Vacant Industrial Complex

 

Waterbury, Connecticut

ABN

 Waterbury, Connecticut

Tires

 

Waterbury, Connecticut

City Tree

 

Waterbury, Connecticut 

A recently demolished factory complex on Railroad Street. It had been derelict for decades.

Gatehouse

Waterbury, Connecticut  

Overgrown

Waterbury, Connecticut

The imported wildfire smoke is gone, but it's mid-summer in southern New England and even at 1:00 PM on a fairly clear day the sky is a pale, not deep, blue. This is a corner of a factory complex in the Waterville section of the city that has been vacant or abandoned for as long as I can recall, and I've been making photographs around Waterbury since 1975.

Corona Extra

 Waterbury, Connecticut

You can click on any picture on the blog to get a much bigger, more detailed view.

Factory

 

Waterbury, Connecticut, Platts Mills district

At the Salton Sea

 Corvina Beach, California, 6/6/12

Thought a couple hot weather shots from the desert might fit well now.

MoneyGram

Waterbury, Connecticut

Bender

Torrington, Connecticut

The faded billboard is for a bath supply store. The window is to a vacant storefront last working as a sandwich shop.

Back Lot

Shelton, Connecticut

Shop Windows

Shelton, Connecticut

Corona virus themed front window of an Irish pub.

Gun Shop.

Closed cafe.

Weeds, Brick Wall, Composite Board

Batesburg, South Carolina, 2012

224 PEARL ST

Torrington, Connecticut

E

Torrington, Connecticut

Early (for me) Digital Capture

Burlington, West Virginia

We all need to find things to do during this period of restricted activity and travel. This past week I decided to revisit the first personal work I did using color digital capture. It was 2004-2006 and I was really excited about what I was seeing on screen and from my first photo quality digital printer. I decided to make a set of intimate (almost exactly the size of classic whole plate) prints that are what you get from native Olympus E1 files at 300 ppi. I liked the results and decided to put up a web gallery on my site, with this introductory note on the Web Galleries page:

In 2004 I acquired my first digital SLR camera, for a large assignment that the publisher required be shot digitally. I quickly found that I loved many aspects of working this way. I’d always worked in color as well as black and white for both personal projects and assignments, but was never really happy with darkroom color prints. Over the next couple of years I made a lot of pictures with this Olympus E1 outfit on shooting trips that centered on my Drive-in Theater and White Churches large format b&w projects. Recently I decided to revisit the archive of this work and select thirty or so pictures for printing. Hardware (the printer) materials (baryta style photo paper) and software (the current version of Adobe Camera Raw) have vastly improved since 2005, so I found I could make  better prints than 15 years ago. Since the E1 files are so small, they still look best as modest size prints, around 6.5x8.5 inches. Next I assembled this web gallery to make the work available here on my site.

The "early" needs a couple qualifiers. The projects on my site go back to 1969, so pictures made mostly in 2005 aren't exactly early in that context. Also, digital capture in 2005 isn't necessarily "early" for anyone but me. I'm really pleased with this new edit, in two ways. First, I'm very fond of a lot of these pictures because they exploded in a burst of enthusiasm for a new aspect of my medium, offering all sorts of new possibilities.

Second, to go techy-doo for a moment, I have to hand it to Adobe. Back fifteen years ago, I ended up shooting RAW+JPEG because while the advantages of raw capture are obvious, many of the personal project pictures had higher resolution and better color in the Olympus jpg files than in the ACR interpretation. I was fascinated to find that this is no longer true. I had to update ACR's understanding of the raw files to it's current state. Each time, the file improved enormously. I found the jpg files and made comparisons. Current ACR digs out more resolution than the original jpg files that had more than ACR could find back then, and the color in the ACR interpretation has all the "magic" that Olympus fanboys rave about (with good reason).

If you'd like to look, the direct link is: http://www.carlweese.com/earlyE1color/index.html

Weeds, Storm Clouds, and Vacant Building

Torrington, Connecticut

This is part of the building complex that housed the local/regional newspaper, "The Register Citizen." Torrington is the largest municipality in the northwest corner of Connecticut, about forty minutes north of my location. This extensive set of brick buildings appears to have been around long enough, and been big enough, to have been a full service complex with not just editorial offices but an actual printing plant right there on site. That's something that began to disappear in the mid-twentieth century. A bit of preliminary research turns up that the property is now owned by a non-profit which has not yet begun to repurpose the buildings and facilities. I've wandered past these buildings for years, made a few pictures including some that wound up here on the blog, but this shot makes me want to look into the history of the site. If I can turn up contacts with the current owners I might be able to find out if there are picture possibilities inside.

Summer Weeds

Ansonia, Connecticut

Vacant Storefront

Liberty, New York (November, 2011)