Most “how to write good blogs” articles recommend posting lists, so I figure a list of lists would be the most awesome post ever. So here are the top ten lists I found by typing “list of [random word]” into Google.

25 Heroic Dogs From the blue heeler that beat up an alligator to the bulldog that dove into a pond to save a bag of drowning kittens, this list shows some dogs are more than man’s best friend.

10 Drinks Only American Could Have Invented Bacontinis, jello shots, and bottled tap water are just a few American contributions to the world of imbibing.

6 Insane Laws We’ll Need in the Future Mostly inspired by science fiction and the latest advances in real science. The plot of Gattaga almost came true already!

10 Incredibly Expensive Hamburgers For people with beer tastes on a champagne budget. Anyone want to get together to tackle the Absolutely Ridiculous Burger? Only $16.63 per person!

5 of the World’s Most Expensive Toilets You need one of these after you eat the Incredibly Expensive Hamburgers. This list also answers the question “Where do astronauts poop?”

The World’s Smallest Countries This list only includes “real” countries that are recognised by other countries, so Sealand and Hutt River Province, and Strongbadia aren’t listed.

10 Bizzare Uses for Duct Tape Clearly the duct tape calculator is missing since the list actually contains 13 items. Although making a wallet from duct tape isn’t so bizzare.

Top 10 Bizzare Tourist Attractions Noodle Bath and the Cockroach Hall of Fame… that’s my next holiday planned!

The Six Creepiest Abandoned Places I think the first one was where much of Battle Royale was filmed. But let’s face it, any place designed for humans is creepy after the humans leave.

Top Ten Hoaxes of All Time Number 11: my claim that this post is entertaining.

So there we go. Awesome post, or complete waste of time? Answer in the comments.

With more than 20 plants across Belgium, this concrete producing group is one of the biggest in the country, producing more than 2,5 million m³ of concrete on a yearly basis. However, as times evolved, some concrete plants had to close, the ‘Nord’ one in a harbour-city close to the sea was one of them.

This post is actually a rather long reply to a question about flash photography in a heritage forum Midland Heritage, so it may read a little strangely.

Blimey now this is a big can of worms. Firstly I would really recommend the strobist blog as an excellent resource lighting 101 this will take you straight to the first page of their (rather long) lighting tutorial which will give you all the info you could possibly want.

One way to use these flashes  is  to fill shadows   when you are lighting a dark dingy room, I would suggest that a set of triggers is a good first purchase for this and will help immensely, especially if you havent got any of the shiny flashes that will trigger wirelessly.

I always find it easier to work from an example and I quite like this one as it is not immediately apparent that I have used a lot of flash.

I have just used the one unit which has been placed just behind the door on the left and bounced off a silver reflector (though the wall would also work).

The reason I needed to light this was that the difference between the sunlight streaming down the stairs and the door which was deep in shadow and rather gloomy, so I metered for the stairs and used a process of trial and error to find the correct fill.

With this shot there is some evidence that I may have used a flash, first the colour of the light is different, cool the side where I have used the flash and warm on the other where the sunlight is coming down the stairs. Secondly the light is concentrated at the bottom of the door which is a giveaway that a small light source has been used (firing two or more flashes through a diffuser or large bedsheet may have helped lessen this but it is not really the most practical or portable of solutions).

I will often use a flash to highlight a section of detail aswell, this shot is the usual long exposure on a tripod which people are used to 1.3 seconds at iso 100 and an aperture of f13. the flash here is lighting the foreground and bringing detail to the “thing” at the front.

In this shot the flash would have been firing at quite a high power despite the long exposure, this is due to the aperture being so small and the way that flash lights a picture.

Put simply the flash only cares about aperture as the burst of light is emitted for roughly 1/10000 sec, only one burst is emitted during a normal exposure so it doesnt matter what the shutter speed is to the flash.

Having said this the ambient light obviously cares about both so in a long exposure the flash may not appear as evident but this is only due to the natural light taking over as the dominant light source and stifling the light from the flash.

