Fire Hydrants

This is an interesting image, I for one, never knew uprooted fire hydrants looked like that. :-) However, there seems (to me) to be a certain arbitrariness in your cropping. Your emphasis seems to be more on the long (usually subterranean) pipes rather than the more familiar hydrants themselves. The pipes though, would have no interest to me whatsoever if they weren't connected to a fire hydrant. So I think there is something not quite right with your compositional emphasis? The cropping is also too tight here, leaves me wanting to zoom out and take a look at *where* these dead hydrants are, and possibly figure out *why* they are here...

Jin Ru,

Thank you for your comments and questions.

Abutting the Great Meadows NWR is the Concord Municipal Waste Water Treatment Plant. While hiking in the NWR we came to the plant and wandered around a bit. A ways beyond the main plant buildings was the "grave yard" of old hydrants, telephone poles, water pipes, wire, cable, and various other things I couldn't identify. Like you, I had never seen an uprooted fire hydrant and was intrigued by them.

I only had an 80mm normal lense with me on that trip, which greatly constrained the framing I could do. I wanted to capture the dirt encrusted pipes as well as the chipped paint on the hydrants themselves (the poles extended perhaps 15-20 feet below the hydrant itself). The angle you see was the one I felt best provided the view I was looking for given the direction of the light and the constraints of the lense I had with me. A wider angle might have helped, but there was a lot of extraneous scrub and concrete around the pipes that would have detracted from the shot.

I may go back there some time with more film and more lenses to specifically study this subject.