Old sheds & houses
An old abandoned house with broken or boarded windows, half a roof and little to zero of it’s color left can look really awful in highly populated areas but as soon as it sits out in the outback it becomes something else.
Something genuine, with character, mystical and almost magical, like it immediately has a story to tell.
We’ve all driven past them on the roads or seen them in the distance on a hike or even seek’ed shelter in them in poor weather – the beautiful deserted houses that year by year, board by board gets swallowed by the surrounding nature until they’re barely visible anymore.
To be fair it’s not only battered deserted houses that get my attention in photography, sometimes a beautiful architectural house in the perfect location can take a landscape shot to the next level as well and I often find myself wondering what it would be like to live in these houses.
Off course there’s also the practical parts of shooting houses or objects in landscape photography. It’s a great way to add some sense of scale since it’s often hard to tell if a mountain is 200meter or 800meters tall in a photo, but just by showing a house at the base of the mountain lets the viewer understand just how big things really are.
In the same manor a weather beaten deserted house right next to the road can help the viewer understand the harsh conditions of the location photographed like the red house below that sits literary right next to the harsh ocean out on the lofoten islands.
I’ve driven past this house many many times but never given it much thought but on last years trip the conditions was different. With a layer of mist and the sun just barely breaking through I knew I had to stop for a shot.
Another aspect of photographing these old houses are that they’ll probably be gone in a couple of decades with your (and probably a couple of others) photos as the only evidence that they have ever existed. As small scale companies are being replaced by large scaled industries a lot of these buildings will never be rebuilt so your also saving a bit of history for future generations.
As a bonus, if you visit a location or object more then once and with a couple of year in between you have the luxury of comparing your photos over time. Like the this photos above from the shipwreck in Sildpollnes, Norway. Unfortunatly being vandalised and set on fire reguarly over the years there is not much left to see now. I re-visited this site in 2024 but by then the remains wasn’t even visible above the water. But having your old photos you can always “go back in time” and have a look.
You can also see the progress in your photography skills and style, but I’ll leave that for you to judge 🙂
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