Lush Abandonment | Rural NC
It has been a while, but I finally made my way to a new location for my Abandoned NC series (see the rest of the series in my portfolio, or on Facebook). I drove past this old house on a back road between Trenton and Kinston, North Carolina. The house is set back about 250 feet off the intersection of the main road and a dirt road. The lush growth around it made me almost overlook it, but seeing the shape of the greenery, I knew there was an awesome old building in there. I turned around and returned to shoot a few frames.
It’s always fun to speculate about these abandoned homes and who lived there. I would suspect that it was in that spot before the main road came through, and quite possibly before the dirt road too. Usually, you see these old farm houses standing in the middle of the fields that they used to tend. With fields on both sides of the road and a new growth forest to the right, it would seem that it once stood right there, in the middle of its’ fields. As society “advanced” and the road came through, the family decided to move on.
The shot: Nikon D90, Nikkor 18-105 VR lens. 2 exposures, manually blended. f/14, ISO-250, 1/125 sec. (foreground exposure) & 1/500 sec. (sky exposure).
Weathering Storms | near Stonewall, NC
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This is the latest installment of my on-going ‘Abandoned NC’ project in which I am documenting rural abandonment primarily in Eastern NC. I came across this old boathouse near Stonewall, North Carolina. It’s hard to say how many storms this old structure has weathered over the years. I had seen it before but never had a chance to stop by and shoot it. I set out with the plan to add it to my project, but on the way it donned on me that it may not even be there anymore being that it is located in an area that was heavily impacted by Hurricane Irene in the summer. But, as I turned the corner, there she was. Standing there the same as always. It is amazing to me that things can sometimes be discarded as ‘useless’ or ‘junk’ but survive long beyond anyone’s expectations. That’s the essence of what I’m hoping to capture in this series; before these structures actually do succumb to Mother Nature, as they are certain to do someday.
Check out the series so far at: http://uprootedphotographer.500px.com/abandonednc/
The shot: Nikon D90, 18-105 VR lens. f/16, ISO 200. 3 exposures, merged in Nik HDR Efex Pro and finished in Photoshop CS4.
