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. 

New Mexico Ghost Towns + - The Very Large Array

 After Kelly and Magdalena, we headed further into the vast, mostly empty, interior of New Mexico for the 'plus' to our Ghost Town themed trip. Our quarry, he Very Large Array. 

What you say is the "Very Large Array"? It is one of the premier radio telescopes on Earth. For more detailed information here is a link to Wikipedia's page on it. Wife and de-I have a number in our circle of blog readers who are quite the science geeks. So us getting out there in-person definitely ups our cred among that community.

It is really amazing just how vast this operation is to be working as one single unit. This will give you and idea.

 And, of course, there was a very large array of photographs required to capture our experience. During this shoot I started to play around a bit more purposefully with shooting the same image in color, as well as in black and white to see the difference.

And can you believe it? The New Mexico edition of...

SIGNS OF THE WORLD

Geeky place...Geeky signs

 In New Mexico, we have no 'whimp' Rattlesnakes

 

NM GHOST TOWNS + - KELLY & MAGDALENA

 New Mexico has ghost towns, lot of them. The vast majority were associated with booms that resulted in the discovery of precious resources like gold and silver. When a discovery was made, there would be a surge of people coming in to work the deposits and to provide services to those working the deposits. But most of the deposits found in this part of the world were worked out fairly quickly. Then the towns would gradually begin to diminish, and in many cases, die out all together. Ghost towns offer very interesting opportunities for photography. 

On top of this, after the workshop done in Penang, and the focus on using dark spaces and shadows, I was all hot to try shooting black and white. I did have to figure out what setting to use to get black and white pictures. A brief search on YouTube found the answer. 

Our first stop were two towns very close to each other Kelly and Magdalena

First Stop Kelly

Kelly (according to the New Mexico Tru tourisim site) is noted for its rather substantial mining equipment remains. Sadly that part was closed off, only leaving us the town which had had most of its buildings hauled off when they officially closed down the town. However, two intrepid people went back a decade a go and took up residence there.

There was a church, which still is being used.

And some ruins associated with the mines

And the New Mexico species of Espouses Fotograficus 

It was very dusty and I thought this pattern on our car was particularly interesting.

Magdalena

Magdalena is not completely dead. Unlike the mining only towns, Magdalena kept alive through the 20th century due to ranching. But like so many small rural communities, it could not provide economic opportunities for young people and was gradually dying. Then in the 1990's a few intrepid newcomers arrived and began a number of efforts to revitalize the community. So far it has been successful in staving off entropy.

As this was the first time shooting black and white, how I was shooting was evolving with each new location. Here, I started to mix in color pictures to see the difference.

A Study of Patterns

Then we came to the Stockyard/Rodeo Grandstand which was an entire study unto itself.

Finally we bid adieu to Magdalena