New Work: The Reaper’s Scythe

Alas, I haven’t been out with a camera again much lately. Life is on the hectic side lately and I’m just not finding the time for photos like I used to. I’d actually been meaning to photograph this elevator for quite a while. It had been on my list even before I noticed that it was being demolished while riding the train into Chicago one day. Once I saw that, I knew that my time was limited if I wanted to photograph any part of this venerable business.

I posted this image on a grain elevator group that I’m part of. While there were the expected responses mourning the loss of another elevator, it was interesting to see this alternative viewpoint on the matter from another member: “Anyone that lives in Illinois and has hauled into or out of Dixie Portland will be happy to see this nightmare go.” It’s easy to be on outsider who merely appreciates the aesthetics of grain elevators, it’s important to remember that there are people that have to spend their working lives around them and what may be aesthetically pleasing to me could just be a 124 year old pile of problems for them.

I thought I’d give a quick update on my NX Studio experiment, too. After using it for a few months, I appreciate what it can do and that Nikon offers it as a free download for users. However, I find that the time investment is too great to use it as my primary cataloguing and processing software at the moment. Even after spending a lot of time with it, I’m still far slower sorting, tagging and processing pictures than I am with Lightroom. So I’ll keep NX Studio as a processing option for those moments when I want the very best image quality but I’ll keep using LR until Adobe gives me a reason not to (fingers crossed that that is still years away given the updates that Adobe has produced for Lightroom Classic recently).