So it was pretty spontaneous, as I was driving towards my old house and spotted an obviously derelict structure. I happened to have my camera gear, and couldn't resist checking it out. Keep in mind that I've never done this kind of thing before, and my photography skills are severely lacking. It doesn't help that I don't post-process in any way except for a crop and/or resize, so be gentle.
This site was well boarded up, and being a total beginner, I chose to find a good angle and take this picture. I find that the tractor looks pretty cool.
As I continued my ride, my eye soon caught sight of a house, and investigating it proved exciting and much more fruitful.
It seems that this place suffered a fire, so I proceeded with caution. I was not wearing anything really suited for exploration, and a loose pitbull that seemed to hate my guts across the road was nerve racking.
As I went inside, I took a few pictures to see how to set up my camera with such varied and quite difficult lighting situations. My viewscreen on my Olympus always shows a brighter, cooler image than what I end up taking, so I have to eyeball the white balance, exposure, and f-stop from shot to shot. I took many photos of various angles, and here are those I consider to be good enough to post, or not completely boring. In this picture, we can see the living room and the old television, with an even smaller and television on top.
Moving on, I assume this bedroom is where the fire started. I had a difficult time figuring out how to even set my whites because of the ash and sunlight; it really did look green close to me and blue in the corner. The color is a little more contrasting, or saturated, than it was in real life, but that's the best I can do to capture it how it looked. The roof was pretty gutted, showing the charred skeleton of the house.
Going to the basement was an interesting experience as the bottom steps were pretty much missing. I went down carefully and started taking pictures, each one a little more interesting than the last.
The old couch wasn't too cool, so I moved on to the ever creepy "old insulation" room. The colors do stand out well in this image, I think I did well not to use my flash. It was difficult to get the camera to focus in low light, I'm glad I had a little flashlight on my keys to make a spot on the wall bright enough for the camera to focus. I still can't manual focus to save my life, they always come out blurry regardless of how sharp they look. It's frustrating, and I wish it focused like my old, but broken Olympus film camera. Again, I had to fiddle with the whites, going from under a chilly 3200k to hot 4800k and above, depending of the room or angle I was taking the picture from. Gave my photography a total workout, I'm used to simple bounce flash situations in a white room.
This port in the basement perplexed me, perhaps the window or door covering it up was missing. I noticed the spider after I was gone, I want to go back to take a picture of it from closer up.
As I was going back upstairs, I noticed a washroom. It's a little funny how a simple water closet could yield what probably is my personal favorite picture out of this trip.
From there, I went on my merry and upon the return trip, got to stop along this old garage. I wanted to get inside, but it was locked up. I feel like a failure for not being more intrepid, and finding or forcing my way in.
I want to return there a bit better prepared, and explore the inside of this distorted, buckling garage.
This pretty much concludes my first Urban Exploration. I hope that I didn't make a fool of myself somehow as noobs may do, and that you enjoyed this post at least a little.
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