Another blue door at the Malden Mills.
I don’t know what I like most about this image. Maybe its the fact that the gable above the doorway is slightly askew or maybe its the very inviting and polite, “Please Come In Thank You” sign. It could be the textures of the brick and peeling blue paint.
It could be just the fact that I found this little second hand store, tucked away in a remote corner of an otherwise empty mill complex. And it had all of the above working for it..
When I shoot at the mills I am always concerned about where I leave my car. I don’t like to leave it in plain sight for a couple of reasons: I don’t really want it to end up in my frame and then have to go move it and; I am not always “authorized” to be where I am, so I don’t want to call unwanted attention to myself. I was more worried about the former yesterday.
When I arrived, I instinctively pulled in between these two trailers, at Loading Dock 13, figuring my car will be out of the line of fire. As I was pulling in I quickly realized I was driving into my first shot of the day. I parked in front of Loading Dock 15.
I went over to the Malden Mill Yard for some late afternoon shooting. The slowly setting sun created some amazing shadow patterns across the mill yard and buildings.
I figured it would also be a challenge in post process.
This image was shot from the top of a fire escape at the far end of the yard with a sign saying “No Admittance, Authorized Personnel Only”. I authorized myself to proceed.
I have a tendency to neglect my Friday image, so I’m posting it early.
As I was leaving the Stone Mill in Lawrence the other morning, I stopped to look up the spiral staircase. Between the decades old paint cracking and peeling off of the wood and the spiral pattern of the stairs, I had to grab a shot.
I was running a little late so I didn’t bother setting up my tripod. I shot a series of five bracketed exposures, hand held, to get this HDR image.
Spent some time shooting in the basement of the old Pacific Print Works in Lawrence. The Print Works is now part of the River Front Properties, an office and retail complex. While fully renovated, parts of the building retain some of the character of the the century old building.
The area I was shooting was dominated by several gigantic gate valves. These valves were used to help control the flow of water from Lawrence’s South Canal. The full gallery contains about a dozen images of the rusted hulks.
Hard times hit the Print Works in 1937. According to Time Magazine, “In Lawrence, Mass., the world’s largest factory of its kind, Pacific Print Works, shut down for ten days along with all other textile firms in the area, and out of work went some 30,000 people.
First of all, welcome to my PhotoBlog site. The structure is a work in progress, so please bear with me as I finalize things.
What you will find here are a few galleries of my landscape, cityscape mill photography, and anything else I choose to feature. Periodically I will feature a new image to the home page and write something about it.
My latest project is a photographic study of the mills and industrial revolution era technologies from Lawrence, MA. The project started a couple of years ago. In order to feed my habit I found it easy to pop into nearby Lawrence to take advantage of the city’s rich, historic urban landscape. Then earlier this year I learned that a couple of the city’s iconic smokestacks were going to be taken down, along with one period building and a portion of another. (more…)