Indiana, USA

I knew this would end up as black and white before I shot it. The mossy, boarded up clapboard farmhouse against the gnarled trees in the side yard with the shadows of the leafless branches on the ground fairly screamed for a conversion. A little filtering of the blue skies and yellows in the ground brought out the feeling I was looking for.

Natural light is ofter the best way to shoot an interior- especially one with the rich tones and textures of the old Indianapolis Union Station main hall. There were glass doors across the end I was shooting from; since I didn’t have a tripod with me, I removed the lens hood and used the doors as a stabilizing device for the necessarily long shutter speed. You can almost always improvise to get the shot, so don’t let a lack of equipment be an excuse.

This shot won the People’s Choice Award in the CaptureIndy competition in 2009.

Indiana, USA

Don’t be afraid to reshoot. I had shot this gate a few days before, but really didn’t like the lighting or the technical sharpness. I kept my eye on the weather, and a few days after the original shoot, there was a bright cloudy day with a few sprinkles, and I immediately drove back to the barn and shot this. The soft light from the bright overcast gave me the rich texture and effects I wanted.

Indiana, USA

Keep your eyes moving as you look around for stuff to shoot. I was walking back from the rear of the barn where I shot the gate photograph when I saw this composition- with the peak of the roof almost perfectly defining the 2/3 vertical in the frame. I used a very wide lens on this shot to move the branches up over the house, which required some perspective ‘correction’ in Photoshop after the fact.

Indiana USA

Get Wide and Close. Very wide angle lenses can be lifesavers in tight situations, and when you want to use their inherent ‘distortions’ to accentuate something- in this case, the feeling that the barn is just a puff of air away from collapsing entirely.

Indiana USA

Filters can help or hinder you. In the old days, when we shot black and white film, a deep yellow filter and some creative underexposure was needed to blacken the sky. These days, it’s easy. In this case, I knew I was going black and white when I shot it, and exposed to get enough detail and contrast in the boards, and enough blue in the sky to use the sliders in the CS3 Black and White layer control to darken the sky and punch up the contrast in the barn.

Bush Stadium, Indianapolis Indiana

Pareidolia can be your friend. If you see a face in something, shoot it! Faces and face-like things share a trait- they have an “image triangle” in them consisting of the eyes and mouth.

Pareidolia comes from, loosely, the Greek words for “wrong” and “image”, and describes the phenomenon of seeing something significant where nothing exists. Automobile designers use it all the time when designing the front end and grilles of new cars.

Bush Field, Indianapolis Indiana

If you know of something that’s abandoned, and in danger of being torn down, shoot it! You never know when some nostalgia will kick in. In this case, Bush Stadium in Indianapolis is in the process of going from closed to an eyesore, and while various groups in the city are trying to give it purpose, the inevitable decay has set in, and it may only be a matter of time before it’s gone. I shot this on a sunny afternoon, and did all the post processing in Photoshop. I chose the soft filter to suggest the Stadium’s place as a more distant memory.

The new Indianapolis Public Library.

Reflections can be either your bane or your best friend- here, the latter. For this shot, I got up close with a wide angle lens, and let my composition wander over the frame until my spidey-sense tingled and I said “That’s It.” This is just about exactly what came from the camera.

Indiana USA

Keep your eyes open. I bet I drove past this abandoned, rotting longboat a thousand times before I noticed it sitting there by the side of the road. For this shot, once again, I got Up Close and Wide. Making sure the camera was as close to perfectly vertical as I could get it helped to keep everything relatively distortion-free.