Forgotten

Forgotten, a photo by Pantheroux on Flickr.

This is currently the most viewed photo in my Flickr photostream. Taken in spring 2009 in Bents, SK with a Holga Toy Camera. The Holga is the perfect camera for photographing a ghost town. This is another test post... still learning how to post from Flickr to my blog.

Here are some photos from our visit to Bents (a ghost town) earlier this spring. It was my first visit to an actual ghost town, and I hope it won't be the last. Bents is completely deserted. All that remains is a grain elevator, some rusted farm machinery, a general store/post office, a community hall, a scattering of old houses and sheds, a swing set, and other assorted debris left behind by Bents' inhabitants (including these boots and these teacups).

Although I enjoyed my visit to Bents, the whole experience left me with a peculiar hollow sadness. As I traipsed around the general store, camera in hand, trying not to fall through the rotting floorboards, I imagined the store as the centre of a bustling community. I imagined the inhabitants of Bents as the hardy early 20th century pioneers I learned about in elementary school. This was the real wild west!

Despite my imagination's best efforts, bashed-in TV sets and semi-modern appliances hinted at a more recent date for Bents' abandonment. Creeping through one of the old houses, I discovered a door frame where someone had tracked the growth of two children with pencil marks. The last two markings: Tyler April 1988 and Kim April 1988. The height of one of the wall markings, a hockey trophy atop the TV, and the peeling Smurf wallpaper in one of the bedrooms betrayed an irrefutable fact: Tyler, wherever he is now, is the same age as me.

I'm not sure why this revelation bothered me so much. A family abandoning their prairie town in the late 1980s is nowhere near as romantic as the saga of the pioneers, right? Will amateur photographers 20 years from now find poignancy in the wreckage of today's cookie-cutter suburbia littered with iPhones, Poang chairs and plasma screen TVs?

I spend a lot of time living for tomorrow. Life sucks now, but tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow I'll be able to do the things I want to do. The old adage tells us that tomorrow never comes. I find it to be quite the opposite. Tomorrow comes, followed by another tomorrow, followed in rapid succession by a few hundred more tomorrows. Eventually, all that's left is debris - most of it not very interesting.

Sometimes I see something and I become obsessed with photographing it. I'll go to great lengths to take a picture, and if for some reason I can't, I feel annoyed and depressed about it for days! I usually end up liking those pictures, even if they don't look like much to other people. This is one of those pictures. I'm not sure what appealed to me about this scene... maybe it was the bright red of the wheel juxtaposed against the weathered wood. This was taken when we visited a ghost town called Bents, SK earlier this spring. It wasn't that hard to get the photo... I just had to climb over a small pile of rusty junk to frame it properly.

We visited a ghost town called Bents, SK. It is about 90km southwest of Saskatoon. The abandoned buildings were interesting, but most of my pictures of them were disappointing. Some were cliched, others just not what I was expecting them to be. Maybe I'll post some later when my mood is different. Here is some ubiquitous prairie grass... the macro lens and wide aperture gave an interesting effect.

I take more pictures of flowers than anything else, but I rarely post them anywhere. I figure that a flower photo has to be spectacular to merit posting, since everyone and their dog takes pictures of flowers. I'm not sure if this flower photo is spectacular, but it's one of the better ones I took today.

The selective blur effect in this photo is created by a Lensbaby Composer. I used to think the Lensbaby was a poor man's tilt-shift lens... now I realize it's more just a toy. It takes some interesting photos, nonetheless.

I used the Lensbaby to make it appear that the old rusty tractor was racing across the field.

I have a strange fascination for machinery of any kind, although I rarely understand what the machines are supposed to do.