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I needed a break from painting this past fall and winter. As I drive around the Roanoke area, I am fascinated by how many abandoned buildings that I see. I felt like I was losing track of them, so I decided to document all of the ones that I would see on a regular drive. Then I ventured out and found more. I’m not really sure if Roanoke has a lot of abandoned buildings as compared to Richmond, but maybe because I was discovering the area I noticed them more. I also decided to depart from the “RAW” image creation with my Nikon Digital and instead decided to shoot in JPG and black and white.

The common approach nowadays is to shoot everything in RAW and modify later; get as much of the data as you can and remove what you don’t want later when you have time. Also, save all versions. When you switch to JPG (a compression that loses data) you commit to the image that you take. When you shoot in Black and White, that is also the case. I found this freeing and was suddenly transported back to shooting B&W film, only I had upgraded my camera and film considerably.

Social media posts related to these images can be found on Reddit and Instagram