Photo Walk with Tom

Post date: Jun 7, 2014 9:47:51 PM

On June 7th, I had the pleasure of doing a little photo walk with Tom Dwyer (http://www.tomdwyerphoto.com/) and one of our students, Matthew (https://www.flickr.com/photos/muyaoz). It was a gorgeous early summer day and we intended on doing the Creekwalk in Syracuse, but was detoured by a charity 5K using the pathway. Instead, we hunted for some urban decay and while we didn't quite get to the level of A.D. Wheeler (http://adwheelerphotography.com/), we found a couple of neat buildings to practice on. Clicking each photo below will give you the full sized version. Enjoy!

We started in Franklin Square Park, so of course you have to get a shot of the iconic water tower. Due to our late morning start, the sun was already high in the sky which drove us to use HDR for processing most of our photos.

Directly across from the water tour is the original entrance to the O.M Edwards building, dating back to the early 1920's. In its prime, the factory made railway cars eventually closing in the 1970's. I processed this HDR with a distinctly painterly feel hoping to elicit a feel of 1940's advertising.

Next, we walked up and shot the old Allied Van Lines storage building on Spencer Street. Before the windows were all boarded over, you could catch glimpses inside of the old storage rooms - I wonder if anything was still left or all looted away years ago...

Finally we made our way around the old baby furniture warehouse/retail location on the corner of Spencer and Solar Streets. This is a shot of a very overgrown loading dock.

What's important in photography is to look around - every direction including up and down. The best find of the day for me was a collection of snail shells in part of the old back parking lot.

More important, however, is to keep trying different angles to find that "wow" shot. For this one, I put camera straight on the ground.