ABANDONED FARM HOUSE: VARIATIONS

I have returned to the abandoned farm house that's a few miles from our home.  I have shot and posted this place a number of times in the past.  The house is situated on what was formerly a small dairy farm and now is land awaiting redevelopment.  The property is posted with numerous "No Trespassing" signs, but I have assumed those are intended more to protect the owner than to keep casual photographers away.

Spring is really the best time to visit this place.  In the winter (at least this past winter) snow can be a serious impediment.  And in summer and into fall, there is an unfortunate sapling growing right up against the north side of the house that leafs out, creating a significant bushy distraction.

Here is one of the first photos of the farm house that I took this year, on a bright and sunny morning.

The house faces east, and the sun was nicely lighting up that side of the house.  One of the great features of this place is that there are simply no distractions in the background--no utility poles or wires, no other structures to distract from the house itself.  I say that last with one major caveat:  This was a working farm, and there are numerous outbuildings, including a barn and silo.  Those are to the north of the house, and that is why I kept finding myself shooting toward the southwest.  There are a couple of small outbuildings directly to the southwest of the house, but I can generally "hide" those behind the house.  The problem I see with this shot is that it is too upbeat.  The house is a shambles, but it almost looks inviting in this shot.

Here is a similar shot that I converted to a black & white.

Now this is a bit better.  And I thought the clouds added some interest to the shot.  But overall it still seems too "positive."

So a couple of days later I returned to try again.

In this case, in addition to converting the shot to a black & white, I also darkened the nearly cloudless sky and darkened the exposure a bit.  I thought this worked well, particularly because the sunlight striking the front of the house contrasted nicely with the darkened sky.

Here is similar shot that I cropped more linearly.

I like this shot because it emphasizes the empty area around the house, enhancing its abandoned quality.  The big drawback to this shot is that pesky little sapling in the left portion of the image.  For a moment I even considered cutting it down, but then thought better of it.  I know that in Photoshop there is a way to remove the sapling, but I don't have the technical skill (or patience) to handle that.

And then there was the toilet.

I don't know how it got there.  It certainly wasn't there last year.  (I would have remembered that.)  I did "cheat" just a little on this shot.  The toilet was lying on its side and I admit to standing it upright and lifting the lid (using my foot and not my hand, by the way).  A novelty shot.

And here is another novelty shot of the house that I took through a glass-block window in the dairy barn.

Here I focused not on the house but on the seams between the glass blocks.  There were some dead vines that complicated the composition, but I didn't think they distracted from the overall effect.  I shot this at f/14, which increased the depth of field.  But because I was so close to the window, the house was thrown somewhat out of focus.  However, I thought that actually added to the shot.  My only regret is that I didn't leave enough of the seam on the far right when I took the shot.  Still, I did like this shot.

John

DOMES: A DIFFERENT APPROACH

I recently read an article by another photographer about how he does nature macro photography in public venues.  He stated that he used a telephoto lens rather than a macro lens.  In addition, he did everything handheld rather than using a tripod and set his camera to adjust the ISO level and shutter speed automatically depending on aperture and light level.  I thought this actually might make some sense.

The theory behind this approach is, first, that a tripod might get in the way of other patrons of whatever public space is involved.  However, with handheld shots, one may need a much faster shutter speed to avoid camera shake.  That translates, in turn, to a higher ISO in some cases to establish the desired depth of field called for by the composition.  Finally, using a telephoto gives you the opportunity to capture shots further away than would be available with a macro lens, which is generally limited to very tight closeups.

I have a (mediocre) 70-300 mm telephoto lens, and my camera does allow me to set a combination of ranges for shutter speed and ISO and the camera then does the calculations to establish the proper overall exposure.  So I decided to give the technique a try on my next visit to the Mitchell Park Domes.  This was my experience.

First, I soon found myself looking for photo opportunities that were further off the paths that run through the botanical domes than I had been looking in the past.  This was the biggest advantage of this approach.  On the other hand, there were also disadvantages.  One was that my telephoto lens is more limited in its largest aperture setting than is my macro lens.  In short, the telephoto is not as "fast" as my macro, and as a result I needed to increase the ISO more than would have been the case with my macro.  Compounding this issue was the fact that, because everything was handheld, I had to keep the shutter speed relatively fast, and this also required raising the ISO rating.  As a result of all this, there was a lot more ISO "noise" in the shots I got than would have been the case with my macro, though this noise is hard to detect at the resolution I use for the blog.  Moreover, I "cheated" a bit on the shutter speed and some (actually quite a few) of the shots evidenced camera shake.  Finally, my macro simply has better resolution than does my telephoto, and so the shots I got weren't quite as crisp as I would have gotten with my macro.

OK, so what did I get?  As anyone knows who has visited the domes, there is a show dome, a desert dome, and a tropical dome.  In the show dome spring floral displays were in prominence (something that is a long way off still for anything growing in the great outdoors).  That included a profusion of easter lilies.  In this case I decided to take a shot of the backs of a couple of blossoms.

