Canon T2i (550D) and Canon 100mm. All hand held shots.
Finally treated myself to a new camera, the T2i (upgrading from an XT), and after waiting for Adorama to stock it again, it arrive last week!
I took it out to an abandoned school in Hall Summit, LA this past weekend and put it to the test… One of the main reasons I went with this Rebel is the ISO range, from 100 to 6400 and expanded to 12800. The noise levels up to 3200 are quite acceptable, so it’s a great camera for hand held low-light photography such as the abandonments I visit. The HD video and all the other features are great too, so I’m really happy with it thus far.
After using the XT with battery grip for so long, the T2i is a little awkward to hold without it’s grip, so I will be making that additional purchase soon.
Hall Summit’s school has been closed since 2001 and is still in relatively good condition. The main buildings are all intact, the playground still has some equipment laying about, but the gymnasium is a little worse for wear since water has damaged the floor and caused much of the wood to buckle up.
Full set of photos (58 images): Flickr
All in all it was a good trip and I’m really pleased with the new T2i!
Established in 1924, this orphanage was home to children between the ages of 3 and 13, but it closed it’s doors in 1994. Since then several projects have been planned for the facility, but none have taken root and the buildings remain empty. I spent a couple of hours there last weekend and was pleasantly surprised by the good condition the structure of the main building seems to be in.
For the whole set: Masonic Orphanage
Thanks to my sister in law for finding this place!
Set close to the highway, it’s not an old school building and seems to be privately owned… I have no idea how long it has gone without use, but the doors are all either broken or unlocked and the roof is falling in in several places. Bullet holes in the glass show that the side entrance doors have been used for target practice.
Despite the constant traffic on the road out front, the building carried a strange feel of desolation… almost too quiet. Also, even though the structure was small for a school and the rooms were all largely empty, it carried it’s own special atmosphere that I can’t quite put a finger on to describe.
Ok, so this isn’t a new trick, but I finally got around to taking a trip to a hardware store to look for a neutral density filter. Well, not a ND filter, but something that works in the same manner. The store only carried one type of welding glass, but it does the trick!
The glass is cheap, which is wonderful, and is cut into a 4″ square that would make it easy to build a holder for it. I took it out for a spin yesterday at a semi-local spillway overflowing from the recent rains. After a couple of quick test shots, I was able to achieve 20 and 30 second exposures at f11 in full sun for the remainder of them. The color of the glass itself is green, so I was assuming I would end up with either green or black and white images after processing… I was a little disappointed.
However, once I started processing the RAW files, I decided to try adjusting the tint slider.. moving it more to the purple/magenta side…
Lo and behold, maxing out the tint on that end solved the problem! The color is slightly off, but is realistic for the most part.
Not bad for a $3.99 ND filter. Pardon the flare!
I suppose the best place to begin would be to go back to what got me started with photography.
*Dreamy flashback/old film reel sequence*
… Nah, just kidding!
My mother spent a lot of time behind the camera while I was growing up. She was always the designated family photographer though it was only a hobby to her and family pictures were not her favorite things to take. Our outdoor storage building was converted to a darkroom when I was in elementary school and I remember the one time I was actually interested enough to ask her to let me develop a print. I was much too impatient to really appreciate the process at the time, and only resulted in a black and white print of a black cat, but later on I realized that was probably my first step in this direction.
One of my favorite photos taken by my mother.
Throughout my younger years, my mom always made sure I had at least a simple P&S film camera on hand, even though I didn’t use them very often except on vacations. It wasn’t until my college years that the photography bug officially took over. For Christmas of 2002, I was given my first digital camera, an Olympus D-520 point and shoot. I didn’t use it often until the summer of 2003, when boredom overcame me during the break. One day I simply went outside and took pictures of a few random objects and later uploaded them to my computer. None of the pictures were spectacular, but there was one shot of a tiny rose which caught my eye. It was nice, but missing… something. After trying several filters in the software that came with the camera, then it clicked when sepia toning was added. Suddenly I realized.. I had taken a photograph that I actually liked! This was the moment the photography bug bit me.
Within a few months, I upgraded my camera to a Fuji Finepix S602z advanced point & shoot and I was taking, on average, almost 100 photos each day. My focus quickly turned to the wildlife around our home.. mostly insects. With the addition of a set of close-up filters, I delved deeper into close-up and macro photography of wildlife.
There was something that attracted me to the strange beauty of the tiny critters people usually considered gross or annoying, if they paid them any attention at all. Friends and family who saw my photographs often expressed how they never thought bugs could look so cool. This made me want to continue exploring the macro world, and in 2004 I upgraded again to a Nikon Coolpix 8700 advanced point and shoot, along with other accessories like a +10 macro filter. Closer. I began exploring other genres of photography but nothing quite held my attention the way macro photography did.
To this day macrophotography is still my favorite type of photography to do but since upgrading to an actual DSLR, a Canon 350D, in 2005, and obtaining several lenses, my focus has expanded quite a bit. For a short while I ran a wedding and portrait photography business, but quickly found it wasn’t suitable for me. I’ve dabbled in astrophotography, pets, architecture, portraits, aquatic (aquarium) photography,among others, and most recently.. abandonments. Urban exploration and, more often in my case since I live in Nowhere, Louisiana, rural abandonment exploration has become my second favorite.
I will try to post each time I do something that is, in the least bit, interesting, such as finding and exploring a new abandoned location, trying new techniques in post processing, or just general shenanigans. I enjoy the occasional DIY project, so you might see one of those pop up every now and then.
Well… I think that has pretty much gotten us up to date. I’ll stop babbling now and actually go find something to photograph!
Sooooo, here we go!
This blog will be about my photography in general, my somewhat wayward methods, and any number of random tidbits of information that come to my attention. Like so many others, I’m new to the blogging phenomenon, but hopefully I’ll get the hang of it and manage to entertain a few people out there!