Going back to the picture the flash is very evident here because the area it is lighting is in shadow allowing the flash to be the dominant source of light, it needed the high power to allow enough light to hit the sensor through a small hole in a very short space of time.

This was the part of flash photography I always struggled with but the best way is really to experiment.

Another way I will often use flash like this is to kill all the ambient light in a room and allow the flash to light the scene on its own.

The geek info for this image is: 1/250 sec at f10.

It would make sense for me to increase the shutter speed further to something like 1/1000 as this would allow me to reduce the aperture and put less strain on the flash units, however the flash will not sync at this speed 1/250 being the maximum on my camera. So I am stuck with f10 which isnt so bad as it allows me to keep everything nice and sharp.

Without the flash the frame is black, the little detail you can see on the background is due to spill from the lights

To light the picture I used two lights, one on a stand right in front of where the model was jumping at around chest hight on the model. This flash was zoomed in towards the model as I wanted to concentrate the beam of light on her (this also reduces the power needed as more light goes where you want it) doing this makes the beam harder and narrower and is a great way to bring attention to a specific point in an image.

The second light was low down right below the camera and bounced off a silver reflector, this light was as wide as I could make it and lower power than the first as I wanted a soft light just to fill the shadows left by the main beam (it is also this light that caused the spill).

The only problem with lighting this way is you are forced to blend the light, filling any unexpected shadows and keeping the light from becoming a distraction.

You are not restricted to darkness for these techniques either and they can be a viable and interesting alternative to a HDR image. This shot was exposed for the sky on a bright day with the sun at my 5 o’clock. This caused the top of the Helicopter to be exposed, but left the detail at the bottom dark and in the shadow. To counter this I used two lights one either side of the helicopter (my 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock), these lights were used to give the bottom of the helicopter a little more exposure than the light hitting the top, bringing your focus to the front of the helicopter and giving the picture more impact than a normal exposre could allow.

I hope this has been somewhat useful to some people, and sorry about the length, this is a technique I use in most of my images at work and while it may take some getting used to, once you have an idea about what the light will do it becomes a very powerful tool that can be set up quickly and easily

A note on my kit: All the above were taken with a Fuji S5 Pro, a Nikon 17-35mm f2.8 lens and one or two nikon speedlights. I use an old Sb26 connected to a trigger and an sb800 which fires wirelessly when it detects the light from the first flash (or any other flash for that matter) my bag also contains a silver/gold reflector and a cheepo Jessops tripod which I use as a stand. All fairly cheap and most importantly very portable

I regularly put images using this technique on my Flickr page and include a brief description of the lighting used.

A ghost town in the heart of Silicon Valley? I first read about Drawbridge a couple years ago, but didn’t get a chance to explore it until last weekend. Founded in 1876 on the rail line between Fremont and Alviso, Drawbridge reached its peak during Prohibition. Due to its relative isolation and the fact that nearly every resident was armed, local law enforcement didn’t bother making vice raids. Nearly every resident was armed. Water pumping and nearby salt evaporation ponds caused the land to sink into the bay, and people started to leave. Local newspapers published wild accounts of treasure left behind, bringing hordes of scavengers and vandals. The few remaining residents scared them off with shotguns, but it was a futile effort. Charles Luce, the last man in Drawbridge, left in 1979. In thirty years of abandonment, most of the buildings are in an advanced state of decay and sinking into the marsh. It seemed a good time to check out the ghost town before it disappears completely.

I was up by 5:30am and on the tracks heading north from Alviso an hour later. I had hoped for a beautiful sunrise, but the overcast light made for excellent landscape photography.

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The only sound I heard was the occasional pop of shotguns as game hunters prowled the sloughs for waterfowl.

After a nearly three mile hike along the tracks, I came to the first abandoned structures. Drawbridge is technically closed to outsiders, but there’s nothing to stop people save for a few signs. The tracks are active, but only a couple Amtrak trains rolled through when I was there.

