One of the largest water screw pumping stations in Europe was built at Kinderdijk in the 1970s. It does with diesel power what Kinderdijk's 19 windmills once did with the wind. Spinning at full capacity, this "corkscrew" can pump 360,000 gallons of water per minute off the land and into the river. If I had tried to express its huge size, I would have had to include a reference point, which would have made the image descriptive, but not particularly expressive. Instead, I chose to abstract the giant water screw by using a telephoto lens zoomed out to 268mm. It changes what is essentially a huge machine to a precious object by stressing the beauty of its reflectivity, shape, line, and color, at the expense of its extent. Instead of pumping water, the huge abstract screw now pumps the human imagination. (It would have been wonderful if I could have photographed this pumping machine in actual operation, but it was not running while we there. It would have been a delightful challenge to create an abstraction laced with spinning water and great movement, but it was not to be.)