After thinking a while on this challenge, I finally remembered that my workplace has a wild west themed building (my workplace is amazing). Knowing that modern wheels would likely dominate the challenge, I figured wheels from another time period would stand out a bit.
I hunted around the building (inside and out) and found a number of examples that could have worked. But when I saw the old wooden carriage on the first floor, I knew what I was going to do. I purposely picked an close-up view so that most of the frame was filled with the wheel. I felt it important to get the center of the wheel, plus the spokes, as those are the heart of what makes this so cool. Then I just had to get good lighting and a good background.
This was taken with my new 15-85 lens which has amazing stabilization quality. The focal length was 38mm (effective of 61mm), so normally I would need 1/60 of a second for a sharp image (handheld). However, this was taken at just 1/6 of a second, handheld, and is very sharp!
Post processing:
* White balance
* Increase black point and brightness
* Topaz Adjust to even out the exposure a bit
* Topaz Detail to really bring out those grain details
* Crop
* Increase definition
* Increase saturation
* S-curve
* Highlights and shadows
* Decrease orange and blue saturations
* Partial sepia tone
* Blur the background a bit to add some extra separation
* Export to TIFF
* Resize to 1600px
* Sharpen Edges
* Resize to 800px
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