Zebulon Abandoned School – Part 1

Last weekend, some friends and I finally had the opportunity to check out an abandoned elementary school in the small, rural town of Zebulon, Georgia.  I knew someone who knew someone, and was able to get permission and the keys to the building — the best of both worlds!  We were also told that there was supposedly a ghost that haunted this school — predominantly in the auditorium — but I can tell you (very thankfully) that none of us encountered it.

I’m most of the way through processing my photos from this location, but the three below have surfaced as my favorites.

paper towel holder

Unlike the last two abandoned buildings I’ve explored, this one has been locked up and the windows boarded up, so there was really no graffiti to be found.  While this allowed for a more pristine environment, the windows being boarded up did mean that the place was pretty dark.  With very few exceptions, shooting hand-held here would have been close to impossible.  (As much as I hate lugging my tripod around, I keep finding myself at locations whose environments pretty much require it.)

lone lightbulb in weather-worn room

The photo above is my favorite, and I actually knew it would be the moment I walked into this room.  There was wonderful natural light coming in from one of the few windows that wasn’t boarded up, and this bare lightbulb was just hanging there — begging to be photographed!  And then there’s the chair rail and the texture on the wall….  I’m not a people photographer (I wait for people to get out of my pictures :-)), but I so badly wanted to photograph someone here.  If I ever do a portrait shoot, I know where I’m going to do it!

pencil sharpener in classroom

Lastly, there’s this shot of the old, rusty pencil sharpener and a wonderful growing bokeh down the length of the weathered chalkboard.  All of the rooms were painted different colors.  Clearly, this was one of the blue rooms, which contrasted nicely with the brown of the pencil sharpener.

If you’d like to see more photos from this excursion, please check out my Zebulon Abandoned School set on Flickr.

Thanks!

Abandoned Factory – Part 2

So, I’m finally posting more photos from the abandoned battery factory.  I would have posted some sooner, but I’ve been sick with a cold and cough, which I’ve convinced myself has nothing to do with the fact that I was trudging through this contaminated factory a couple of days earlier.  🙂

This time around, I’m not including EXIF data for the photos that went into these HDR shots.  I’m not sure if anyone was really looking at that.  If you liked that information, though, just let me know and I’ll go back and add it.

The photo above is one of my favorites from this second batch.  I absolutely love the lighting!  I think it was just a lucky combination of HDR and shooting at the right time of day.

In this shot, I was hoping to capture a little of the old and the new — invoices from when this was still a business, and caps from cans of spray paint used now to cover the walls with graffiti.  What do you think?  Do you think this shot works?

A larger room shot in the same location as the papers shot above.  I think what drew me to this shot was the contrast of the vibrant graffiti with the drab, dingy papers on the floor.

Believe it or not, this was in the same room as the b&w shoe shot from my last post!  Quite the contrast, I’d say.  The colors on this graffiti were just exquisite.  To the left, out of the shot, was written “THE DEVIL CAME DOWN TO GEORGIA”.  Unfortunately, there just was no way to get it all in due to a post that was in the middle of the room, at least not with the 17-35mm lens I had on me.

So, now for something completely different.  I saw this walking from the large, open space into the room with the devil and the shoes.  The shaft of light completely caught my attention.  I loved how it was illuminating the pipe on the opposite wall.  What do you think of this one?  The shot above was the feeling I had in mind when I took the photo — simple, graphic, monochromatic.  Was it worth it?

If you’d like to see more images from this shoot, please check out the set on my Flickr site.

Thanks!

Abandoned Factory – Part 1

After a short-notice invitation from a friend, I went on my second urban exploring adventure yesterday.  I’m intentionally not going to share many details about the type of place or the location, except to say that it’s an abandoned factory on the Southwest side of Atlanta.  I will say, though, that I learned after the fact that it’s a contaminated site that’s on the EPA’s Superfund list.  Yikes!

ISO 400, 19mm with 4 exposures of 1/6, 0.6, 2.5, and 10.0 sec at f/11

Unlike the abandoned school that we visited in February, we didn’t have to climb through any windows or search for an entrance — we just walked in.  Also unlike the school, this location was pretty much a big, wide open space, with a few rooms here and there.  There was an upstairs, with a cafeteria, etc., but I pretty much kept to the main floor.  I guess I’ll have to go back again so I can explore the upstairs.  🙂

ISO 400, 25mm with 3 exposures of 2.5, 10.0, and 30.0 sec at f/11

I still have plenty of photos to process from this excursion, but so far, the photo above is my favorite.  The moment I converted it to b&w, I felt like I had something special.  This was taken in a shower/locker room area where the workers must have changed from their normal shoes into shoes that they wore just for work, because there were several shoes (not sure about pairs) in this room.  It was one of the few places in the building where there was any remaining connection to the people who actually worked at the factory.

