The Forgotten House [Canon 5D]
Hope, Maine
September 29, 2007
(click in the image for a larger version)
I drove past this abandoned house in Maine a few weeks ago and was compelled to stop and explore a bit. There is something incredibly wistful and melancholy about an abandoned house. Perhaps because the image of a house is so symbolic of the concept of home, which is arguably of the the most powerful themes that we carry with us through our lives. Adding to the sad irony of the overgrown, abandoned house is the fact that the little town where it is located is called Hope. More from this location in the days ahead.
This is an HDR (high dynamic range) composite of four exposures.It was late in the day and the light was fading away and HDR was the only way to capture the shadowy details in the vines as well as hold detail in the sky. I generally favor a more realistic approach to HDR over the hyper illuminated and intensely saturated illustrative approach that is often associated with the HDR technique.
Note: This is one of those high frequency detail images that does not survive the translation to web size that well. The larger version is better, but the fine, intricate details of the full-size image don't come through very well in this venue.
Hi Sean--Love the picture. I love photographing old places like this. Have a good friend who has had trouble getting HDR to work in CS2. He can't get the images to align properly. Has CS3 improved this any? I remember from our workshop that Adobe improved Photomerge in CS3 100% over CS2. Just wondering if they had done anything to help you align photos for HDR also.
All the best,
Darrell Shurtz
Posted by: Darrell Shurtz | 13 October 2007 at 08:51 PM