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The land surrounding the tracks is mostly salt marsh crisscrossed with small streams. A few of them are covered by pickleweed and nearly invisible, causing me to stumble and plunge ankle deep in mud. It’s not a particularly safe environment for high-end camera gear.

Surprisingly, the place isn’t as overrun by graffiti as I would’ve expected.

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This place was the best preserved in all of Drawbridge. Pretty sure this used to be the kitchen.

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More abandoned buildings are north along the tracks.

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Some great opportunities for macro decay photography.

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Around this time I noticed that the tide was coming in fast, causing the bay to seep out of the marsh and make further exploration difficult.

The sun came out around noon, and by then Drawbridge was inundated by water.

Rest of the Drawbridge set here.

Built around 1920, this was one of the first Belgian military airports. The airport was closed in the mid 90’s. The airstrip is still being used by a local flying club but the barracks and sporting facilities were left abandoned.

By Kwasi B. | Canon G10 | Digital raw capture | 2009

Built in 1859, Fort III was part of the Brialmont fortification around the city of Antwerp. Construction works ended five years later, in 1864 revealing the fortress’ unique entrance to the reduit and unique capponières, which weren’t built in other forts of the second southern fortification belt.

This shoot had been in the making for quite some time. Organised by Brent (landscape and light painting expert) with my help on the strobist side, we were to create something of a blend between the two, with the concept of “a girl finding herself lost and alone after a night out”. The site was an abandoned warehouse in Sydney. We had all up about 8 people on location. The idea was to shoot the model with off camera flash then wait until dark to light paint the scenes.

We had 6 cameras lined up on tripods with Pocketwizard Multimax to fire the 580EXII through a softbox. This was pretty simple and straight forward. Each of us had a turn. In the mean time, ambient shots were also taken to act as a background plate.

We had to wait a bit for night time to fall. Brent was preparing his light painting gear with various tubes, colours, sizes, etc.

Each wall was light painted individually for maximum exposure.

After a few hours in Photoshop, below is the final result. The image was a blend of about 8-13 photos, each individually masked and adjusted to fit.

Link here is a flash file showing the layers that were in photoshop.

from September 13, 2009

AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you didn’t like my last blog I don’t expect you’ll like this one. On the other hand, if you liked my last blog you’ll like this one because I’ll very probably use the same jokes, you know, the same jokes I’ve been using for the last three years. So perhaps you may not like this one after all, as it is likely not very different from what you’ve read before. On the other hand (and I think I’m up to my third hand at this point) I’ll be writing about stuff I haven’t written about before so maybe you’ll stick around.

I do, though, start off with something I have written about before, airplane travel. You may want to skip that section and jump ahead to where I talk about the phoniest Italian food in Providence.

But if you ask me, and well you should since after all I wrote this crap, maybe you should just log off altogether and go back to your farm game or your zombie fight. It is all kind of silly.

In fact, I do something in this blog I rarely do. (Fact check? Praise Obama?) At certain points I exercise discretion. This has the twofold effect of shortening my blog (“yay,” you are undoubtedly thinking) and perhaps leaving out promising avenues of sophomoric humor. Believe me, it is very hard for me to leave a fifth grade fart joke or crude sexual euphemism out of my blog but at certain points I did it. The upside is that I get to avoid some stuff I want to avoid and I get to lean back from my keyboard, thinking “ah, how adult of me.”

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I spent ten days in San Diego this summer.

To get to San Diego you’ve got some options. You can take a train across the country, but unless you are living in 1955 no one does that anymore. You can drive across the country, but I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and I know I’ll be seeing the same hitchhiker asking “going my way?” every time I stop and by the time I got to Missouri I’d drive into a lake. That left me with only one other option- hot air balloon. However, the FAA refused to give me the proper clearance to fly over Nevada and I said fuck it, I’ll take a plane.

I paid an extra $40 to get a seat in the extra legroom section. I got about two extra inches, but if you’ve ever flown in a full plane for longer than 15 minutes you’ll know how much I appreciated the extra two inches.

