It's your berfday!

How am I celebrating my birthday this year? By taking a road trip to the US with Matt and a couple of friends to do more urban exploration. ;)

We left Toronto on Thursday evening after having a quick dinner near our place. This way, we would have reliable access to good food and kill some time. Leaving during rush hour would have been a bad idea. After dinner, we packed up the rental car and headed out. The border crossing was short and virtually hassle free. We arrived at our hotel shortly before midnight. After settling in, we decided we would try to leave by 7am the next morning.

After a mostly leisurely breakfast, we headed to our first urbex location. It was located beside a correctional facility. When we arrived, we immediately noticed the very new looking fence around the property. We did a walk around the building and did not discover any easy access through the fence. We decided it would be too much hassle to attempt entering the property and headed to our next location.

Our second urbex location was not any better. We arrived at the parking lot outside the building and it was practically full. This was a bad sign. We slowly circled the building in the car. It did not look abandoned and a small construction trailer was also present. Well. We suddenly had a lot of time on our hands. We hit the road once more and stopped at a coffee shop to review our plan for the rest of the day. Once we finished our beverages, we headed out.

Our next stop was successful. We explored an abandoned public bath house building and an abandoned hotel that were a few blocks apart. The bath house had many small rooms for spa treatments. Many of the rooms still contained massage tables and chairs. The hotel was a u-shaped building that had 5 floors. All the rooms were still intact with almost complete furnishings: beds, chairs, dressers, old television sets, lamps, and telephones. The beds were mostly bare but some bedding remained. Some of the mattresses looked almost brand new. Many of the rooms had very colourful wallpapers and equally colourful carpeting. One of the rooms contained wall to wall television sets, all of them stacked neatly in rows on top of each other. Someone went through a lot of time and effort to arrange them this way for their own amusement. There were obvious signs that people lived in the hotel rooms after it was abandoned.

When we were done, we continued our trek to two more destinations. They too, were inacessible. With a success rate of 30%, we headed to our next hotel. Since we had finished up earlier than anticipated, we had time to do a bit of research on where to go for dinner and book our next hotel. We settled on a local Belgian restaurant called the Merry Monk for dinner that had favourable reviews. On our way to the restaurant, we passed a gentleman sitting on a park bench with a grocery cart full of belongings and ... a laptop. He was chatting with someone using a webcam. Wow. When we finished dinner, we passed him again. He was still chatting.

When we returned to our hotel, the lobby was bustling with activity. An auction had just finshed up and people were leaving with their purchases. Very strange.

It had been an interesting and eventful day. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.

No More Secrets

Former Glory

This European castle, built in the mid to late 19th century, has been left to decay for the last 20+ years.  Despite the great decay that has taken place here, walking through it one can see reminders of this castle's former glory: a grand staircase, vaulted ceilings, towers, etc.  Even now, the beauty of this place still manages to capture the imaginations and curiousities of urban explorers.

Exploring Europe: A Sneak Peek

While for the most part I'm going to wait to really go through my photos until after I'm home, here's a little sneak preview.  This is the inside of a cooling tower at an abandoned power plant.

Density

Downtown Toronto has been in a residential construction boom for quite a number of years.  As a long time Toronto resident, I've been a witness to the continuously increasing density.  The Toronto skyline has changed a great deal over the last decade and despite suggestions that a construction down turn is coming, there are yet to be any signs of it.

If only our city council was stronger in its urban planning efforts to ensure that the density growth was managed in a efficient and thoughtful way, we could take this opportunity to create new communities and enhance existing ones.

UrbEx Multiplicity

Inspired by a friend's (Alexander Hosking) multiplicity shots, I was inspired to try my hand at it, and along the way, give myself a little bit of a post-processing workout.  This was shot inside an inner courtyard at an abandoned Detroit school.

Diversity

One of the things I love about Toronto is just how diverse the city is, even its downtown core.  We have a mix of buildings zoned for residential, retail, as well as commercial use.  I think that variety makes the city quite lively and allows Toronto to not suffer the urban desert that occurs in so many other large cities after 5pm.

Sometimes things take a while...

Those who know me personally are aware that my photography of abandonements has very little to do with documenting the places I visit.  While I definitely have an interest in the history of the sites, I try to recreate the feeling I had when I was at a particular abandonement.  Sometimes, doing so takes some time and you've got to let the image and your treatment of it perculate.

I took this image in one of Buffalo's grain elevators a few months ago.  While I liked this image from the moment I shot it, I was never 100% happy with the mood evoked by it.  Every now and then I would go back to the image and work on it some more.  It wasn't until recently that I finally got to a final product that I think captures the mood I felt when I'd taken the image in the first place.

Commercialization of Urban Exploration

It's not uncommon for me to run into other people while exploring.  Sometimes they are other explorers, sometimes scrappers, other times maybe the odd homeless person or two.  This particular instance at a church in Detroit was very different.

While exploring this church for the first time with a few friends, we heard the sounds of other people entering the site.  Imagine our surprise when we saw they were carrying cases upon cases of lighting gear.  It turns out, they were going to be doing a commercial advertising photoshoot.

I had mixed feelings about this.  It's certainly cool to see abandonements used for advertising, after all, their aesthetic is what draws so many of us to explore them.  What bothered me about this though was how this group was going about their business.  Large moving truck parked outside, front door ripped wide open.  Not much to be said about being discreet or respecting the location.  I fully expect the location to get re-sealed in pretty short order, making it inaccessible to other explorers.

Packard ... in Slow Motion

I have shot parts of the abandoned Packard plant in Detroit on several occasions. I say 'parts of...' because the site is so huge I'm not sure it's possible for anyone to really say they've shot the entire thing. On my last trip there, I decided to do a little bit of experimenting and shot with some of my Neutral Density filters. I've used Neutral Density filters in the more traditional scenarios before (moving water, etc) but this was the first time I've used them in bright bright daylight.

While I'm not overjoyed with the results, the experimenting was a lot of fun. Even though I shoot purely for myself, there's always a bit of pressure I feel that I want to walk away from the locations I visit with at least a few images I like. None of that pressure I put on myself was present when I was messing around with these long exposures. It was liberating.

Moral of the story? Go out, experiment. Make time to do it. Seriously.