Abandoned School

Another great outing!

Our camera club arranged for a shoot in an old, abandoned school in Shenandoah, PA.

The J.W. Cooper School was built in the late 1800's and went through a few iterations up until it was abandoned in 1992.  It was a high school for a while and a grade school for a while.

In one of the rooms, there were cards for the students.  On the front side of the cards were the students' grades and on the back side of the cards were rudimentary health information.

In this day and age of the ubiquitous computer, it was nostalgic to think back to the time when information was kept on paper in one place.  That piece of cardstock for a given student sat in the file in the school for the entire time that the student attended that school.  Each quarter of the school term, someone had to go the card file, pull the card and enter the student's grade for each of the classes.  Think how different that is from today, where all student information is kept on a network, where each teacher can access the network at their convenience from a location of their chosing.

There are so many opportunities for pictures when you have the run of the building.  And yet I was stymied.  I got stuck taking pictures of the stairs.  I guess I just liked the patterns of the stairs.

One fortunate thing for me was that I had Annette's 10-22mm lens that I had bought for her for her birthday in July.  It gave me a new way to look at things.  So I used it to give my creativity a boost.  You can see how I used it in the two stairs pictures and the auditorium picture below.

Stairs in the Abandoned JW Cooper School

Wide Angle View of More Stairs in the JW Cooper School

 You could never get this much of the stairs and the doorways into the frame without a wide angle lens.

The Auditorium in the Abandoned JW Cooper School

 The wide angle lens was essential for this shot.  One of the other photographers on this trip tried to take this shot with a 24mm lens and found that she could not get as much into the frame.

Light Detail

Today when you buy a light with a milky, white shade or globe, the shade or globe is made out of plastic.  It is almost indestructible.  They want to make it safe for you to tip over the lamp!

However, when we examined a couple broken shades that were lying on the floor, we found that these white shades at the school were made of heavy, white glass.

My theory is this:  Back in the day when the school was built, people had very few possessions.  They wanted to make each item that they owned last for as long as possible.  Therefore, people were more concerned with quality and durability than in how cheaply they could purchase items.  They were willing to pay more if they thought it would last longer.

Today, we all have so many possessions, many of which are designed to be disposable.  We value our things less, which also means that many people value other people's things less.  Are we headed in the right direction?

Panning and Lighting

A couple of weeks ago, my son had the opportunity to participate in Karts Against Cancer at Summit Point.  His employer wanted to race the karts and so he invited his staff to participate.

For Annette and me, this was a great opportunity to get the cameras out and try something a little different than we were used to; panning.  We had done panning before with bicyclists in some triathlons, but it had been quite a while.  In fact it was such a long while that I forgot some of the techniques that could have helped me with panning.

One of the techniques that I remembered on the way home is to:  place one of the focus points on an edge of the subject and then strive to keep it there as the subject zooms past.

Another technical point that I remembered later was to:  choose a place where the subject will stay the same distance away from the camera during the pan.  That's hard to do.

The race started with lots of sunlight.  It was easy to get a good exposure.  But, as the race went on, the sun went down and it became more and more difficult to find enough light to get a fast enough exposure.  In fact, once the sun was gone, I had the ISO cranked up as far as it would go and the aperture wide open, yet I was still getting shutter speeds that were too long.

For panning to work, you must keep the shutter open long enough for the background to blur, but not so long that you can't keep the main subject in the same position on the sensor for the entire exposure.

In the first picture below, you can see some carts in the left background.  These carts were on the back of the track headed in the direction opposite of the main subject.  Since I am panning right and they are going left, the shutter does not have to be open very long for the carts to get blurry.

During the two hours of this race, I shot about 200 pictures and only 20 of them were usable.  That is a 10% rate.  Not too good.

Let's take a look at a couple picture.

Red Helmet at Karts Against Cancer
Look how far the racers in the far background have moved during the time that the shutter was open.

Black Helmet at Karts Against Cancer
The racer is relatively sharp, yet the orange cone is stretched out.

In the Corner, Under the Lights.
I was losing the daylight and was looking for well-lit portions of the track,
when I found this corner, where the carts made a pass directly under the arc light.
I decided not to pan at this corner, but rather I set the camera on the barrier wall as a makeshift tripod.
The first two racers were coming straight at the camera and did not move much relative to the camera.
The third racer had a lot of right to left movement during the time the shutter was open.