Rural Obscura

I’ve always been intrigued by broken-down buildings on the side of the road.  In New England they are everywhere.  Little shacks.  Barns.  Garages.  Unidentifiable buildings that make you wonder what they used to be and why they were hammered together in the first place.  Mostly they’re wooden, but occasionally metal and almost always difficult to reach for any close work.  Sometimes the available light isn’t so great either and it makes the shots almost unrecognizable to someone who doesn’t know what she’s looking at.

This is one I’ve passed by probably a hundred times.  I’m told it might have been a chicken barn since before electric fans they needed a lot of natural ventilation.

Unless you’d driven by it in winter, you probably wouldn’t notice it at all during other seasons.  The leaves obscure it almost completely.  They also made it a challenge to find a decent composition, but the light was so yummy that I decided to risk parking on the curve with barely any shoulder and walk up and down while other drivers looked at me like I was crazy.

I’m pretty used to that by now though.  This cemetery is one of my mom’s favorites and she’s been asking me to photograph it in winter.  So I went out the other day to try, figuring it would be easy.  Silly me forgot about the snow.  Since this cemetery is right on the side of the road, there was a 6-foot snowbank between me and it.  So up I went.  People driving past almost crashed craning their necks to look at the lunatic with a camera on the snowbank.

It makes me laugh thinking about it because it was funny.  I couldn’t move forwards or backwards because the snow was too soft.  I could only move from side to side and even then I sank up to my thigh a couple of times.  What else can you do but laugh?

So the next time you see something that jerks your head around on the side of the road, stop and take a chance.  You might end up with a gem and a good laugh.