Not bad, actually, and at an aperture of f/5.6, I was able to isolate the flowers adequately from the background.  Technically, this was one of the better shots.

And here is a shot of a multi-colored tulip (as well as others).

In this case, even with the lens at a wide-open f/4.5, I felt the background was too distracting.  Just too many flowers.  However, this tulip was several feet off the path, and I never would have considered shooting it with my macro.

I took the following shot in the Desert Dome of a tangle of vines (or whatever).

Not exactly a macro shot, considering the size of the vines, but again I would not have taken this shot, which is at least mildly interesting I think, if I had only had my macro.

On the other hand, I have taken the following shot any number of times.

I found out I had to keep backing up to get this shot in focus, as the minimum focal distance for the telephoto lens is just under five feet (compared with a minimum focal distance of under three inches for my macro).  This was shot with the lens at f/5.6, which was plenty to blur out the background.

And here is a shot in black & white of a desert plant that was probably 35 feet away and that I never could have gotten with my macro.

I just liked contrast between the spikes that are projecting toward the camera and the vertical spikes serving as background.

Then it was on to the Tropical Dome.  The following banana leaf simply would not have been available with my macro--too far away.  On the other hand, the image is not as crisp as it could have been, due mostly to camera shake.

Nor would I have taken the following shot which was essentially a vertical shot of the top of one of the tropical trees in the dome.

I liked the following shot of interwoven ferns.  This was probably my favorite shot of the series, and frankly could have been taken with my macro and tripod.

And here is shot of a tropical leaf that I liked because of the way it was opening up.

Finally, I intended the following shot all along as an abstract.  

I set it up with a wide open lens at f/5.6 focused on the front edge of one of the leaves.  This allowed everything else to go out of focus, creating the soft image I was seeking.  I felt I had to establish at least one point of focus to prevent the entire photo from looking like just a poorly focused shot.  I think it worked.  

I'm not sure I am going to repeat this experiment.  If I do, I will bring along my tripod to improve the technical quality of the shots.

John

SOLVAY COKE PLANT REVISITED

I shot photos at the abandoned Solvay Coke Plant, on Milwaukee's south side, on a number of occasions in 2013.  I "enjoyed" not just the plant's overall decrepitude but the array of litter and graffiti that it offered.  Driving by the site later last year, I had noted a significant amount of construction activity on the site, and I was concerned that the buildings--or at least what was left of them--were going to be razed in anticipation of the redevelopment of this notable Superfund site.  This last week I paid my first visit of 2014 to the location and was relieved (I think) to find that the construction equipment was gone and that the buildings were still standing.  So I took a few more shots of what has become a familiar venue.

Here first is a "grand" shot of the factory's largest space, essentially a three-story high room that is absolutely littered with junk.

It was a sunny day, and the light streaming through the doorway in the lower left was confusing my camera's autoexposure system.  In the end, I decided to let the door go overexposed in order to expose adequately the remainder of the space.  For this shot, I set the aperture at a narrow f/16 to maximize depth of field and set the autoexposure system to slow the shutter speed by the equivalent of one f-stop (to 1/2 second) in order to override the reading from the light of the open doorway.  For whatever reason, I shot this image vertically, but I think it would have been more effective to have shot it horizontally.

Graffiti artists are continually revisiting this location, and there was a fair amount of new graffiti since my last visit some 8 or 9 months ago.  Here is one of those.

Papa Smurf, maybe?

The following really features two different graffiti on separate walls, one behind the other.

And here is a well done graffito outside the building that I have shot before.  Still like its artistry.

One of the things I am trying to do is to create better context in my shots.  This has been a failure for me, and I'm afraid that the above shots illustrate that deficiency.  I thought I did a better job with the following photos.  In this first photo I had been working on some shots that featured just the openings on the left, and then I noticed the interesting graffito on the wall to the right and decided to combine the two points of interest in a single shot.

In this next shot, I had been focusing just on the graffito in the right portion of the image.  And then I realized that including the stairway/ladder in the image might tell a better story.

The same can be said for the shots I took of the junk littering the floor.  Initially, I had thought to take a shot just of the boot in the following photo but then realized that incorporating more of the industrial detritus might add something.  Not pretty, but perhaps that was the point.

The same can be said for the shot of the metal spring in the following photo.

Finally, what caught my eye was a paint brush full of dried vivid green paint (obviously used by a graffiti artist).  Here I should have included more "context."  In an attempt to make up for that, in post processing I decided to focus on the green paint by setting all of the other colors to zero saturation, essentially converting the image into a black & white except for the green paint.

The brush is resting on some sort of shattered glass fixture.  Just a fun shot.

This abandoned site, perhaps 75 yards off a dead-end road in an industrial area, is, frankly, creepy, and I finally decided that I had had enough . . . until next time.

John

WALKER'S POINT: QUIRKS

Walker's Point is an older neighborhood on Milwaukee's near south side.  It is diverse both culturally and in terms of property use and is slowly undergoing an economic revival.  A lot of the shops are, well, quirky and present interesting photo opportunities, and last week I spent an hour or so walking around with my camera, something I had done a number of times last summer.

