Alison Lyons photo of an old water cart Alison Lyons
D3S, AF-S NIKKOR 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 ED VR. Initial exposure: at 1/125 sec., f/9, ISO 200, programmed auto, spot metering. Three bracket HDR combined in Photomatix software; with texture screen over the background in post-production.

Alison Lyons’s photographic skills play well into what she calls “the day job”—art director of an ad agency in Sydney, Australia. She saw the Laughton Water Cart in a junkyard in Windsor, a small town just west of Sydney, and took the photo with a D3S and an AF-S NIKKOR 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 ED VR at 1/125 second, f/9 and ISO 200, with the camera set for programmed auto and spot metering.

She realized that a three-bracket HDR would go a long way toward solving the problem of the harsh midday light. “I also put a texture screen over the dark background to give it a warmer tone and more of an antique look,” Alison says.

“I talk at camera clubs here in Sydney,” she adds, “and I try to give the members an idea of how they can develop their own individual style by working with their images. In the old days we used to do that in the darkroom, but now we’ve got so many more tools available to us.

“I consider myself quite fortunate that I’m old enough to have a lot of the old-school design principles and training in darkroom and photographic techniques, and still young enough to embrace the new technology and run with it.”

So what’s the Laughton Water Cart? We’re not quite sure of all its former uses, but Alison reports that it brought needed water to troops on the battlefield during World War I.