STUDY IN RUST

With the weather finally getting warmer, recently I ventured out with my camera looking for something to shoot and stumbled across a metal sculpture outside the entrance to a building that was part of what had been the Schlitz brewery.  The brewery had closed years ago and the cluster of brewery buildings had fallen into disrepair until it was successfully converted to an office park several years ago.  Here is the sculpture, which stands perhaps 20 feet tall.

Not particularly impressive, but what caught my eye was the complex of rust circling the sculpture about 18 inches above the base.

Embarrassingly, even though I took a number of shots of the rust that first time, I wound up coming back another three times in an attempt to capture the texture as an abstract.  The rusted metal featured a number of defects--scratches and patches--that I didn't notice at first but that I felt were creating a distraction.  In short, there were a lot of wasted shots (nothing new there) that drew me back three more times, hoping to finally get it right.

The sheet metal of the sculpture was wrapped in a cylinder and the seam was then welded.  Here are a couple of shots that feature that weld.  I had tried setting the seam in the center but felt it worked better off to the side.

The remainder of the "keeper" shots featured one particular irregularity in the texture of the rust.  Here they are, generally in order of closeup.

Some of the shots for this post were made handheld, which necessitated ramping up the ISO to minimize motion blur.  For the last few images in this post, though, I did use a tripod and also employed my macro lens to maximize detail.

I realize that these shots are almost purely abstract, but I liked the complexity of the textures as well as the earth tones.

John

MILWAUKEE BREWERY CAMPUSES

Milwaukee is no longer the center of the brewery world.  I don't believe there are any breweries in Milwaukee that are still owned locally, other than small craft beer makers.  Two of the major breweries that were purchased years ago were Schlitz and Pabst.  After those breweries were bought out, the campuses remained vacant for years and suffered major deterioration.  However over perhaps the last 10 to 20 years, the campuses have been undergoing a renaissance, with former brewhouses and warehouses seeing renovation and occupation primarily by commercial tenants.

Last weekend I visited both campuses with my camera, something I have done before but not for a few years.  Here is what I got.

Not much caught my eye on the Pabst campus.  Here are a couple of shots of older buildings that feature the fine brick masonry that was prevalent a hundred years ago but is now largely a lost art.

One of the buildings has been converted into a hotel and bar, and, it being a sunny day, the shadows cast by some outdoor wireframe tables caught my eye.

Then it was on to the Schlitz campus.

The above was shot with my wide-angle lens, set at a wide open 15 mm, yielding some distortion that I sort of liked.

Laid out at the base of one of the buildings were some ceramic pieces that had been created over 100 years ago and fortunately had been preserved.

These pieces were perhaps 2 ft. by 5 ft.  I particularly liked the 1903 piece.

At the east end of the campus were a couple of smokestacks.  I  don't know if they are functional, but I thought they made a nice black & white study.

In front of one of the buildings was a cylindrical structure, a piece of art, I presume, that may have had a practical function at some point in the past.  This was a quiet Sunday afternoon, but I must have triggered some sort of security alert.  So as I was taking photos of the cylinder, a couple of security personnel came on the scene.  They asked me what the object was I was taking pictures of and what in particular I was photographing, and I had to confess that I had no clue what the object was but that I was interested in decrepitude and was taking pictures of the rust that the cylinder was exhibiting, as in the follow shot.  Then they left me alone.

There are parts of this shot that are something of a mess, but through post processing I was able to soften the image to give it an abstract impressionistic look.

Here is another detail shot of the same structure.

Finally, as with the Pabst campus, the Schlitz campus also features some interesting masonry.  Here first is some detail stonework at a corner of one of the building entrances that I converted to a black & white.

I also liked the stone masonry that featured larger stonework, as in the following photos.

© 2018 John M. Phillips