RETURN TO ABANDONED FARM

We live in a suburban neighborhood that was largely farmland a few decades ago.  Five miles north of our home is a dairy farm that has been abandoned for a number of those decades.  It is situated on land that is potentially commercially valuable, as it is located at the intersection of two busy roads, one if which features a north-south freeway interchange.  There has been a For Sale sign on the property for several years, along with a couple of No Trespassing signs.  Recently, the No Trespassing signs have multiplied, and I have been reluctant to visit the property with my camera.  But last Sunday--during the Packers game--I did pay another visit to the farm.

The farmhouse continues to deteriorate.  It is, in my view, beautiful in tis ruined condition.

I figured getting caught in the house might be harder to explain than getting caught in the dairy barn.

Earlier I had taken a photo of a barn window in connection with a Facebook black & white photo challenge.  I liked the photo but I thought it was flawed because, while the window looked out on the house,  the view of the house was not very well centered in the window.  I tried to correct that problem with the following shot.

Better, I think.  Often when I am processing photos from a shoot, I regret that I didn't get the shots quite right.  But where I have had a chance to return to "get things right," I have more often than not been disappointed.  In this case, I thought, the second shot was actually an improvement.

Here is a shot of another, now vacant, window that I also turned into a black & white.

The farm features a steel silo, which also is slowly deteriorating.

The barn was basically empty, but there was a stack of firewood that I suspect has been there a long time, since I doubt that the farmhouse fireplace has witnessed a fire for decades.

I thought this shot worked because of the light coming in from a doorway to the side and because of the diversity of color in the pieces of wood.

John