Urban Photography Escapes Pt. 1

Fun With Cameras XXXVIII

Sunset sky at the Rhine River in Ruhrort. In contrast to my normal workflow, this image was exported from Nikon’s NX Studio software with settings left untouched expect for cropping the portrait frame to a square (meaning: what you see is what the camera would have saved as a jpg). Duisburg, Germany, September 26, 2023.

The wanderings in nature I shared in the last Fun With Cameras were a happy accident because disruptions in the public transportation system made it too arduous to reach the locations I had hoped to visit.

The locations in question are my go-to places for a relaxed time with a camera. Despite having photographed them both a few times, there’s always something new to find.

I finally returned to those two places and enjoyed three bumpy walks that gifted me two calm sunsets, a chilly sunrise, and visual food for thought. I’ll share some thoughts and pictures from the first walk in today’s first part.

I ended up in Ruhrort when the plan was to walk the vast premises of the defunct steel production site Landschaftspark. Somehow, I mixed up the stops, which forced me to swap locations.

Stepping off the train, I took a deep breath and let the annoyance go.

My feet carried me to a part of the area I hadn’t been to. It looks abandoned here and quietly active there. Just across the street from the very active power plant that visually dominates the area, ThyssenKrupp and the local university share what I experienced as a quiet campus.

I wasn’t interested in the big building that still houses some of the industrial giant’s divisions. I walked up a few stairs and met the first disappointment of the day.

Two of the attempts to work with the old garages, exported from NX Studio converted to black and white and with the exposure adjusted to fix what I failed to do in the moment.

That disappointment took the form of a row of old garages with shattered windows in the back, open doorways, and piles of leaves on the ground. A sign indicated they are for bicycle storage. No idea if that’s still valid.

I was immediately drawn to the broken windows and tried to find a composition.

Nothing worked. The trees blocked both the furnace of the power plant and the church tower I could see on the other side. The best I could do was a lamp post or a hint of the church tower. I decided to add two of the attempts for reference.

Top left A narrow and quiet path back to the main street revealed interesting details, such as this tree branch that shot up and across the railing. Top right At the end of that pathway is a building for the local university and an old coal wagon. Here’s a detail image of the rusty chain that hangs from its front axle. Bottom Abandoned storage sheds along a pathway that runs through a quiet and partly abandoned part of the steelworks facilities.

The failures accompanied me for a while.

But I found potentially interesting scenes and tried to transfer what I was seeing in my mind into the viewfinder. Despite the disappointment, I continued in an improved mood because I saw something and tried to make it work. Practice and experimenting, that is all that photography is about.

I was drawn to a row of old storage sheds. Their, shall we say, rustic appearance, interested me. I liked the intrigue of the half-open doors and the frame of grass and shrubs. I’m not satisfied with the result, but the image above has something that keeps me coming back to it.

I saw the old coal wagon at the end of the street from afar. Strong backlighting stood in the way of an image. But I found some mildly interesting details on it and along the narrow footpath back to the main street.

Thyssen power station emerges behind a curtain of leaves (left) and gas pipes (right).

Before I was ready to move to a different part of the area, I wanted to see what I could do with the power plant.

The narrow footpath that guided me back to the starting point of my walk offered views that warranted a first try. The parking lot a few hundred meters further along was the second chance. I swapped lenses and tried eye-level, low-angle, landscape, and portrait compositions from various spots.

The messiness of the place always seemed to be one step ahead. That’s the problem with modern urban spaces and the challenge of photographing them. Cities are places of chaos. I always look for the quiet, the small details, and the pieces of visual interest I can pick out by eliminating the urban clutter. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t. But that’s okay.

Two images that didn’t quite work for me. Left: a close-up of a tree near the university building. While I’m not a sharpness connoisseur, the softness here bothers me just as much as the branch on the left, and the overal composition in any of the attempts I made never quite matches what I had in mind. Right The elusive church tower I couldn’t frame through the broken garage windows. I liked the pipes in the foreground, but I missed the bright advertising board in the background. Just as the featured picture and the garage examples, these were exported from NX Studio with minimal (left) to no changes (right) to the camera’s jpg settings (exposure adjustment on the left because I managed to mess up in the early minutes…).

Before I write about the images of that day that I am more pleased with, above are two more examples of the ones that didn’t work as visualized.

Left Sunset at the Rhine River. Right The moon rises behind the old railway harbor.

Despite the decently unsuccessful photography, that first hour of my walk made me feel good. I reached the riverfront, and the early sunset sky improved my mood further.

I tried to include some human activity where possible and noticed a special guest when I looked to the other side.

The foreground is not as pretty in that direction. I wish I had had more space to move around (I was on a bridge, and the edges were closed off — probably in need of repair) or had a more flexible lens.

Still, I was delighted about the moon frame when I continued my walk.

Sunset at the Rhine River.

I couldn’t resist the play with sun stars when I reached the prominent Rhine bridge.

The 35 mm lens doesn’t produce the best sun stars, so I quickly switched to the 20 mm lens from the 1970s.

And I was back to the 35 mm a few minutes later when I noticed the Rhine bridge from a tiny side alley above the promenade. I spent another 10 minutes down there, in the company of the dying sun, but the bridge image feels like a good ending point.

I hope you enjoyed some of the photographs or the thoughts and experiences I connected with them. The images from my two wanderings at Landschaftspark follow in two weeks. In the meantime, you can expect another Ghana travel experience, a writing post about the usefulness of timelines, and new reading recommendations.