8 January 2020 — 0512 mst

A bronze age photograph from 1990

Thirty years ago, for the long defunct Flathead Business Journal, I wrote a story on the bronze casting industry in the Flathead. It was growing rapidly, making the Flathead one of the west’s centers for bronzed western art. The assignment required photographing a bronze pour, a fascinating, colorful, and somewhat dangerous process. I wore the same kind of heat attenuating gear as the foundry worker in this photograph, and still remember how much heat the molten metal radiated.

Flathead Beacon photographer Hunter D’Antuono’s richly colored and exquisitely composed images of blacksmith Scott Joram Sweder hammering orange-hot steel into a knife reminded me of both that decades ago bronze pour, and of the advances in photographic technology over that time. I used a Nikon FE2 and T-Max 3200 film, but the brightness range of the subject was wider than the film could record. The shadows are dark, yet the highlights are blown. Today’s digital cameras have considerably more dynamic range and, as D’Antuono’s luminous photographs prove, can hold the highlights.

D’Antuono has a better camera than I had. He also has a better eye.