Urbex

What the heck is urbex, I hear you ask? Good question, because I just came across it now and it's the first I've heard of it. I just looked it up on Wikipedia...

Urbex is the examination of the normally unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities.
Source

Ahhhhh...now I get it...I *have* heard of it, I just didn't know it had a name! So, has anyone got any good urbex pics that I can drool over?

Here's a pic to illustrate what urbex is all about...

from wikipedia

And there's even a Flickr group where you can drool over even more pics!

Cropping

Something I have been trying to do in my own photos is to try cropping them to make them a bit more interesting. I do like cropping because I think it engages the viewer in a game of guessing what's happening outside of the photo. It can also be used to hide unwanted aspects in a photo. Take this terrible photo for example. It was taken by a friend about a year ago. The raw photo is terrible (no offence to my friend). I have marks on my face from my glasses, my hair is fuzzy, I'm not smiling and my face somehow looks saggy.



I increased the contrast, brightness and saturation because this is how I like my photos to look. I also erased the background and then cropped the photo in 2 different ways. First I focused on the top half of the face. You can see this picture on my profile. I thought this worked quite well because it provides a hint of what I look like but without giving the game away completely. Once I got the cropped version I noticed how stunning the eyes looked and decided to try cropping further in order to focus on this.


I have another example of good use of cropping here.

Shoes

I do think shoes make interesting subjects and are pretty good for jazzing up or improving the interestingness of photos. I'm heavily biased though because (being a woman) I love shoes :)

I took a photo of my own shoe a while ago and liked the contrast between the dark earth and the brightness and interest of the shoe.




The following 2 photos are not mine but illustrate the kind of thing that I like.

I like a few aspects in the photo below. First off I do appreciate the use of cropping and I'll go into this in another post later. Another thing I like is the pink tinge to the sky and also the contrast between the grey/pink sky and the pink dress. I also think the shoes provide some additional interest and are visually appealing. If I was to take this photo myself I don't think I'd do anything different to this really.


I like the subject in this photo but I do think there are some things that I might of done differently. One thing I would try out is to make the ground B&W and then add some interesting and colourful shoes. Something that contrasts well with the B&W ground and the blue jeans. I'd also use higher contrast and saturation to make the photo appear more dynamic.