Junkyards

What a great find. You’re definitely on safe ground here with your junkyard full of strongboxes. This is a first for me but I suppose there must be recycling specialist for everything - even safes. The building in the background gives your photo an authentic backyard feel to where these heavy metal storage units are kept. I can’t help wondering if anything of value was ever found inside any of the boxes but I’m glad to say that entering your photo to this challenge was a value judgement in itself.

This resourceful farmer has made part of the Yorkshire Dales his own junkyard. Making use of a huge natural hole in the ground he’s placed all his oversized scrap inside - hopefully to eventually cover with earth to allow nature to bring back the beauty of the landscape. You did well to include the surrounding Dales to view the farmer’s actions in its wider context. I would have lightened the foreground slightly so that one could easily see what junk had been ditched but that doesn’t stop your photo being a very powerfully documented entry.

What a brilliantly apt title! This delivery could easily qualify as one of the annual complaints received about courier companies. Main accusations are that the driver was unable to deliver because no one was home (despite the recipient being in all day), delivery being late or maybe like this FedEx driver it was delivered to the wrong address. Whatever the reason why this vehicle is on top of the junk pile, you’ve managed to photograph a superb image of something we’ve all been dying to do to our rubbish delivery drivers and their vans.

What a delightful smorgasbord of junk. I spent ages perusing the countless items interspersed with hand-written nuggets of general knowledge. The owner of this bargain house plastered with car junk has a great sense of humour. Well done for spotting the potential of this three-dimensional bargain house montage and giving the artistry a worldwide public exposure with your well-composed and insightful photograph.

This is nature doing what nature does best - reclaiming land whatever the obstacles placed upon it. These pine needle-covered, abandoned rusty cars, have now become part of a natural-looking forest landscape. The vehicles resemble hairy, goggle-eyed creatures that one hears about in legends like Big Foot or The Yeti. Camouflaged to fit in with their surroundings, I imagine one day they might completely disappear perpetuating the legends even further. Well done for creatively capturing a monster of a photo.

Street artists have a knack for choosing where best to paint their murals. And you've caught the photo angle to best display the street artist’s work. The illustrated animal sifting through metal recycling bins to select which ones to spray paint is neatly captured by your camera. I don’t know why he’s wearing a chef’s hat but you’ve certainly cooked up a recipe for photographic success.

I’ve seen this Bolivian locomotive junkyard photographed many times, usually with a sunset background devoid of any people. What I like about your photo is that you’ve made a feature of the human element in your composition. This rusty ghost train site must be one of the most unusual junkyards in the world - certainly one of the most photographed. You did well to take a step back to document the tourist attraction in your own unique way.

Now this IS a car junkyard - unlike many entries of solitary cars standing in various unspecified surroundings. Even without looking where this shot was taken, once I saw the old Volkswagen Beetle, I knew it had to have been shot in Mexico. Your low camera and ISO settings have ensured you taking a very sharp photo - right down to capturing the detail of the twisted barbs on the wire fencing against the rusted wreckage.

This is a tidily-framed photo of a tidily-framed junkyard. The person who organised this junk must have obsessive-compulsive disorder to keep their yard so perfectly ordered. The rubbish sculpture (probably made to entice wildlife) wouldn’t look out of place displayed in an art gallery. You’ve added some realistic HDR to bring out the details of the individual pieces of junk to give your photo a grittiness befitting the subject matter. I prefer the simplicity of this shot to your other entry but both photos do justice to the OCD person’s attention to detail.

I read your junkyard photo as an abstract-sculptured landscape. The discarded silver scraps cascade like a waterfall river of steel running through a valley of twisted heavy metal. Green, yellow and red lichen cover the sharply pointed rocks rising majestically out of the autumn-coloured grassy banks. Brown hedgerows with red tree stumps create a barrier on two sides to fence in the natural flowing watercourse. Very nicely-captured indeed.

What a great use of horizontal rule-of-thirds. The dumped cars jam-packed between the minimalist foreground and the sun drenched sky top and tail your layered composition exquisitely. But the dumped automobiles are the tastiest morsels of your sandwich filling. Running through the centre with a crumbling wall trying to hold back the predominantly red and blue crushed vehicles. The dynamism of your near abstract photo forced it straight into my top ten the moment I saw it.