Here are a couple of shots of storefronts.

I actually took a few shots of this second story window before realizing that if I shifted my position a little to the right I could eliminate most of the reflections that were plaguing the window, allowing the little white ghost to show up better.  A lesson about working the shot.

Note the signs in this tavern window.

I think this place was only a couple of doors away from another bar with the name Walker's Pint.  Clever.

Jeremy Novy is a street artist who recently relocated to San Francisco but not before gracing Milwaukee with any number of stenciled graffiti of koi.  I ran a cross a few in Walker's Point and caught this shot of one of them.  Simple and graceful, I thought.

I wound up being a little dissatisfied with this shot, not for its technical quality but for its composition.  I would have preferred having more negative space around the graffito.  Alternatively, there were actually a number of koi on this exterior wall of peeling paint, and I could have figured out how to include more koi in the shot.  I will need to go back, I think.

We're all familiar with the metal plates that are anchored into sidewalks at points where it is sloping down to street level to accommodate those in wheelchairs.  I had always thought that the plates, which all feature a similar pattern of raised knobs, were intended to provided added traction on sloped surfaces.  But I have been informed by a knowledgeable party that they are actually intended primarily to provide warning to blind persons of a change of slope.

On our recent visit to Austin, we attended an art festival one of the featured photographers of which included a nicely framed photograph of one of these plates.  His was a bit more interesting--and cleaner--but I thought, what the heck.  I picked this one for its unusual color.  Again, I intend to play a little more with this subject.

On my walk I also ran across a more than 50 year old Chevy truck that at some point had undergone restoration and painting with a rust colored primer.  Here's one of the detail shots I took that worked OK.

Following is a detail shot of a portion of a medallion for an overhead light fixture in the entryway for another Walker's Point bar.  (There are a large number of bars in Walker's Point.)

I have photographed this medallion previously but keep finding myself going back.

There wasn't much to the neon sign for the following bar (yes, another bar), so I decided to play around with the image a little, eliminating all color except the red of the neon.  Just OK, I thought.

Finally, here is the stark and frankly unattractive entryway of a nondescript industrial building.

I actually like this photo.  The composition's redeeming quality, if there is one, is the series of concentric rectangles that it presents.  The siding is cheap and ugly, but the shadows the seams create add nicely to the texture, I think.

John

AUSTIN: THIS AND THAT

I thought I would wind up the posts for our stay in Austin with one of photos that I liked but that didn't find their way into any of the other posts on our trip.

These first few are black & white shots that could have been included in my post of Austin architecture, except that I took them on my last visit to Austin's downtown area, after I had already done a post on architecture.  The first is obviously a structural support for one of the bridges over Lady Bird Lake.

The next is of an older building in the downtown area.  The day was cloudy and I liked the way the light was being reflected in the 1960s(?) building's windows.

The third is of a stairway leading down a level from the pavilion at the front of the LBJ Library building.  An interesting abstract, I thought.

The following is of some park benches adjacent to the walking/running/biking trail that extends along the north side of Lady Bird Lake.

Speaking of benches, here is a shot of a couple outside the front entrance to the LBJ Library.  I liked the way that the reflections of the benches in the windows were dark, creating a sort of contrasting symmetry.

One of the last places we visited was the Zilker Botanical Gardens.  They were surprisingly extensive and offered a quiet interlude from the city's hurly-burly.  But I found them a little boring, actually.  However, I did like one of the wrought iron gates leading into the gardens.  These gates were obviously custom-made and were much larger than the portion I wound up shooting.  However, I was limited by the fact that I wanted to pose the dark of the wrought iron against the cloudy but light sky and only a small portion of the gate was available for that perspective.  Note the spider's web.

I liked this 6th Street nightclub neon sign for the way the light was being reflected off the nearby brick walls.

The following shot, of a musician on 6th Street, is very poor technically.  The light was poor; the musician was moving, causing motion blur; and there is minimal definition.  But I thought that the shot somehow caught nicely the spirit of the situation.

Finally, after having visited the Texas Capitol building four times, I finally visited the Texas Capitol Visitors Center, located just a half block south of the Capitol itself.  Turns out, I hadn't missed much.  But I did like the following serendipitous shot that featured a series of complementary arches.

John

AUSTIN PUBLIC ART

If one defines public art as paintings and sculpture that is in public space available to whoever happens by, then Austin has its share--and perhaps more than its share--of public art.  I found plenty without really trying, some personal and some intended for broader consumption.

Here, without comment, are a few examples of two-dimensional pieces that caught my eye.

And then there were the three-dimensional sculptures that speak to Austin's reputation as a mecca for music.

I also liked this statue of a younger Willy Nelson.

But my favorite was the statue of Stevie Ray Vaughn, located on the south side of Lady Bird Lake.

This first was taken on a cloudy, hazy morning, and I thought the image worked best as a black & white.  And here is a closeup, in color, of what I thought was the sculpture's most representative element, the musician's hand on the neck of his guitar.

And then there were the olives perched on the roof of a building.

Not sure what was going on, but, of course, Austin prides itself in behind weird.

John