While we all wait for my business name and all that to become fully licensed and legal, I’m getting everything sorted to finally finish my Etsy shop. That means I need photos, lots of them. Sadly I live in a nice shady apartment; I never get good enough lighting from the sun to take good photos in my home. And while I can achieve good enough lighting for blog reports, they’re somewhat sub-par for what I want and need for my shop. So I went out looking for interesting [and Hopefully somewhat convenient] places to take product photos.
I couldn’t decide what I liked better as the backdrop for my work: clean and verdant gardens type things for a more high fantasy feel, or blasted graffitied abandoned buildings which always have such interesting shapes and colors to set things against. So for this first scouting trip I picked a mix of location types.
[Photos are on the other side of the read more cut.]
First up was just a roll around the block from my apartment. And I feel like it’s a mix between the two types of settings I had thought up. The Power lines give it a touch of an industrial feel, but there’s minimal graphiti, and the tidal marshland it’s over lends a sense of verdant liveliness.
The next place I went was more clean than the marsh but still very verdant. The tall grasses and wildflowers had a very meadow feel to them, but the unusual sculptures kept it from feeling too rural.
I didn’t get a good shot of the wildflowers, being rather taken by the strange almost sci-fi sculptures that dotted the park. On the edge of the park there was this tiny suspension bridge that for some reason really makes me thing of a final fantasy game.
Low tide near that bridge showed some mossy/sea-weedy rocks that might be good for some photos later
Next I headed over to an old convent that has since been updated to include several private schools and some retreats. The Sisters of Mercy grounds were covered with enough trees that most of it was shaded, with small pockets of direct sunlight. One of those pockets was a meditation labyrinth. Sadly a private school backed up against and seems to use part of the old mansion on the grounds making it unsuitably busy for a photoshoot.
The last place I tried to get into was an abandoned train yard and roundhouse. However it was Extremely securely locked up. padlocked fences 8 feet tall [ten in some places] with a mix of razor-wire and barbed-wire along the tops. They seriously don’t want people getting in. I did find this old warehouse being used by someone. It’s just on the accessible side of the fencing, and you can see some of the ruins beyond the barbed-wire from the warehouse’s yard. As I was alone I wasn’t quite able to get up the courage to check out the warehouse more closely, and find out if the owners might allow a photoshoot on their grounds.
