Our new friends in the Bay area have one of the coolest old houses I’ve ever seen. Â I could spend a full day there exploring and photographing everything. Â My youngest daughter was especially fond of the “doll house” (play house) built out back by the previous owner for her daughter. Â It has fully functioning water, A/C and more. Â Heck, I’d live in that kid’s cottage. Â Inside the main house, I just had to grab a shot of this awesome old phone box. Â Man I love “retro” eye candy!
I’ve always been a big fan of sci-fi and horror flicks, and I’ve got a pretty good imagination to boot, which is probably why a lot of the URBEX environments I visit remind me of some movie I’ve seen before. Â Sometimes, that can be a bit creepy, especially if I’m in one of those rooms alone with only the dripping and creaking sounds of decay. Â This particular room reminded me of the scene in one of my all-time favorite horror flicks, the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, when Donald Sutherland’s character’s pod-self is transforming as he sleeps. Â Click here if you want to see that still (to me at least) creepy scene. Â Speaking of which, it’s midnight as I post this, so I suppose I should go to sleep now. Â Wonder if it will be me who wakes up in the morning?
I had fully intended to post another URBEX shot today, but decided instead to toss this photograph I made down in Bonitas, California last week onto the blog instead. While I was shooting this bad boy, a surfer dude came out of a nearby house and asked me if I wanted to buy it. Uh, um, no thanks, bro. But I’ll be glad to send you a shot of the car when I’ve processed it. Cool! Everyone’s happy. Let’s see what he thinks of my treatment of this grand old blue bomber.
The other day I was exploring some of the historic parts for Redding, California, looking for some cool architecture to shoot.  Scouted a good location I shot later that same day (the old Cascade theater I posted a couple of days back), and talked to some interesting people (like Glen, the fellow I photographed and to whom I introduced you all last week).  I also found this cool old Ford Anglia, which I shot from three different points-of-view.  This angle is my favorite, because it really shows off the cool tail end of the car.  I used my 24mm tilt-shift lens to keep the eye focused on the back end.  For you Harry Potter fans out there, this car look familiar to you; it’s the same make and model that Fred,George, and Ron Weasley flew in to with to rescue Harry when he was locked up in his room under the stairs at the Dursley house.
While I continue my deliberations about my future in photography, I’ve promised that I would still post-process and post photographs I’ve take over the last several months, but have just not had the time or inclination to work on. This shot, of an old spiral staircase, is one I shot during a fairly recent trip to an abandoned paper mill in former East Germany. I photographed this vertical panorama (or Vertorama) with my 24mm tilt-shift lens, using both shift (to shoot the upper and lower frames of the vertorama), and tilt (to keep the stairs sharper, while allowing the rest of the shot to blur). By the way, if anyone has questions about how to use a tilt-shift lens, Photomatix and Photoshop to do this kind of work, give me a holler! And if you want to see a true Vertorama master at work, check out South African photographer Paul Bruins’ work on flickr. He is known there as Panorama Paul, and it was through his amazing work that I was turned on to Vertoramas!
