saturday we went to ralston, an all but ghost town about and hour from here. the sky was sunny, so i used my uv and my polarizing filters together. i used all manual settings, trying to get different kinds of exposures. i had some trouble loading them, so the order is backwards in the album.
we visited the first of two cemeteries at the beginning of our expedition. it was south of town a ways, and not very big. i didnt find it that inspiring, and only managed to get a few shots. the land next to it was being used for hunting apparently, because about twenty or thirty minutes after we got there we heard rifle fire very clearly just to the south. three shots. seemed like a good time to head back into town.
town was clearly vacant, but not dead. there was some traffic passing through . someone came out of one of the buildings to see what we were doing once. a few cars parked here and there, and some activity way down the street. people still live there, with most of the houses obviously occupied. but the storefronts were all closed, and looked like they never opened anymore. there was a little white dog tied up to one of those closed store fronts, with a dish and a bowl of water, and a parked car. but the store door was padlocked. one old saloon front had nothing but vines and open sky behind the boarded up door. sadly, my images of it were too overexposed. there is also a very green saloon front, closed but possibly still a business, that i thought was awesome. i tried to get some shots of some of the stores behind the old windows, that housed what were antique stores – yes, they were antique stores alright. a couple of them had vines and weeds and seedlings growing inside, among the piles of readers digests and old plates on tables all covered in debris. it was hard to get good shots from a realistic point of view, but i kind of like how they turned out anyway.
on the way out of town, just to the west, there was a dirt and gravel road that lead to the second cemetery. it was really old, and some of the headstones were merely rocks. it was kind of on a hill, and way out of the way. no flowers, no flag on the pole – which really looked out of place anyway. some of the graves were marked out with brick outlining the plots. nothing new there at all. it was most inspiring.
all in all i think it was a fine outing.