The Artful Engineer

Late last year we visited my daughter and her husband twice in Casper, Wyoming, once at Thanksgiving and once just after Christmas. On the first trip, I heard about the Goose Egg Inn, which was about a 15-minute drive out of town. There are still lots of favorable reviews of the former bed & breakfast visible online, but it’s been closed for a while at this point. The adjacent detached garage had this wonderfully colorful door. Normally I prefer my images a little tidier than this, but the encroaching tree in the upper right and the foreground weeds add to the being-reclaimed-by-nature feel. The sagging door almost makes it look like there is a lens barrel distortion that needs to be corrected, but there isn’t.

This next image also works well as a square with the bottom cropped off, but only a few things say “abandoned” as well as lots of weeds growing up through parking lot pavement, so I kept the whole frame here, which also retains the zigzag shape of the weeds. It’s a great sign, too, that stands out due to its color and shape—being the only round object in the image—not to mention the goose silhouette above it. I like the soft light here, which adds a certain drabness that seems appropriate, but if I have the chance to return in midsummer the sunrise would be right behind me from this perspective and would light up the sign; that would result in a more lively image of a decidedly unlively place, but it would undoubtedly look nice.

I passed this next old motel in town and made a mental note to return later. I made four or five other good images of this complex, but I liked the creepy open door of room #45. (This was about as close as I got—no telling who or what was inside!)

This next building was another I passed along the road and subsequently returned to. I’m fond of the old pallet, with its horizontal boards that contrast with the vertical siding. (The little twig hanging on it is a nice touch, too.) But the striking detail that anchors this image is the window-framed-in-a-window near the center and the resulting bold black square.

Moving on from abandoned places, the remaining three images were all made within a ten-minute span on a short walk from our daughter’s home. This trailer itself is mundane, as is the fence, but the light is glorious. The reflection off the frame of the trailer is key to helping the trailer stand out; it also gives something to attract the eye that is on the right side of the frame; otherwise the image would be very left-heavy. The trailer’s siding and wheels also echo the color of the fence, which helps balance it, too, if more subtly. The corner of the fence, against the background mountains, is the visual center of this image, in my mind, and it is supported by the trailer’s shadow on the left and the aforementioned reflection on the right. Overall, I am very pleased with the composition. The snow on the mountains is fortuitous, too, because it keeps the mountain range from being a featureless dark mass.

This next image is definitely an artsy composition. The low sun was reflecting off of windows out of frame to the left, and they made these curious patterns. This particular composition wouldn’t have worked without placing the two clouds in the bottom left; perhaps I could have come up with something else involving just the three reflections, but this seems a lot more interesting.

This next image makes good use of transmission towers and power lines in a landscape, things that generally, as a photographer, you wish were somewhere else. I was pretty much forced to use them, because there were too many to avoid. The great light of the previous two images was still present, making the clouds a great backdrop. Usually power lines in a wide landscape image will run horizontally across the image, like the ones in the background, but since I am underneath these they run vertically out of the frame. The foreground tower explains their presence, so I don’t think they are overly distracting here. In fact, they lead to the brightest and most interesting patch of cloud in the scene. The foreground tower is interesting—and fortunately hasn’t been painted in a while—but tends to sit in my peripheral vision as I look at the lower-right quadrant of the image.

As always, I appreciate your visit and hope you enjoyed these images. Next week I will feature some from near our home in Colorado.