Small Town Decay

Image Description

This old building has had the second floor removed and the front door was also removed allowing me to shoot. This was from the second trip as I needed a day with clouds to control the light through the openings.

Type of Critique Requested

  • Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.

  • Conceptual: Feedback on the message and story conveyed by the image.

  • Emotional: Feedback on the emotional impact and artistic value of the image.

  • Technical: Feedback on the technical aspects of the image, such as exposure, color, focus and reproduction of colors and details, post-processing, and print quality.

Specific Feedback and Self-Critique

This is an image from a series of small town decay I’ve been working on.

Technical Details

This is a single image processed in Affinity.

3 Likes

Hi Garry
Man, this is really trippy! The symmetry of window placement between the first and second floors at first seemed like a mirror. Then you add in the mirrored windows in the ground. I feel like I’m in a hall of mirrors. Very cool visual effect.

This is very cool. I love the vast nature of the enclosed space without the second floor. The details of construction are so interesting and I love the various holes throughout as well as the ones the reflections make on the very bottom. It extends that space even more. I’m curious about the bars on the windows - were they to keep people out or in?

Buildings in this state say so much, but mostly about how much effort we put into things as a species that serve only temporary purposes. I’m sure the folks who commissioned and built this thought it grand and everlasting, and look at it now.

While the ceiling (roof?) is interesting, I wonder if you need it. A scroll crop eliminating it refines the image for me and makes it about the repeating patterns of the doors and windows. Just an idea to play with depending on what you plan to do with this photo. If you do, another thing you could try is to selectively darken some of the already darker areas to bring a wider tonal range into play. Eliminating the ceiling takes some of those dark tones away and so that might be needed for some balance.

Very intriguing and as an abandoment junkie, I look forward to more of your series.

Gary, this is absolutely incredible. I am so intrigued. There’s so much detail in here and it is a joy to view the larger version and just let my eye wander around. B&W is the prefect treatment too.

Did you process this completely in Affinity? From Raw to finished product? I have Affinity but don’t use it for Raw processing. Maybe I should, after seeing this.

Well done, sir and I do look forward to seeing more.

Cheers,
David

Kristen: I think the bars on the windows were to protect the supplies in the basement, the above was a retail store. When I shot this I also shot many different images (crops if you will) as there are so many other possibilities to consider.

David: I don’t use Affinity as a RAW developer, I use Nikon’s NX Studio as it seems to do nicer job on colors.

2 Likes

Trippy indeed! I like this as a twist on the decaying building genre - the reflection seems to create a spinning motion as if falling into this photo… I would agree with @Kris_Smith that a crop off the top would work well , making it symmetrical. But this works well too. Nicely seen and captured.

No Words needed here !!! Amazing !!!

My favorite find today, Garry. Outstanding and very, very cool. It would be interesting to see what the color original was, but I think monochrome was the perfect choice. There are so many textures and gradations of grey that I think it is safe to assume that color would have only been a distraction.
I really love that there are so many details to look at and that the reflections in the water kind of add an extra floor. There is also the ceiling with stuff hanging from it, seemingly ready to fall down at any moment. This is a photograph that inspire the viewer to think of what might have happened, what this place was, what it looked like when it was intact. The timelessness even though there are so many implications of time is what makes this so very interesting to me.

What about something like this?

Thanks everyone for your comments. I still prefer it with the ceiling, probably as my view point was from the second floor level. I also shot this version:

3 Likes

I prefer this image because the composition is more concise.

Thanks Igor.