Know what else I got for the extra $40? I got to sit next to the emergency exit, a very responsible seat. The stewardess asked all of us next to the exits if we were willing to help other passengers out of the plan in the event of an emergency. If not we could switch seats. No way was I giving up the extra legroom so I lied and said sure I’d be willing to help. In fact I was already composing my speech for CNN explaining why no one but me got off the plane before it went down.

I took the door position very seriously. When the stewardess specifically asked me if I knew how and when to open the door, I told her “you’d better tell me when not to open this door, ‘cause I am ready!”

She then very slowly and patiently told me when not to open the door.

The flight itself was very uneventful, except for one time when we hit a spell of turbulence and I grabbed for the emergency handles. The stewardess kindly asked me to let go. I was ready, dammit!

About three hours into the flight, when it was nice and quiet, I looked out the window; turned to my brother (did I mention my brother came with me? Well I’m mentioning it now.) and said “there’s a man on the wing!” He was not at all amused, probably because I say that to him every single time we fly.

I went to San Diego for a week of training where I learned that I hate training, and especially hate it when I have training with other teachers. The highlight of the training came when my group had to turn an old poem into a sketch and I had to tie up a very attractive teacher from Seattle in a bondage position. This is true. I was not at all comfortable but she had clearly done it before. “Run this rope between my breasts” she said at one point and I really wished there were not thirty other people around. I have not found them yet but pictures of this do exist. I hope they stay lost.

Along with me from my school were some other teachers who kind of went off on their own and my AP. Every single day he told us how much he wanted to take us out to dinner and every single dinner time he was nowhere to be found.

While I was there I saw the zoo, where we watched an ape piss right in front of us.

I did a lot of touristy stuff and if you want to you can check my photos on Facebook. Be on the lookout for the one where I am wearing a stupid looking hat.

The less said about San Diego the better because it was, quite frankly, fun but not funny. Good for me to experience, bad for you to read about. (That sums up everything I have ever written in a blog, bad for you to read about. Why do you do it?)

San Diego was sandwiched, sort of, by two trips of urban exploration.

Here is how wikipedia defines Urban Exploration:

Urban exploration is the examination of the normally unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities.  The nature of this activity presents various risks, including both physical danger and the possibility of arrest and punishment. Many, but not all, of the activities associated with urban exploration could be considered trespassing or other violations of local or regional laws.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This blog is a work of fiction. Any illegal trespassing or violation of local laws is intended as humor and is in no way an admission of guilt. And as for the photos I posted on my profile, I have no clue how they got there, who took them, or why I am even in some of them. And maybe that’s not even my profile. Wait, do you have a warrant? Get your hands off me, I know my rights!

I was caught in a rainstorm while Michelle and I explored an old abandoned mental asylum on Staten Island.

Read that back, there’s a lot to take in. I know it all sounds pretty Scooby Doo but that is what happened. (Maybe happened, wink wink.)

Let me go back to the beginning. In fact, let me go back before the beginning. I’m going all the way back to when I was a kid in grade school. Trust me, this will make sense. At least as much sense as my blogs usually make. (Be glad I have not come crazy with the punctuation. I haven’t done that in ages and I’m itching to go nuts with semi-colons. But I digress. You may remember I was using some discretion in this blog.)

Ten-year old me had a ten-year old friend named Michael. For some reason we would go to school and tell each other the most ridiculous lies about what we did the night before. I’d tell him I saw a UFO. He’d tell me he went into a haunted house. I’d tell him I saw a ghost on my fire escape. He’d tell me fought a werewolf. I once showed him some white paint splotches around my block and told him they were skeleton tracks and I followed them all the way to the cemetery. What does this show? It shows that ten-year old me was as big a jerk as 2009 me.

Zip ahead to July, 2009. Remember the rainiest day of the summer? The one where Staten Island was hit with a tornado? Streets were flooded, trees were down, some areas were blacked out? That was the day I could be found driving around the backwoods. Or as close as S.I. has to backwoods.

