After today’s thunderstorm
I decided to have some fun with my kiddo.
more urban exploration
The Coleman Company, maker of all kinds of outdoor and camping gear, is headquartered here in Wichita. For years their main building was downtown, but a few years back they moved out of it. It’s been abandoned ever since; the pollution they were responsible for was so bad that it’s now a superfund site and they’ve been utterly unable to sell or otherwise offload the property.
The back side of the building is up against a raised railroad track. There’s a gravel alley in between, and a number of shipping/receiving docks. I was intrigued to discover that one of them had a garage door that was completely unlocked. All I had to do was raise it up, and I was in.
I went in exploring a number of times, but only once did I make a photographic expedition out of it. I got a few friends togther and we took flashes, flashlights, colored gels, tripods, everything.
This shot was taken from a second or third floor room that overlooked what I imagine was some sort of production floor. A friend opened the shutter while I wandered around the floor, popping colored flashes.
These containers were in some of the rooms. This one had some standing water in front of it. I shone a flashlight on the water, and the reflection is what’s lighting the top portion of the container.
This one was fun. These big translucent plastic or fiberglass containers were empty, so I had friends standing on the far sides of them, firing flashes into them. They appear to glow with some sort of imagined radioactive sludge.
Here’s another shot featuring that container that was tagged “n00b”. This time I framed in the standing water and walked past with a sparkler while the shutter was open.
We found a portion of the building where a homeless person was apparently squatting. He had been using this broom to keep his little area swept and clean.
This is probably my favorite shot from this location. The room had holes in the floor, so I sent my friends to the room below, and they fired flashes and flashlights through the holes while my shutter was open. In the mean time, I danced through the room with the homeless guy’s broom, sweeping as much dust into the air as I could. (I returned the broom.)
It was an interesting place.
urban exploration
Although I haven’t done any of it in a long time, Urban Exploration (google it, it’s pretty much what it sounds like) has led to some of my favorite images.
It’s gone now, but on the north end of town there used to be an abandoned oil refinery. A couple friends and I explored it one night. The part of town where it used to be is very strange. It’s very industrial, but everything is spread out quite a bit. There’s a sketchy car dealership about half a mile away, but no other businesses anywhere close. A railroad runs along one side of the property and a highway along another. At night, it’s a strange combination of remote emptiness and bustling traffic with the periodic train passing by.
We parked on a little-known, little-traveled gravel road that winds around the north side of the area before it just kind of ends. We parked in a spot that’s relatively well obscured at night – a few trees and dirt piles were around. We got our nighttime photo gear out of the car and started hiking.
It was like some strange surreal post-apocalyptic landscape. There was virtually no foliage, though the ground appeared to be just dirt, with gravel paths cris-crossing the area. One assumes there was just too much chemical pollution going on for grass to grow, but who knows for sure. The facility was already in the middle of being torn down, which turned out to be a years-long process. We came across a few big containment structures, one of which looked like a giant had just walked up to it, grabbed it by the top and ripped part of the wall away, which was lying in a heap a few yards away. I guess they really needed to get at whatever was in there. So I set up the camera, opened the shutter, went inside and popped the flash a few times. It almost looks like a cutaway diagram except for the odd colors inside, created by flashes and colored gels.
Here’s another angle on those three structures. They were made of very different materials, of very different luminosities, as evidenced by the next photo. The center one was aluminum or some other kind of reflective metal, and the other two were matte painted and sludge-covered. This photo is just available light – no flashes or anything else were used on that center structure. This is just how the photo came out.
There was still one main structure standing at this facility, and as we approached it, we realized it was speaking. Quietly at first, but louder the closer we got. There was a bit of a breeze that night. It pushed the clouds along very nicely for our photos, and it also caused the big metal structure to creak and groan. Large aluminum panels were rusted and falling off in places, and they would swing and bang. Chains would blow in the breeze and clang against pipes. It was very surreal.
As we got closer to it, we actually got inside the main area, so that this structure was towering all around us, and the creaks, groans, clangs and bangs were coming from all around us. Looking up at the structure from that point was really impressive.
We didn’t climb on it much as we weren’t sure how stable or safe it was. We wanted good photos, but not badly enough to risk our health.
This place isn’t there any more. I’m glad we got these shots when we did.
Teter Rock
This one has gotten a lot of love over on Flickr. This is Teter rock, which lives in the middle of nowhere in the Flint Hills of Kansas. It’s basically a big chunk of limestone which, in Pioneer days, someone turned on its end and chucked into the ground. It sits on a relatively high point and can be seen for miles. In the valley below there used to be a trade post, and the rock was intended to guide settlers who were traveling the plains to the trade post.
The clouds behaved particularly well that day. This shot, like the earlier shot of the faucet by the lake, was shot on Fuji Velvia film.
Here’s another shot of the Flint Hills from that day. This was actually shot from on top of the same hill, but with Teter Rock at my back. Kansas State University used this shot for a promotional poster which was distributed to high schools to recruit students to their Agronomy department.
school = busy
So I haven’t had much time to shoot for myself. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been shooting.
For work last week, I went to Froz, a new frozen yogurt joint in town. They bought an ad in the magazine I work for, but they didn’t have any decent artwork so I went over there to shoot some photos. Here’s the ad proof – I thought it turned out really nice.
The pomegranate yogurt is delicious.
Confetti
Here’s an old shot that I made when I was first playing around with night photography and light tricks and such. I’m pretty proud of it. I shot it on my very favorite film – Kodak Ektachrome 160T, which is a slide film. The T means it’s Tungsten-balanced, which works exactly the same as the Tungsten setting on your new fancy-pants digital camera’s white-balance setting. It basically gives everything a blue cast, which is intended to compensate for shooting indoors under incandescent lights, or even better, it’s good for shooting outdoors under those awful sodium vapor street lights.
But I’ve found it works very well as a nighttime film, because the blue cast makes everything look… well, night-timey.
This shot was made at a little park down by Pawnee and Broadway which celebrates water conservation. When I saw the quote, I decided to add some “confetti” of my own by dragging a sparkler through the frame.
My girlfriend needed professional head shots
So I took a couple.
A little light skin smoothing was all they needed. Can you believe I didn’t put a vignette on them? I KNOW.
Faucet
Here’s an image I made on Fuji Velvia film back in about 2005 or so. I was still shooting with my old Pentax PFXn. You can easily see here why Velvia was such a great film – the color saturation is amazing. None of that was done in post – this is a straight scan of the slide.
Wichita Walkability Photowalk
Someone from some Wichita planning commission or something wanted to get some people together to do a photowalk examining the “walkability” (or lack thereof) of Wichita. I’m a little fuzzy on the details because all I heard was “photowalk” and I was in. I’m pretty sure I failed spectacularly at capturing anything related to walkability, but again, photowalk! Here’s a slideshow.