The Arcade - Dayton

The Arcade, originally uploaded by BillyCrafton.

On Monday, 11/17/2008, I got to go shoot with Vincent Laforte at an abandoned building in downtown Dayton, The Arcade. This is an amazing building that used to have stores, restaurants, office space and apartments. There is an effort to restore the building and re-open it.

Thanks to John P. Murphy, we were able to get access to the arcade and shoot with Vincent, a Canon Explorer of Light, as he was in town to do a presentation for the Focus Photo Club.

Vincent had a pre-release of the Canon 5DmkII DSLR. If you haven't been to his website and seen his movie, Reverie, created with a pre-release version of the 5DmkII, go there now and check it out!

While Vincent shot video, I looked for areas to shoot High Dynamic Range photos, HDR. Vincent loved the peeling paint and general decay of the building as we got to work with the 5D and video. The building was very dark and we only had flashlights, so it was a challenge in some of the areas. We only made it to 5 areas as we would stop and shoot for 30 min to an hour in each spot.

I found a door out to the fire escape and could have spent an hour out there alone. The shot here is one of my favorites. It is an HDR made up of 3 shots taken 2 stops apart. I processed them through Dynamic Photo HDR, a windows only program. I'm planning to switch to a new Macbook Pro in the near future and when that happens, I plan to switch to Photomatix as well.

When I shoot landscape HDRs, I go for a natural look to try and capture what I saw with my eyes but I've gotten to do a few shoots in decaying buildings and I like going a little to the extreme to create something different.

We also learned that the Arcade has a ghost! I look forward to going back and documenting more of the building.