Michelle has done a lot of urban exploration and I always wanted to do some so this was the day we picked to go. Would I have done this with David Din? No. Would I have done this with Bonnie? No, she’s snubbing me. But I’d do it with Michelle. (Poor choice of phrase? Yes, but if you take your mind out of the gutter it is perfectly innocent.) If you are reading this and you know Michelle, no explanation is necessary. If you are reading this and you don’t know, that’s your loss. She’s great. Absolutely great.

First we went to the boat graveyard. No, let me start over.

First we went to the spooky, abandoned, Old Boat Graveyard, where rusty hulks decompose and die!

Isn’t that better? Sound spooky enough? It really wasn’t spooky, despite the gray skies and rain. The best place to see it was on the property of a construction company. Normally I avoid places where construction workers could beat me up and throw me into a river, but I had to man up and we took some pics until a guy yelled at us and we had to stop.

We drove around in the rain, guided by Michelle’s iPhone, and made a large number of wrong turns in the pouring rain until we got to the site of the abandoned mental asylum. At least Michelle said it was the site. All I saw was a fence surrounding a lot of trees. Michelle knows her stuff though, and after a quick duck through a hole in the fence we were in.

TO BE CONTINUED

I am doing my university project on urban xploration and the urban decay theory. 28 days later is an amazing urban exploration forum, theres a few places that I plan to visit soon for my project. I will post pictures here at some point.

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=43359&highlight=village

When I saw this refrigerator, I knew right away it would be a great subject for HDR photography.  As I was processing the RAW photos to create this image, I saw the potential (mostly because of the cracked paint) to give this photo a bit of creative lighting.  I think I am getting closer and closer to developing my own style, especially when I look at this finished work together with the work titled “Come sit with me…if you dare!”  What do you think?  Is it a keeper?

I shot this back in 2006 as the final project for my MA in Documentary. It is a short documentary revisiting Whittingham Hospital, a huge derelict asylum. Featuring Ray Gosling, former Granada film-maker retracing his steps with the aid of a former patient and a team of dedicated urban explorers.

The original idea was to make a film about urban exploration, and to follow urban explorers entering abandoned buildings and locations across the country. The idea had to be refined and I chose to tell the story of Whittingham using urban exploration to make the film happen. In any other scenario this film could not have been made.

I had become an urban explorer myself, making new friends online and going on trips to all sorts of locations, such as derelict holiday camps, hotels, huge underground quarries and mysterious underground MOD sites. When exploring you feel like a time traveller, exploring a lost civilisation and trying to make sense of the artifacts left behind.

Through the help of one of the explorers called ‘Ste_Nova’, I managed to track down Ray Gosling giving a public talk in Wales. At the end of the talk we asked him about his film Whittingham and I asked if he would consider going back there for the film. I didnt expect him to be up for it but his enthusiasm for the project was unstoppable.

At 70+ he is full of life and up for adventure, he loved meeting the Urban Explorers, likening them to Urban Guerillas! On the day of the shoot, I was so worried we would get caught by security, would have to shelve the project, deal with the police and try to reassure my tutors what I was doing helping Ray Gosling scale a 6 foot security fence!

Luckily ‘Iansradios’ had the security aspect covered, being a former patient, he knew the place inside out (look out for him him barricading the doors at the start of the film!) With the real prospect of being caught, me and my camera operator Timo carried minimal kit and had to shoot it handheld with little time to stop and give direction, we just had to go with the flow and film the situation unfolding. It could have gone horribly wrong but Ray Gosling, with decades of television and radio presenting under his belt, knew exactly how to engage with the explorers and was not afraid to perform up to the camera when he felt the urge!

The original Granada documentary that features as archive footage in the film was one of Nick Broomfields early works for television, fresh from Film school, Nick and Ray were given a free reign to film whatever they liked while they lived at Whittingham for over a month. I think the approach was brilliant and gives one of the most authentic insights into life inside an institution such as Whittingham.