Another one of my favorites so far is the one below.  I just love how the colors play off each other, as well as the position of the desk compared to the main graffiti on the left wall.  There’s just a lot of visually interesting stuff in this one.

ISO 400, 30mm with 3 exposures of 0.4, 1.6, and 6.0 sec at f/18

If you’d like to see the rest of the images from this shoot, please check out the set on my Flickr site.

Thanks!

Abandoned School – Part 3

Today I purchased and installed Lightroom 4, and took it out for a spin by working on some more photos from my excursion a couple of weekends ago to an abandoned elementary school in Atlanta, Georgia.  So far, I’m not seeing any tremendous differences between Lightroom 3 and 4.  There’s the addition of the Highlights and Shadows in the Basic section of the Develop module, but I’m doing HDR with these photos, so I’ve used it very little.  There are also new Map and Book modules, which I haven’t explored yet.  I’ll probably post a more extensive review once I’ve had time to play with it.

Below are a few of my favorites from this latest batch of photos of an abandoned elementary school.

ISO 400 with 5 exposures of 1/8000, 1/6400, 1/1600, 1/400, and 1/100 at f/2.8

The photo above is a great example of what HDR can do.  Even though it was overcast, there was still a tremendous amount of light coming through those windows.  Without HDR, I’d never have been able to get this shot.  Since I have a Nikon, I can only bracket 1 stop apart, so I bracketed the maximum of 9 shots, and used every other shot for the HDR.

1/400 sec at f/2.8

This is the fourth of the five exposures I used for the HDR — the one that’s [mostly] properly exposed for the interior.  Even with a raw file, it would have been difficult to get all of the detail I got with HDR.

ISO 400 with 3 exposures of 1/200, 1/100, and 1/50 sec at f/2.8

This one is not very typical of my style.  My approach is usually a little more straightforward (read: few crazy angles), but I really wanted to emphasize the spray can, as well as the fact that the color spread all across this really long chalk board.  Then, of course, there’s the naked woman on the far wall.  Again, not a normal subject for me, but it was really colorful and different from the rest of the graffiti in the place, so I just had to capture it.  All in all, I’m really pleased with how this one turned out.

ISO 200 with 3 exposures of 1/4, 1.0, and 4.0 sec at f/16

Even though the place was teeming with color from all the graffiti, I think there’s always a chance to slip in a b&w shot here and there.  In this case, the tiles walls were a pinkish flesh color and not terribly appealing, so turning this into a black & white was really the best way to showcase the drama of the scene.  It also allowed me to highlight the reflection of the light on the shiny tile walls.  I created the HDR, then used one of the new b&w presets (“B&W Look 2”) provided by Adobe with Lightroom 4.

ISO 200 with 5 exposures of 1/4000, 1/1000, 1/250, 1/60, 1/15 at f/3.2

Another 5 exposure HDR shot due to the extreme lighting.  There was something about this room and this green chair; I think it was my favorite location in the entire place.  The chair was one of the few things left in the building that gave any indication of the building’s former life.  You could imagine someone using this at their desk while grading papers.  It humanized the building, particularly in contrast with all of the graffiti.

Believe it or not, I’m still not done processing photos from this excursion, which means that there will at least be an “Abandoned School – Part 4” in the near future.  In the meantime, feel free to check out the other photos from this batch on my Flickr site.

Abandoned School – Part 2

I’ve just uploaded another batch of photos from my recent trip to an abandoned school in Atlanta, and I’m really thrilled with how they’re turning out!  Below are my two favorites from this batch, and some of my favorites so far from this trip.

The photo below was the result of three exposures — 1/160, 1/40, and 1/10 sec at f/5.6 — all shot at ISO 400, 35mm focal length, then processed using Nik HDR Efex Pro and a custom preset.  I was also using a feature of my tripod (Manfrotto 190CX3) that I hadn’t used before where the center column can be turned horizontal for shooting from straight above the subject.  I guess it worked!

I just love the tones in this picture!

For the second photo, I took nine exposures, but I only used four — 1/125, 1/30, 1/8, and 0.5 sec at f/16 — shot at ISO 400, 17mm focal length, again processed using Nik HDR Efex Pro.  This image just popped so much by default that I did very little to it after creating the HDR image.

Again, I love the tones, as well as the reflection of the windows in the glass and the way the white graffiti pops off the wood panel.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about these as well as the other photos from the set on Flickr.  Thanks!