In a (New) World of My Own

This is a true-to-life representation of my own vision: One eye goes up and one eye goes down.

Can I say ‘win!’? Yeah, I can. I’m ordinarily humble about my photographs. I see them in terms of their flaws; softness, blown highlights, uneven horizon, blur and underexposure are what leap out of me when I review them. Recently I have been working on the ‘exposure’ part of matters by trying to nail down correct exposures in difficult situations, such as catching the sunset through a grove of trees.

In this instance I’m happy to say that I believe I’ve nailed it.

(dot dot dot)

These aren’t part of my 365 days of photos, but are instead a bunch of related photos I want to toss out: Dark and foggy. Lovely.

Day #1: Foggy dawn at the People’s Park, Headford Road, Galway Ciry. Taken on December 24, 2009.

Two months of waiting for the perfect foggy weather paid off on December 24 when I captured these shots of an amazingly cold Galway morning on the Headford Road. In processing the images, I amm torn between two different styles: A harder and colder interpretation or a warmer and far softer view of the foggy forest.

These are the final images (for now) of the derelict service station on Galway City’s Headford Road. You can view the first three parts at the links below:

Bury their paws in the stone
They’re tearing up holes in the house
To wait till those wolves make nice

I’m keeping them coming, one by one…

The derelict Esso service station on Galway’s Headford Road.

This, for me, became a surprisingly powerful photo. In the midst of Galway there is a building which serves many people in many roles: It is a repository for contemporary artifacts, a dormitory, an art installation, shelter, a meeting ground, a dumping ground, an eyesore, a magnetic attraction, and enthralling and repulsive. And it’s just an abandoned service station at the end of my road.

As I sat on the broken glass bottles in the forecourt and stared at the graffiti’d walls, the idea grew on me that this was the sum result of all of our striving, relationships, human ingenuity, schemings and going-ons: Abandonment and ruin, until somebody comes along with a new idea and paves over this inadvertent monument to us all.