Mooresville, IN

When you first start learning about composition in photography, the very first rule they teach is “Don’t put your subject in the middle of the frame.” Sometimes you break the rules, because it allows you to show other aspects of your subject. Here I wanted to show the open area through the barn, that allows the image to show some sense of the interior space and the scale of the structure.

Indiana USA

Sometime extraordinary things are just a few seconds’ investigation away. The only road near this barn was on the other side from this picture. From the road, this looked like a perfectly ordinary, if somewhat weather beaten barn. Just walking around to the invisible side uncovered this magnificent decay.

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.

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.

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.

Rocks and Shoals Indiana, USA

Get Close and Go Wide. Here, I’m only inches from the rock in the foreground. My crop put the stem of the boat in the corner of the frame and the curve of the side within the confines at the right. This had the effect of exaggerating the angle of the prow a bit, making it seem leaner, and more sweeping than it otherwise might, making the contrast with the rocks more striking.