I always intended to make an unbiased film about the Hospital, so I included interviews with the staff and undertook a lot of research into the background of mental healthcare. I realised it is one of those sensitive topics that cant easily be written off as good or bad. Whittingham was a close-knit self-sufficient community where people were accepted for who they were. Society in those times had very dated views on mental illness, in todays world societies attitudes have improved but there is still some stigma attached to mental illness. That is something I wanted to challenge at the start of the film, to dispel the myths and stereotypes using the archive footage from Ray’s film to show the sort of people who lived there.

I have no doubt of the sincerity of the former staff nurses in the film, they cared for the patients like they were one big family, this is evident in their anger at the patient grave stones being removed from the cemetery. Perhaps it was theft, but it is quite something when graves go missing like that with no explanation. It seems that today’s society is not much more evolved than it was when we stuffed the mentally ill in workhouses and forgot about them. If those graves had belonged to anyone else there would be national uproar! Where are the newspaper headlines on the missing graves?

My commentary in the film is very minimal, so I hope the viewers can reflect on the topics and come to their own conclusions. I agree with Ray when he says it is a time that must not be forgotten. I think today’s society is trying to brush the history of mental health care under the carpet, like many other parts of our history. Anyhow, I will let you watch the film and make up your own mind.

Voici un peu de nouveauté du côté de mes occupations dominicales, nous sommes allés dans un lieu assez connu de la Belgique, pas mal visité, mais hélas une partie n’était pas accessible ce jour là, dommage et tant pis pour moi… Mais bon j’ai quand même trouvé quelques petits recoins sympathiques malgré la destruction et l’obscurité… Je commencerai avec ces deux premières de la série pour ce bâtiment.

Lors de cette session je réfléchissais aussi à comment photographier la friche sans que ceci ne tombe dans le “vu et revu” sempiternelle phrase à laquelle j’ai droit de mon côté. Je comprends parfaitement, mais en même temps il n’est pas aisé de trouver la façon qu’il me convient de prendre en photo ce genre d’endroits, tout du moins pas tant que j’apprécierai y aller car je ne peux faire quelque chose de froid en parcourant ces lieux. Enfin même si avec le temps la façon d’appréhender les lieux change, je pense que la photographie de friches et de ruines est loin d’être une chose facile et qu’il n’est pas bon d’empêcher les gens de travailler à changer cela… Mes recherches avancent donc très lentement, mais je suis patiente même si c’est au péril d’autres choses…

Here is another shot from the sanitorium at Beelitz, near Berlin. I was after a more somber mood here, so a bit less “cartooney” if you will, and of course…darker. Some of the rooms in these buildings are pretty darn creepy! This one is best viewed large, so click on into the phot and find the largest version over on flickr.

Here I am, enjoying the silence.  I am a little belated with this entry – I took this picture nine days ago – but it makes me happy, so I shall share it with the world whoever happens to accidentally stumble across this blog and have a peek.

Up here in this spot I can forget the mundanity of my daily life, the stress and anxiety, everyone who exists.  Up here I have the peace and sunshine to myself, save for a couple of pigeons.

and now back to the regular (not scheduled) chronology of my experiences wading through water beneath the streets.

Located in one of Rosedale’s larger parks, Park Drive captured the imagination of aspiring drainers across the city when it was published in Infiltration by the late Ninjalicious. His entry, however, merely scratched the surface of this monster of a drain that travels beneath a ravine that once acted as an urban borderline and might one day have been the path of an expressway that would have scarred the city. To civil engineers, the drain is better known as the Spadina Storm Trunk Sewer that collects runoff for well over six kilometres diagonally through the city’s centre to eventually meet up with the Don River. Due to the extensive ground the drain covers, a very large pipe was necessary to accomodate the waterload.

