VISIT WITH AN OLD FRIEND

Saturday, May 6, dawned chilly but sunny, and I decided to pay a visit to an old friend, an abandoned farmhouse a few miles from our home.  I say old friend because I have photographed this place, a long abandoned dairy farm, many times over the past several years.  It had been a while, however, and, if for no other reason, I wanted to see if there have been any changes in the place since my last visit.  The answer was, not much, but if anything it has simply continued to deteriorate.  Otherwise, the property is still for sale and there are still No Trespassing signs posted around.

I converted the first shot, above, into a linearly cropped black and white.  I thought the early morning sky, which was cloudless, came through as darker in black and white than the original blue appeared and contrasted nicely with the front of the farmhouse that was being lit by the morning sun.

A few detail shots.  The first is a shot of a window at the front of the house.

Too simply, I'm afraid.  Most, if not all, of the windows of the house are now broken.  Someone probably had a bit of fun throwing stones, a pastime I enjoyed as a kid, though for the most part I avoided throwing at glass windows.

The next is of the front porch door.  I turned this into a black and white to give it a bit of the feel of an old-time photo.

This is not the only front door of this house.  Here is a detail of another door that I like because of the manner in which the door's paint has failed over the years.

Following is a shot that didn't work.

Often I spend time in post processing using software to rectify architectural lines that have been distorted by the perspective or the camera's lens.  But here I was trying to create an effect by exaggerating that distortion.  In this case, I would have liked more distortion that a wider angle lens would have created.

Finally, here are two more full views of the farmhouse that I also converted to black and whites.

It was a bright morning and there was ample light, so I did not use my tripod.  Sometimes that means that I have to make decisions as to ISO level and aperture in order to obtain a fast enough shutter speed to avoid camera shake.  For the record, both of these last photos were shot at an ISO of 200, an aperture of f/8, and a shutter speed of 1/800 second, plenty short enough to avoid any blurring.   In these shots the focus was on the house (of course), but I pleased to see that much of the foreground grass remained in sharp focus as well, even at the midrange f/8 aperture.

John