Thanks to my friend and Redlands-based photographer, Steve Wormser at Stephen Wormser Photography, I had the opportunity to photograph inside the Retting Machine Shop in Redlands California. Rettig Machine is a general machine and fabrication shop that was started by David Rettig in 1946 and remains a family-owned and operated business.
Retting Machine has serviced the aerospace, construction, mining, railroads, and steel and aluminum processing industries. There are photographs of work done for the space shuttle on their walls, and they have made everything from parts for the Magellan Telescope in Chile to coating machines for the metal processing industry. And they still do small walk-in jobs for local citizens.
Photographically, Retting Machine Shop is wonderful. The rooms are filled with soft light that casts onto massive metal fabrication equipment to create wonderful monochromatic tones. There’s opportunities to photograph still-life, abstract, soft-tone and hard-tone images. We had two hours to ourselves and it wasn’t nearly enough time.
Here’s a small collection of photos from today. I Hope you enjoy them.
John Donoghue 
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