Just outside the town of Uyuni in South West Bolivia is the Cementerio de Trenes or train cemetery. Set in a barren landscape, numerous rusting steam engines and carriages have been gathered together to slowly decay. Built mainly in France and England, the trains once transported minerals to the ports of Chile. Today they have strangely become a tourist attraction.
When I was told that our group would be spending a few hours photographing these crumbling monuments, my eyes glazed over. I saw myself having zero enthusiasm for this genre of photography. In fact, when we arrived, I remained seated in our vehicle trying to figure out how I would pass the next 2 hours.
After about 15 minutes, I reluctantly got out, without a camera and ambled lethargically over to the first of the rusting steam engines. I peered inside the boiler unit and a spark of interest was ignited. A shaft of light was streaming into the boiler chamber where the funnel used to be, illuminating the inside. I realized that it would be possible to climb inside the chamber and if I used a fish-eye lens I might be able to take an interesting image.
With my interest peaked, I photographed the insides of several other boilers and carriages. Now that my creative juices were flowing, I moved onto more abstract images. This is simply a twisted, rusting door, bought to life by the fish-eye lens and some pseudo HDR processing.
Some of the carriages carried graffiti and encouraged by our leader Joe, I zeroed in on some of the graffiti colours on the rusting, peeling steel of the carriage sides. I love this next image! As you can see, I have not been shy about boosting the saturation nor the total contrast but out of nothing, this to me has become a work of art.
Suddenly, I was seeing a myriad of abstract image possibilities.
After two hours, it was time to go and I literally had to be dragged away.
But we would have another opportunity to create art out of graffiti on our last day when we visited the seaside city of Valparaiso, two hours west of the Chilean capital Santiago. Our Chilean guide was anxious to show us the city’s colourful and picturesque residences perched on the hills overlooking the city’s azure bay. He seemed dismayed that all we were interested in was photographing the city’s abundant graffiti. We only stayed a few hours but in truth I could have stayed for days. Here is a small sample of the “graffiti art”. The artistic effect has again been amplified by liberal usage of saturation, contrast and a number of the filters in Nik software’s Colour Efex pro.
Coming next: The wonderous landscapes of the Altiplano
Gordon Lindsay
April 10, 2011
Definately different but still arresting images.
Virginia Gray
April 14, 2011
Paul.you are getting more & more creative,painterly etc.Beautiful images!!