My friend and neighbor Harold Ross, who took the Guerilla Drive-In photos last Saturday, as well as the hyper-real picture of the MacGuffin and the awesome long exposure in the Northbrook Canoe Barn, just went to Hagley and took some long-exposure pictures, leaving the shutter open and “painting” the beautiful, massive, and WORKING machinery with an LED flashlight:

Now, I don’t know much, but I do know how to get the Internet to look at pictures of machinery from the days when lathe operators wore leather trenchcoats, brass goggles, and fought magical Confederate golems by gaslight.

I submitted the story to uber-blog BoingBoing under the heading “STEAMPUNK! STEAMPUNK!! STEAMPUNK!!!” (I’m not kidding), and god bless Cory Doctorow‘s fondness for brass gears, they ran with it. And then awesome-design-bricollage blog notcot.org picked it up. So I’m very glad that these photos are getting some of the attention they deserve.

Hagley is a REALLY cool place, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen photos that bring out the… the… BRASS BADASS-I-TUDE of these leather-strap-and-pulley machines before.