Q: I came across your work and loved your pictures of abandoned places so I have decided to base my project around your work and was wondering if you could email me some information about yourself such as who inspired you to start photography and when you were first interested in photography and particularly in buildings.

A: In college I took a black & white photo class. Everyone in the class was photographing uninteresting things such as their back yards, bedrooms, or even worse...their baby nieces and nephews, but I wanted to find something unusual.

About 5 minutes from the college were abandoned steel mills and some old buildings. I had a two hour break after one of my classes so I would drive around looking for unique things to photograph. It was then that I discovered an abandoned building and started to explore. I was only at the location for about 10 minutes before I got totally freaked out and headed back to campus. I was by myself and had never been anywhere like that before. I did manage to snap a few shots while I was there tho. When I went to develop in the dark room I was completely shocked at what I had captured. Everyone crowded around me and wanted to know the story behind the shots. Where was the building? Was it creepy? What did it use to be? I was getting all these questions. People were intrigued. It was then that I decided pursued photographing things that would make people say "where the hell were you?"


Q: A lot of you images have so much detail, how are you doing this?

A: More of my recent photos are shot using the HDR (High Dynamic Range) technique where 3 exposures are shot then merged in post-processing with a program called Photomatix. Merging the multiple exposures allows for greater depth and textures to be reviled that normal single exposure shots can't.


Q: How do you find these locations? Just stumble upon them or do research first?

A: When I first started out, I would drive around for hours looking for abandoned places, however that is very time consuming. I now use flickr and google maps to pin point locations. Flickr is a great resource because a lot of people will map their finds so it makes it easy, plus seeing how buildings are laid out beforehand can really be a time saver. Flickr also makes it possible to coordinate multiple locations in one day. For example, I did a search for "Abandoned Cleveland" and started to narrow down the locations of several buildings so I could maximize my time when doing a location photo shoots.