Misha and His Girls

This is my friend Misha.  I asked him a few years ago to go out and help me practice with some natural, direct light photography.  We headed down to the levee that keeps the Mississippi from flooding downtown St. Louis.  The graffiti wall down there is spectacular, I highly recommend going to see it.  Unfortunately, much of the art has been tagged over with much lower quality work but there are still a few gems to find down there.

This is one of my favorite pieces, with the stencil of two women in pink against the blue background.  the colors in this shot really shoot off of the image which is one of my favorite things to do.  His shirt has been made fun of by a lot of our friends but for this image, the orange and bright red work great.  There are lots of colors here and he is a very colorful guy.

This location is a different angle of the same room that contains the giant, red wheel.  It's part of the Armour Meat Packing plant (which I talk about here).  I love the color scheme that the room has and the state of disarray of the environment makes for an interesting story in my mind.  What mad science is going on in the far corners of the building?

I really like the high contrast with all of the intricate lines and shapes and even colors in the image. It's personally one of my favorite photos of the place.

Big Red Truck and HeadStone Roses

A dear friend of mine for many years had been suffering from a migraine.  Yes, that's right, a single headache that lasted for multiple years and caused all sorts of damage to this poor woman's life.  She called me one day to ask if I would be willing to drive with her to Springfield, stay overnight and then drive her home.  She was going to get a medical procedure that would hopefully help relieve the pain she'd suffered for so long.

We were driving back from the trip and saw a house on the side of the highway with some abandoned vehicles in front.  So I asked my friend and she agreed:  we should go check it out!  We got off the highway immediately and drove over to the building.  It looked like a house but because of the interior and the trash we found, we assumed it had to have been some kind of business or municipal building.

I got a couple of good shots of the vehicles, my favorite being below.

There was a cemetary next door which we hadn't noticed on the highway so we went over there to see what was up.  Plenty of small, mildly interesting headstones but not a lot worthy of photographing.  But something about the headstone above really resonated with me.  I loved the color contrast between the cloth roses and the polished granite headstone. 

Taylor

   

This is my friend Taylor.  She's an absolutely beautiful young woman with a beautiful smile and a fantastic laugh.  It didn't take me long to convince her to let me shoot some pictures of her so I tried my best to make them a little unusual but without losing anything significant in the process.

The day I shot the right and left photos, I was using a new camera body that I hadn't had very long and accidentally set the ISO to AUTO.  That means whenever I was trying to take a photo with the flash, the camera would adjust the ISO settings to shoot in the natural light and THEN when the flash went off, it was entirely too white and too blown out to use the work.  So I turned the flash off and shot using the natural light.

What I didn't know at the time was that my lens was also BROKEN and that's why everything has a slightly soft edge to it.  The lens wasn't able to focus correctly and so the shots came out just a tad bit soft and blurry.  But I don't mind.  In the picture on the far right I think it works with the colors and the background and such.  I'll toss a few more photographs of Taylor up here a few more posts from now.

In the Halls of Heaven...

I took this photo in January of 2010.  The front door to the building was wide open and I was in an exploring kind of mood so I checked it out.  I have other photo previews at the bottom from the same building, but from various shoots.
  I digress.  This is the state of the building in 2010, before any real restoration work or preservation has begun on this building.  there was a blue tarp over the front of the entrance, but it had just been put up.  There weren't even any no trespassing signs when I went there.

  I did a little bit of digging online and learned this amazing building I had been in is none other than the James Clemens House, named after an uncle of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain.  There's no evidence that Twain lived here for any significant length of time, but certainly he spent time here in his youth.

  I went into this building not expecting anything in particular.  I walked through the front door and headed straight for the giant four foot wide staircase that took up half of the hallway.  The wood was in good condition, the plaster on the walls faring relatively well.  I walked up the stairs, turned right into the first doorway I happened across and stopped in my tracks.  The above photograph is the room that I stepped into and held my breath.

