Barr Specialty Tools

McCall has a several highly skilled craftsman and artists.  While I've never had any of the fine art photographers hire me take photos of their work, many others have.  I'd like to give a bit of information about several of them in the next few weeks, and I'll start with Barr Quarton.  The top image is of Barr while he hammers on a very hot, soon to be chisel  He manufactures hand forged woodworking tools and knives in his small shop behind his house.  His products are well known, and sold worldwide.

Now I don't know all the correct terms in this process, but I'll do the best I can.  He starts out with a flat piece of metal, much like you would see in any welding shop.  The metal is then cut to length, shaped with a plasma cutter, heated red hot (annealed) and then hammered and pounded to roughly shape it.  The heating and hammering have got to be an art form in itself.  Then he creates the neck from some pipe, and welds it to the blade.  After much grinding, sharpening, tempering and polishing he adds the handle, and bang - it's a chisel, a slick, an adz, or any of the other many items he creates.

In the top image, I wanted to put a bit more focus on the hot fire and the piece of metal Barr is working on, so I removed all the color, except for the red hot parts of the image.  Then I slightly darkened up the back ground.  So it's now basically a black and white image with the reds and yellows left in.  All basic Photoshop tricks.

The product image was a table top shot, then cut out in Photoshop, and a drop shadow added - I did this to about 30 items.  We're hoping to use the images  for some promotional work sometime soon.  On a side note, these tools are very sharp - I cut myself a couple of times by just touching the cutting edge.

I have a small photo gallery of Barr's processes and products here...
http://www.ertter.com/gallery/BarrTools/index.html

And here's Barr's website...
http://www.barrtools.com/

All images are copyright 2009 - all Rights reserved.