The gun shown is a "quick-firing" gun from the Spanish-American War. The text shown is "VELOCIDAD DEL ENEMIGO" which means "speed of the foe".
It sits on the Capital grounds in Raleigh, next to the statue of Worth Bagley (the "first to fall" in the Spanish-American War.
Edits: Cropped, Increased brightness and contrast.
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This image is certainly high in contrast. It is an interesting image, and the story/translation in your description adds to the interest.
As several people have commented, you have an interesing grain effect, very reminiscent of b&w film. I think that this works well here (especially in the light greys).
Focussing on the detail as you have, the image takes on an abstract quality, though at the expense of the viewer's general comprehension of what they are looking at.
As you have chosen to present an abstracted image, the importance of remaining elements and in particular composition increases. The key elements in this image (to my mind) are the writing, the highlight on the barrel of the gun, and the stand (with more writing). These elements are all quite central in the composition as it stands, which leaves the eye quite static when looking at the image. It may be more satisfying if you moved everything so that the important elements were off centre, leaving the eye to move around the picture to extract the detail (and even better if you could direct the eye to a particular highlight of the image). I might have tred framing this image with the gun running along the top third line, with the stand to the left of the image.
Part of the challenge (in my opinion - there is some debate) was to find a subject matter that was naturally high in contrast. You appear to have chosen to represent high contrast by taking an image that does not appear to have been very high contrast to start with and applied a dramatic shift in brightness and contrast in post processing. The consequence of this is that you have lost a lot of detail in the barrel of the gun. While having strong whites and blacks is important in demonstrating high contrast, some grey is necessary to keep detail up. I think that finding the contrast naturally and gently enhancing it while retaining detail was likely to be a more succesful strategy for this challenge.
Feel free to pm me with any comments. Good luck with future entries!
Okay, I read the Spanish saying on the piece of metal. Is that a gun? I can't really find anything appealing in this image, I also think that the high contrast made the image worse rather than improving it. 4.
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