Last week while visiting family, I was bored and decided to just grab a camera and tripod and spend some time by myself. Like many photographers, I love to lurk around sites that have been neglected and abandoned. They usually make for fun and interesting photo ops and an opportunity to create art from something cast away. The exploration part of it may be a carry over from my childhood when there wasn’t an old abandoned house or barn that didn’t deserve exploring. There was also less chance of being hassled for your endeavors. Either way, I don’t get the chance to do that often so this was a good time. And it was an easy access.
Near where we were staying there is a tennis and swim club that use to be consistently filled with old and young and their laughter during the warmer months. I had played tennis there once or twice long ago and hadn’t been on the grounds since. Over the years it had fallen on hard times and eventually closed down. Today its run down and a little eerie, and that day was no exception as the weather provided dark clouds to add to the atmosphere of the place. For me it was perfect. It provided solitude and a subject out of the ordinary scope of my work. I worked on the images and liked them both in color and also in the starkness afforded by black and white. I have included both in the post.
The laughter is long gone and the grounds have a sad appearance now, but the colors and textures coaxed from the images provide a little life to the solitude. For me it was a meditative moment.
