Not what you think it is

No, this isn't actually a panorama shot.

It's a cropped shot from my wide angle lens, 5693 x 2183 px, so 2.6x1, which is getting up into Cinemascope territory.

It isn't a created shot. I found those elements there and didn't move anything, although I should have. The thing driving the cropping, but not the composition, was another lens sitting in the lower right of the image. Sigh. I keep forgetting just how wide that lens is.

No, it isn't a functional grain elevator, but you already guessed that. It's well known in local photography circles, and there's lots of interesting stuff to see. But the problem for me is that the buildings themselves are so obvious that it's difficult to get an original shot of them. There are usually several other people around trying to do the same thing. Often they are complicating your composition, or you theirs.

I wandered around, did some photos of the other people, and stumbled upon this pile of junk. Quite literally. I'm glad I didn't fall down and impale myself. I liked the rusty metal and tried several compositions, then got the idea of shooting under the hoop.

Cameras are an amazing piece of technology. One of the many things it does is show you an image of what you have captured. This isn't quite as you might think. Here's another view of me exploring composition.

That steel hoop is less than a foot high, but I was thinking of the book Ringworld, and had the idea of the hoop up in the sky as an arch over the grain elevator. Or an metal rainbow. I was mainly focused on getting the camera almost right under the hoop, on the pile of rusty sharp metal bits without damage to me or the camera.

I knew the other lens was there, but I figured by the time I got into position it would drop out of the frame, or be low enough that I could crop it out. Plus, unless I wanted it rolling around in the long grass, there was nowhere else to put it, and no one around to hold it. Yeah, I know, some photoshop whiz could use the clone tool, or something, to get rid of it.

So there I was, working my way in. I looked at the camera version of the shot, and figured I had it. Oops. Not quite. Lots of times I wince at almost shots while editing on the big screen. The little camera screen doesn't quite show you everything the lens captures, so there is sometimes something intruding into the frame. Sometimes cropping works, sometimes not. Sometimes you think your subject is in focus, and it's ever so slightly not. The better a photographer you are, the more flaws you see in editing, but then you also avoid some flaws too.

So what's wrong with the first shot? There's some detail in the metal that got lost. It's slightly out of focus, and slightly too dark for the camera to pick up, but I couldn't tell that by looking at the camera. I need to get better at insurance shots. I should have moved the other lens, snuggled the camera into a slightly different position to make the composition better, and done a 3 shot HDR sequence. Maybe got rid of those two big stalks of shrub, or maybe not. Maybe I could have found a camera angle that would have corrected the distortion of the curve of the hoop so it looked circular in the shot. The call to go back to the bus happened about then, but I could have taken a few more minutes. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

What I actually started writing about was these ghost buildings. At one point someone decided it would be a good idea to build this. Lots of time and labour went into it. There are a few other abandoned buildings nearby, but there wasn't actually a town. I often wonder about abandoned buildings. Someone went to the time and trouble to build them and put stuff in them. They had dreams, I'm sure, of it being part of a better life for them or their children.

Then something happened, or didn't happen. Maybe the crops failed one year too many. Maybe someone got sick or died. Maybe they won the lottery and moved to Beverly Hills but wanted to start over completely and didn't take anything. Ok, maybe that last one is unlikely.

But at some point, whatever reason, the owner or resident walked away and never came back. I look at these abandoned buildings and can't help but wonder what the story is.

Deadwood of the Day