At its outfall, Park Drive is an impressive four metre oval and mellows out to a 3700mm RCP with several waterfalls that vary in height from under two metres to over five metres. Needless to say, these elevations create a spectacle of sight and sound that simply demands your respect. To ascend these waterfalls you have to utilize a system of catwalks that, in the tallest drops, that require a five-step process, consisting of three ladders and two platforms to cross. There is, however, one part of this construction that gets overlooked by many newcomers to this frequented drain…

Above is one of only two shots taken during my first visit to Park Drive. Just after snapping this one, the three of us gathered up our stuff to climb the first water fall. The photo below, taken a couple months ago, gives you a better idea of what I experienced.

The process is: climb the first ladder, walk across the first catwalk until you’re nearly at the lip of the falls. Next you have to climb another ladder up to a higher platform, cross that and climb a ladder back down to the top of the falls where water is directed into two small pipes. What gets people all the time is the first step. In the previous photo you can see that the water level isn’t all that high up our boots. Along the right side of the pipe, there’s a chain that spans the width of the half-pipe (it’s covered in debris from many-a-storm). These chains are installed to let workers that just ahead is something potentially dangerous.

At the foot of the ladder, the floor drops at least six feet. This pit, or plunge pool, goes all the way to the base of the waterfalls. Its purpose is to cushion the surges of water that constantly spill down the drop so that the concrete doesn’t erode prematurely from the impact of water.

It’s beyond me as to why they didn’t begin the plunge pool after the ladder. So basically, what I, and many others did, I walked right into the plunge pool because water levels don’t change even if the floors are different. Luckily I was on my way up the ladder (well, not really “up” it) and I managed to grab a hold of it as I suddenly became chest-deep in cold water.

My draining colleague, terapr0 has a shot that shows this incredibly questionable construction. The plunge pool isn’t the only thing to watch out about Park Drive, but we’ll pause for some photos, all taken from my most recent trip in September.

The top of the first waterfall

3700mm pipe

Some nice calcite formations

On our most recent trip we only went to the fourth waterfall and turned around because it was late and some of us had work the next morning. The second waterfall has a surprise for some first time visitors–the catwalks have no platforms and are merely frames on which you have to walk awkwardly upon. Here’s a photo that terapr0 shot on our way out.

Downstream you can see segments of the metal flooring lying around in the pipe.

A future trip is needed to see the extremities of this monster system as I’ve only been to about a third of the length. More adventures to come!

My cousins Chris and Dave visited this weekend.  It’s a rare thing to have guests from Sudbury, so I’m very grateful.  We had a great time talking cameras and doing what we love to do.  For a practicing photographer, this means one thing: shooting more photographs without pay.  Saturday morning, David arose early like he’s programmed to do, (he’s a “Lubrication Specialist” for a mining supplier company – ha!) and decided to research some local abandoned buildings.  Dave loves exploring old buildings (a predilection formed, no doubt, by his discovery of Sudbury’s ancient Burwash prison complex.)  I have to admit that his enthusasim for exploring them with a camera is quite infectious.  He decided that we should travel to Woodstock on Saturday to shoot the remnants of the Oxford Regional Centre, an old psychiatric hospital that is currently being demolished and replaced with cloned condominiums.  *Sigh*  Such is the way of things.  Time marches on.  Heck, even Google Maps can’t keep up with the onslaught of urban development.  The satellite imagery currently available shows the old complex with two or three buildings intact.  Now, all that remains is the fragment of one building: a whisper of the past waiting to be blown away by the rush of expansion.

We spent a few hours making photographs of the final remaining building and had some fun playing with strobes amidst the chaos of the rubble.  (When I say, “we had fun” I mean I tormented Dave and Chris away from their shooting to act as models for scenes of ever-increasingly ridiculous strobist shots.)  Towards the end of the evening, though, something spectacular occurred.  A migration of what appeared to be crows was transpiring directly over the golf course due west of  our position.  The sound of it was eerie at first.  Dave and I heard it while testing out the Lumiquest Softbox III for portrait lighting.  It sounded like..well, it sounded like thousands of birds.  We didn’t quite believe it when we emerged from the west side of the hospital.  At that exact moment, a massive flock of migrating birds took flight above us, circled the area, and departed.  Here’s what it looked like:

Urban exploration has never yielded such a welcome surprise.  We lucked out that night, big time.  It’s all about timing.  I knew there was a reason I ate that Harvey’s bacon cheese onion ring burger monstrosity so quickly!

