The Artful Engineer

Madison, Alabama, has a cute little historic downtown. It’s not large—only a block or two long—and although it looks fresh and well-manicured, if you stray even a short distance beyond that immediate area there are a lot of structures that have been abandoned or neglected. It’s entirely predictable where I ended up.

The building above is what remains of a very small auto mechanic shop, with just a single roll-up door for a single service stall. I’m sure that when it was built, probably in the 1950s, it was bright and festive. Most of the red paint has held up well, but the white paint clearly hasn’t. On these sorts of compositions, I like to frame the image with things that help constrain the viewer’s eye. In this case, they are the red trim across the top, the bundle of pipes on the right, the strip of ground on the bottom, and, well, nothing at all on the left. Often that can be a problem, but here I get away with it because the window on the right has more contrast than the one on the left thanks to the combination of bright glare on the upper panes and the black void of the missing lower ones; that combination of glare and blackness is what gives this image life. It is also, I believe, what forced me at the time to stand where I was, in front of the left window and not in front of the gap between them. You can probably tell that that is where I was standing, which is a little unfortunate. (The visual clue, which you may only notice subconsciously, is that you can see the inside edge of the right side sill of the right side window, but you can’t really see the inside edge of any of the other vertical sills.) Unfortunate, but shifting my position to the right, I am nearly certain, would have shifted the glare off the window and ruined everything.

Alabama is nothing if not damp, so if you neglect the paint on a wooden structure, rotting wood is probably inevitable; this next building is a case in point. While there are plenty of interesting details all over the image, the clapboard siding accentuates the perspective, converging on the area between the two windows and drawing your eye there. The rooflines and the vertical dog-legged pipe make strong polygonal shapes; the fact that the pipe avoids blocking any of the white trim is important to the overall composition. The verticals across the scene contrast with the strong converging horizontals, too, and also help keep the eye in the frame.

This next study in corrugated siding doesn’t benefit from any features, other than the ground, to frame the subject and constrain the eye. But the dark, high-contrast features are all grouped on the bottom half and relatively centrally; consequently, the center of interest is safely separated from the unconstrained edges. Because of the vertical grain of the corrugation, the biggest risk here is the top of the frame, but there is enough negative space on the top to mitigate that. This image feels well-balanced to me, left-to-right, despite the size disparity between the large door on the left and the stacked bricks on the right, because the latter are such a strong shape. They have a touch of color, too, but it’s not a bold color, so I think the shape is the key thing.

This next image is another example of using glare to my advantage. This is one way to exploit a bright overcast sky: the overall image is softly lit and consequently has relatively low contrast, so anywhere with glare stands out. If you scroll up and down with your browser, you can see what this image looks like cropped square (by eliminating the bottom). I’m not sure which crop I like better, but as I write this I am going to jump back into Lightroom and make that version as an alternative so I can mull it over. (Actually, the winner might well be the square version…feel free to tell me your thoughts in the comments.)

I liked the simple shapes, color palette, and variety of textures in this next image:

Finally, this unusual loading dock naturally stands out, with its warm-toned and relatively bright top surface contrasting with the cool-toned dinginess that is everything else in the frame. Again, there are strong shapes here and pronounced perspective. The triangle of the loading dock is about the same size as the triangle of murky darkness in the upper left corner. Nothing pretty about this scene, to be sure, but it is surprisingly nice to look at.

I hope that you have enjoyed this week’s installment of images. This wraps up three weeks featuring the first state in alphabetical order. The next three, fittingly, will feature the last state in alphabetical order—Wyoming.