Nate and Andrew took me to explore the abandoned Jewel Meats facility in Rochester today. We don’t really know when the place shut down for good but the place obviously had a pretty severe fire as large parts of the building show significant signs of smoke damage although fire damage is somewhat hard to identify in most of the building. The building is largely intact, there weren’t many windows throughout most of the building but some areas had good natural light coming in to shoot with.
I shot primarily with the Sigma 30 1.4 I’ve had for almost a year now but have yet to grow to trust. I have more or less decided that unless I just start using it more I’ll never really know if it’s giving me what I want or if it’s giving me trouble. So far mostly good but under compromised lighting conditions which force high ISO or questionable shutter speeds (for hand-holding), it’s not the best environment for judging lens performance.
A fun trip overall and I’m looking forward to some of the other expeditions we started discussing. Both Nate and Andrew know of a lot of locations around Rochester which might be of interest, even for someone as picky as me! I don’t care for the stuff in the buildings photographically (although it was interesting checking out everything left behind in the offices at Jewel Meats), I’m more interested in the actual space, the building itself, and how the natural light has penetrated and transformed it.
We talked about that a bit while we stood there looking at it, since it didn’t have the usual typewritery bits we were guessing it had to be something along those lines but we’d never seen anything like it before so we couldn’t say.
There’s a flashback to my childhood: I believe that’s an adding machine from the 50’s. I played with a machine that looked a lot like that one when I was in 8th grade (1968) and the machine was obsolete.
[...] up. If you are curious about why I shot the Pepsi can, check out these two previous posts: Jewel Meats and Sykes [...]