Silo demolition

Back in my film days, I spent a fair amount of time photographing buildings in the process of being demolished. Here’s another example.

Notice the difference between the two shots. The subject is the same; the only change is the camera angle. The shot above was taken from a nearby overpass, and the shot below was taken from ground level. Note how the two images look and feel different.

State Drive-In

Ah, those sweet summer nights at the drive-in. Bad food. Warm beer. Awful audio. Barely visible screens (at least until the sun went all the way down). Sigh.

The State was the one we all went to when I was a kid. Many years ago they closed it up and tore it down. But I got some shots of the sign before it vanished.

The photo presents some shot composition lessons, but for this week I’m going to let the teaching slide and just appreciate it for what it is.

Huron Building

Alas for the poor Huron Building. For decades it was an integral part of the modest Kansas City Kansas downtown skyline. It was the sort of building that might have housed the offices of tough-as-nails private detectives from old noir movies (though I suspect the reality was less romantic).

The building was torn down in 1998. I managed to get a few shots before the walls came down. When I was there, the windows were already gone. That made the building’s proud “completely air conditioned” proclamation poignant, as at one time the claim would have made it seem more desirable office space but at death it merely evoked the wind blowing through the empty spaces.

For what it’s worth, these photos were among the first I ever shot and developed on my own. Though I’d been taking pictures for years, I’d always sent them out for processing rather than venturing into a darkroom myself.

Photography lesson: note the differences in the sky between the two photos. Consider what a visible, detailed sky does for the foreground building.

Water towers

Almost literally as the last seconds of the spring semester waned away, I finished a photo project I’d been pursuing off and on since January. I’ve been scanning in all the negatives from back in the day when I (and everyone else, for that matter) used to shoot on film rather with digital equipment. Turned out the notebook full of contact sheets and negs contained more than 1400 photos!

So now and again in this blog I’ll post some of this “old school” work. You’ll be able to spot them swiftly because the photos won’t be captioned (as the film gives me no data about settings or lenses or even what camera I was using).

This week’s entry features the famous hot and cold water towers from Pratt, Kansas, which fooled me for some time when I was a kid. One thing I’ve noticed about the neg scans is that many of them are coated with dust specks and scratches that aren’t visible just looking at the strips but show up dramatically when they’re scanned. Fortunately, Photoshop’s spot healing brush makes short work of most such blemishes (compare the uncorrected shot below).

Contact sheet

No lesson this week, just a quick recognition of a mini milestone. Last week the 8sails staff finally finished the splash page for The Photographer’s Sketchbook. The graphics are patterned off the contact sheets we used to use to “preview” negatives back in the film days, with each frame linked to a topic on the site.

Or to be more precise, each frame is linked to a spot on “the bookshelf,” the site’s index of lessons organized by topic. At this point we don’t have a lot of lessons loaded, but as we add content to the site in the coming months, at least it will be easy to access.