Scott Wood Photoblog

Welcome to the Black Canyon City dog track snack bar.  What can I get you?

This little corner of the dog track really jumped out at me when we were up there shooting after Christmas.  I am not sure why, but when I got home and started looking at the images it didn’t “jump” out at me.  I decided to take another look at it tonight and all of a sudden I was really liking the image again.  To be honest, the color version of it really does nothing, this image was meant to be in black and white.  I also did  a version that I cleaned the digital noise above the grill up, but came back to the “noisy” one.

As always, click on the image to see a larger version at my SmugMug site.

I came really close to not processing this image.  When I looked at the set of RAW brackets there were so many things wrong that I almost didn’t bother.  It was VERY dark in this little room, the longest of the brackets was nearly a 1 minute exposure and that introduced a fair amount of noise into some of the brackets.  With it being so dark in the room I couldn’t really see well enough to keep my verticals vertical but I was fascinated with the plumbing fixture.

This image was also a big departure for how I try to process my images.  Instead of trying to correct the noise, I embraced it and even tried to compound it a bit.  I initially went with a complete black and white conversion but it really didn’t do anything for me so I turned down the opacity of the black and white conversion and really mutted the color down.  Finally I decided to over-sharpen it with a high pass filter cranked up more than I typically feel comfortable with and used a “vivid light” blending mode.

When it was all said and done, I am actually quite pleased with the image and I hope you enjoy it.  As always, please click on the image for a larger version. 

This room was the restaurant at the abandoned dog track in Black Canyon City, AZ.  I did a little online searching and it seems that this was almost considered fine dining, at least for the area, in it’s glory days.  I shot this room from 3 or 4 different angles (I will probably end up posting at least one other) but I keep coming back to this image.  To my imagination the spray painted face is the face of the entire facility and is expressing it’s sadness at the state of dis-repair and neglect that is clearly exhibited today.