Sometimes, cousins get weird.

Sometimes the unexpected occurs, and it’s like pure inspiration.  When you’re knee-deep in strobes and trying to think of ways to improve your wedding portraits or on the move lighting technique, nature will just descend on you and give you some sweet photographs.

After the elation of our unexpected encounter, we drove back to London, ate at La Bella Vita in Byron, and decided that we should hit up one more building before the morning came.  For this, we would need to travel to Thamesford, 20km to the east of London.  Our target this time was the abandoned granary to the east of the Thames river.  We drove past it on our way back from Woodstock!  We managed to have a bit of fun at this site, even though we could not achieve lawful entry.  The two things I found most frustrating about shooting at this location were: A.  Too much ambient light for lengthy exposures involving a mix of strobe; B. Too little light for working with equipment.  Having a flashlight is a definite plus (Chris did not have one *grrr*) but having a head light would be even better.  I know I have one lying around here somewhere, and I’ll dig it up next time I do something like this.

Given the aforementioned difficulties, I decided to find something about this granary that caught my eye and focus on it.  This happened to be a small corner of the back of the building that was falling apart, and that wasn’t contaminated as badly with sodium vapour light.  I worked for a good thirty minutes before I achieved my final result using one Alien Bee B800, one 430ex II Speedlite and an oversized Maglite:

The great thing about photography is that even after shooting for two hours with few results, you can walk away from a session with one frame that makes up for the whole thing.  It’s wonderful that learning can be so much fun.

_E

While walking to the building I planned to explore late in the day, I spotted this lone hydrant with creepy tree behind it. It reminded me of the famous expressionist painting “The Scream”. It was, I thought, the perfect shot to prepare me for where I was headed: the abandoned psychiatric ward at the Beelitz-Heilstätten sanitorium! Believe it or not, I became so engrossed in my shooting inside that place that I ended up in there long after the sun went down. I was glad to have run into another photographer so we could help each other make our way out of their without falling into some dark abyss!

Here are a few more shots from my visit to Beelitz-Heilstätten, which is  home to a large hospital complex of about 60 buildings erected from around 1898.  The complex was originally designed as a sanitorium by the Berlin workers’ health insurance corporation.  From the beginning of World War I the facility served as a military hospital of the Imperial German Army.  Interestingly, during October and November 1916, Adolf Hitler recuperated at Beelitz-Heilstätten after being wounded in the leg at the Battle of the Somme. In 1945, Beelitz-Heilstätten was occupied by Soviet forces, and the complex remained a Soviet military hospital until 1995, well after the Herman reunification. In December 1990, Erich Honecker was admitted to Beelitz-Heilstätten after being forced to resign as the head of the East German government.

Much of the complex, including the surgery, the psychiatric ward, and a rifle range, was abandoned in 2000.  As of 2007, none of the abandoned hospital buildings or the surrounding area were secured, giving the area the feel of a ghost town.  I was in the psychiatric ward shooting after sundown tonight and I can tell you it was eerie.

farm, roanoke, va

My ex and I used to spend a lot of time scratching the surface of the world of urban exploration (I guess in this case rural exploration). We were both fascinated with finding burned out buildings and decaying farm houses, marveling over their states of disrepair, then working to take the most depressing photographs of their ruin. While this says a lot about what poor college students in backwoods North Carolina could get up to on a Saturday afternoon, in retrospect it speaks more about the relationship itself.

They’ve got this ethereal beauty to them, those houses bent inwards like bellies sucked-in, silver slatted roofs slanted at odd angles; those factories with windows like mosaics, yellowed and browned and sometimes translucent and grainy like sugar-glass.

At the same time they’re too much like the relationship for me to want to remember; a display of rot and abandon, nothing but a shell of something not built to last.