Outside the Hall

  To say that the space was holy is not untrue, at least from what I experienced there.  There was a lingering quiet about the place, even as I heard birds chirping from outside the room somewhere.  But a peace washed over me as I walked into this sanctuary and I was humbled by the vastness of the room as well as the toll that the elements had taken on it.

  I've returned to this building since then but the doors were all sealed and once, when I pused on a door to see if it would open, an alarm went off.  One day I noticed the front porch overhang had been removed and that was bad enough.  But then this morning I was able to return to this beautiful building that I had come to cherish so much, and decided to visit my room and see how she was faring in the 3 years since I had seen her.  This is the sight I found.

  The building had been cut away, braced as you can see so it wouldn't fall completely over.  There was no "inside" any longer, just a beautiful alabaster and marble archway that would soon be dissolving in the rain.


  To be really depressed, go look at what this room was like in 2003 at the following: http://www.builtstlouis.net/clemens3.html

P.S. - Trying to post more photos with blog isn't working out as well as I'd hoped.  Bear with the technical difficulties for me, please!

#urbex #photography #abandoned #MarkTwain

In the Hall of the Mountain King

Every time I look at this photograph I think of the musical composition "In the Hall of the Mountain King".  While I don't think the music matches the mood of my photograph, the name of it certainly does which is why that is its title.

I first saw this building a few years ago, when I began my #urbex sojourns and wondered what it was like inside.  I kept finding other places to explore and being distracted from going to this particular building so it eventually fell off of my radar.  Eventually, after three years or so, I saw it again on my drive around the city and swung past to check it out.  The outside of the building is overgrown with vegetation and has lost a fair bit of its glass from the windows but all in all it is still a very sturdy building.

I went in a week later and was awed by the sheer amount of junk that had been left in the building.  I have found no end of bizarre things in this space; broken widescreen televisions (a dozen of them or so), a recliner, thirty or forty highway patrolman uniforms from Illinois, cases of abandoned soda, piles of papers of course, plastics used in forms and even a fully intact cat skeleton  (that was taken by a model of mine and turned into a mobile...don't ask).

This was one of the first photographs I took that day entering into the building.  The thing is, this is the middle of the building, not even the front.  That's a good eighty feet behind me.

Everybody likes free stuff, right?  Well here is a free lesson on how to take photos of waterfalls:

To begin with, find a waterfall.  I like them when they have plenty of vertical space, long lines of water to photograph.  It won't be easy to get a good shot of the water but with a good subject, taking pretty pictures is rather easy.  So find one with a good amount of fall to it and get ready to stand still!

Set up your camera so that you can get a good, tight zoom on the waterfall, still showing all of the wonderful range that it has.  I prefer to be able to see the top and bottom in the same photograph.  It is easier to tell what the focus of your image is when you have the whole thing in the shot, versus someone being interested in a particular type of leaf which seems to take prominence and is breaking up the waterfall so you can't see it.

Grab a tripod and set yourself up a goodly distance away.  Set your fstop to as narrow an opening as you like but keep in mind we are going to be messing with the shutter speed here in a minute.  If you have your aperture too far open (too small an f-stop number) then you are going to flood the image sensor (film) with light and it will appear blown out.  I like mine around 6-10 depending on available light but your results may vary.  Finally, set your exposure/shutter speed to as low as you can manage without totally blurring everything in the image.  1/60 of a second is a pretty good rule of thumb, unless you are hand holding your camera, in which case I wouldn't drop below 1/100.

For those of you without an SLR don't fret!  Those controls on the back of your point and click are actually pretty useful if you know anything about shutter speed and f-stop.  There is often an option for nighttime shooting on your camera and that's what you're going to want to use here.  Do not use the sports photography or automatic settings on your camera as that will speed up the shutter and make the water look terrible.  No, for this soft look you want the shutter open a good while if you can manage it and night settings do that very well.  Also, you might consider trying landscape as well.

This photograph was shot off the cuff as I was explaining this principle to someone.  I think it turned out pretty good seeing as I wasn't planning on actually using this photo!