When I first moved to this part of town I had just started taking photos for the Aggie. This side of the tracks seemed to be popular with other Aggie folk, especially those of us who were more artistic minded and in that bottom income bracket. Often times, in search of free entertainment, we ended up in the cemetery in the middle of the night. Not so much the tombstone area but the undeveloped part in the back. At the far end of the property was the old Chiles mansion site. Though the mansion had burnt down decades ago the old barn still stood at the edge of the cemetery. A few times some of us slipped thru the fence to sneak around the barn but it was already creepy enough being behind the cemetery on dark nights so I never had an inkling to go inside, until last week.
Even though the barn is smack dab in the middle of town It's pretty easy to forget it is there. It's only visible from a low traffic part of Eighth St and the lot is mostly overgrown. Except for a couple assignments I had for the newspaper when the property went up for sale I had forgotten about it.
I'd been wanting to try a star trails photo lately. In thinking of good foregrounds most of my ideas were old oak trees further out in the county that would require parking my car on the side of a lonely road for an hour or two. Then I remembered the collapsed barn and truck south of town I had shot over the winter that was only a 20 minute bike ride away. As the new moon approached it dawned on me that the perfect test subject was only a few blocks away. So last week I rode my bike back behind the cemetery to make sure the barn hadn't been bulldozed yet. It was still there. Either some homeless or drinking teenagers had pried open one of the doors so I took a look inside and wondered why I'd waited so long to come here for pictures.
That moonless night around 9:30 I loaded up the tripod and camera and headed out to the barn. I was surprised to see how many stars were visible here in the middle of town, I could even see the Milky Way. I put a fisheye on the camera to get as much sky as possible and started clicking away, one minute at a time. It was dark and just breezy enough to make the leaves rustle creepily behind me for the hour plus I was out there. After compiling the shots together in photoshop I'm pretty happy with the result.
After my peek inside the barn I decided I needed to come back for some daytime interior photos. The barn sits in a north-south position and the picture I envisioned was light slipping thru the barn boards at high noon, which is technically closer to 1pm this time of year. I took some test shots before the sun was in place,
Then when the sun was lined up with the boards I stirred up some dust to make the rays of light really shine.
The barn was a gem hiding right here in town. Just east of East Davis I found another little hidden jewel. A few weeks ago, while driving back from an assignment in Sacramento, we had a rare cloudy summer evening. Thinking of a good place to shoot the clouds I remembered a lonely shack, hidden by the train tracks and a cell tower, that I'd seen in the distance of a Duck Days falconry exhibit two years back. I pulled off the freeway, headed over the tracks and took a right on probably one of the least used roads in the county. I parked the car and walked down the old driveway to the shack. Some homeless had obviously called it home in the past but now it was the perfect subject for my sunset photo. I backed away to emphasize it's loneliness in no-man's land outside of town and let the sky dominate the shot.
So close to town, just a few hundred yards from the freeway, yet seen by almost no one. Kind of the same way I feel about Yolo County's scenic value when compared to the better known locales in this well photographed state of ours. Sometimes I feel blessed to call this place home.
1 comment:
love it!
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