03.03
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth. -Henry Miller
Most of the photos from last weekend’s trip to the Chalmers building in Amsterdam are up. There might be a few more that I’ll try to recover but that won’t happen right away. This place was huge but after a few floors there wasn’t much to see since it was pretty empty. The bar next door was much more interesting, but small.
The South Park Pub
The real story here is that Amsterdam is full of empty factories and warehouses, like they’ve been putting up abandoned buildings on purpose. This is a good theme park idea, actually. Like Schenectady and Troy, Amsterdam was a thriving manufacturing town at the turn of and during the first half of the 20th century. Now, like a lot of upstate New York towns, all that’s left is pollution in the river it sprung up around.
This was an opportunity to use the Quantaray 19-35mm more, I never even switched lenses. Its faults are showing, especially purple fringing and softness in the corners (and, as you’ll see blow, weird flaring), but it has good contrast and color saturation, and a lot more character than Canon’s 18-55mm kit lenses. The severe distortion, almost a fisheye effect, at the wide end is interesting.
Looking forward to checking out a few other places there; a few proposals have been put forward to rehab the area, so there is a remote chance these buildings will be razed. In the meantime, check out the slideshow and sets from sebastien.b, no3rdw, brit1313, and nerradk.
Related Posts
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- Abandoned Leather Factory Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
- Wellington Hotel Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
The top one is great. Probably stating the obvious here, but it looks very cloud-like. Those kinds of textures are really interesting in these photos, because normally it’s the concrete/peeling paint thing. The metal (bottles, cash register, refrigerator) and the other interesting elements (plants, insulation) are very cool.
Thanks! Yeah there’s been a lot of discussion about that first one, and clouds came up. And yes peeling paint is kind of the de facto urbex subject, there was actually not so much of that here which was nice, plenty of other textures to shoot. Glad you enjoy it.
Geez that bartender had no sense of work ethic. He or she left a mess. No wonder they went out of business.
Excellent captures, B. Being an admirer of phantasmagoric light, I am a tad biased when I say: the different subjects captured along varying planes of light–some veiled by shadow, while others in pinpoint–work excellently to impart that gentle, near-forgotten drama of decay, quietly corroding and yielding to oxidation and gravity. That +1 contrast, +1 saturation bump worked wonders, as did that nice 19mm. Great stuff.
L, for real, they even left some product behind, you should have seen the decade-old 12 pack of Saranac I found. And for some reason I was sick the next day.
Tim, thanks! I had a lot of fun on this one, used a tripod for all of these shots (obvious when you see that some exposures are 10+ seconds — my software has been messing with the EXIF, look for “target exposure time”), and that really let me open the camera up and take shots I would have been able to get handheld. Lots of detail in some of those that I was really surprised to see in the final product.
I’m actually shooting in RAW so those parameter adjustments (which I thought I reset) are not being applied; for most of these, I ended up dropping the exposure of the RAW file, then opening in editing software and doing a very slight contrast boost and unsharp mask. Aside from the exposure adjustment, none of these really needed much editing.
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