All About Photography - Playing With Black And White @ Lake Valley Ghost Town

 There are 'ghost town' and there are 'ghost towns'. Lake Valley is truly a 'ghost town'. There is no current human inhabitants there. It is nothing but a bunch of ruins in the stark desert landscape of Southern New Mexico. 

The stories of all these ghost towns is the same. They only differ in the particulars. Precious metal ore is discovered. Huge rush of people follows. Organization into a town follows. Brief period of boom prosperity. The mine stops producing. The town starts to deteriorate. Ghost town status eventually follows. Fill in the blank for the specific name of the town.

So this post is not about the history of this particular ghost town. It is about photography. Specifically, my using the lessons I learned in Penang in January on the use of shadows and contrast. I focused mostly on black and white. I evolved over the day. I started to take each shot three ways - black and white regular exposure, black and white underexposed, color under exposed. In the majority of cases, I chose one of the three options I thought came out best. But at the end there is a study of a space where I show all three variations.