A Colorful and Textured Past

While exploring a small central Texas town I came across this beautiful wall that just grabbed my attention. It’s a wall, just a simple wall with a bricked-up doorway. But it has weathered in such a way that it beautifully reveals its colorful and textured past. Standing in front of it, you can imagine the building’s past lives and how it looked at various times.

The red bricked-up doorway, while a significant focal point in the photo, isn’t the subject of the photo. As a result, this is one of those photos where the entire photo is the subject. It’s about it being colorful and textured with interesting details.

We can see varying layers and color in the stucco.  Complimenting this, there is beautiful texture resulting from the stucco cracking into many pieces some of which we see on the ground. Clearly, this is an on-going process of transformation. Where the stucco has sloughed off, we can see a wonderful rainbow of painted brick work. I presume some of this could have been from painted advertisements. The faded red bricked-up doorway presents a wonderfully large splash of color.

I love the little details in this image. Above the doorway is the tie rod anchor plate with a decorative star. In the bottom-left corner of the doorway we see a bit of green vegetation; a bit of life in all this decay. At the foot of the wall there is debris highlighting the continual progress of time and the decay that comes with it.

The Composition

The composition was pretty straightforward. I deliberately kept the doorway off-center with some negative space on the right. The idea being that the negative space would help lead your eye to the left and the more interesting area while avoiding a composition that was overfilled with interesting bits competing for attention. Because of this, some might argue that this resulted in an off-balanced composition. With that in mind I did look at changing the aspect ratio to one that would crop some of the area on the right. However, this would have placed the doorway closer to the center which I didn’t care for.

Further to the right (out of frame of this image) there are two individual windows that are also bricked-up but unpainted. I could have included them by moving back but that would have resulted in adding less interesting areas and possibly the sky and more of the sidewalk and street. Not including these allowed me to concentrate the focus on the colorful and textured decay in this particular area. It’s all about making choices.

Taking The Shot

The gear and settings were:

• Canon 5D Mk III, 40mm on a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM Lens, 1/80 sec at f/16, ISO 100, hand-held

I did not use a tripod as that would have required spending time setting up in the street. It wasn’t an overly busy street, but it’s a street nonetheless. Fortunately, the light was such (and the building wasn’t moving, LOL) that I could get a good shutter speed at a low ISO that didn’t require a tripod.

Post-Processing

Post-processing for this image was fairly simple and straight-forward. As a result, I edited this using Adobe Lightroom and did not need Photoshop. I started with checking the perspective to make sure the verticals and horizontals were true. I also checked for sensor and dust spots and finalized the composition.

To make the color “pop” I increased the saturation and vibrance. Likewise increasing contrast and texture also added emphasis for the colorful and textured elements of the image. Additionally, I used radial filters and adjusted highlights to prevent them from being blown out in areas where there was “white dust” from the decaying cement. To bring out detail in the anchor plate and decorative star I used an adjustment brush with luminace masking to select them and then increased the exposure a bit. Finally, I finished up by sharpening the image using the masking feature to apply sharpening along the more significant edges.

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