José Franco's clay village

windmill, originally by ChromaticOrb.
Canon EOS 350D + EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-4.5 II @ 1/20 - f/22
Processed with Bibble Pro and GIMP on Linux

José Franco, an artisan working with clay for 70 years, spent much of his time creating a small size "typical" Portuguese village in his hometown of Sobreiro near Mafra, Portugal. This photo is from a fully functional windmill, built in a scale of about 1:2. It's a very interesting place that functions as a museum, doesn't charge for entrance and you can buy some beautiful pottery as souvenir. If you're visiting Lisbon and have a car, you can enjoy a wonderful day doing a tour by Mafra, Ericeira and Sintra. The village of Sobreiro is on the road from Mafra to Ericeira.

I didn't have a tripod nor some place to brace against, so it was hard to capture the movement. Also there was people passing by all the time. Being a scaled down model, I was standing about 5 meters from the windmill and couldn't get a wider view or would get people cars and fences in the frame. So I took four shots: 1/8 was too blurry, 1/60 and 1/250 stopped the motion too much so, 1/20 was the one that came out right.

There were some wires and a lamp post on the lower left corner and also part of a building could be seen to the right of the mill. So, I applied a small crop and cloned out what was left in order to keep the focus on the windmill. Then I removed some minor noise in the sky and adjusted the curves a bit for contrast.