Pictures of Junk

When you think of some of the best places to take photographs you think of places with majestic mountains, or ocean sunsets, colorful flowers or fall foliage. It wasn't until I discovered the pineland photographer Richard Lewis that I consider trying to take pictures of junk. Richard Lewis is a landscape photographer who specializes in taking photos of the pinelands. He offers a couple of different photography workshops in the pinelands which I considered taking. 

I enjoy photography and want to work on improving my skills. I understand the technical aspects of photography but want to work on my composition skills and finding ways to make photos that are more impactful and artistic. To stretch my artistic skills, I'm studying different photographers who I like and try to understand how they practice their art. I found Richard Lewis because I was looking for the best landscape photographers in NJ. He takes some amazing pictures of the pinelands, but he also takes photos of abandoned buildings and junkyards which is something unique. 

This is why I signed up for his workshop in a junkyard in south jersey. This junkyard is unique in that is more than a regular junkyard it's actually also a graveyard for old vintage cars and aircraft and their various parts. This junkyard looks like an apocalyptic hellscape which is why is has been used as a backdrop in a number of different movies and TV series. 

If you have seen the Amazon series Fallout you will recognize the picture above as the entrance to the town of Philly. This place just has jet engines, pieces of planes and helicopters, buses and old cars just randomly piled together.

It's an interesting place to walk around and is a challenging place to photograph which is why it was a good place to work on my composition skills. The challenge was how to take a bunch of decaying junk and make it look like art.

The one thing that helped is that this junk has a lot of character and color as it has aged.

Just look at the different colors and patina on this car.

Or the dashboard of this car. I used some of the photos in Richard Lewis's gallery on the junkyard as my composition guide and then expanded from that.

I spent a lot of time in the car graveyard trying different type of pictures of outside of cars as well as the insides.

I even did a few close ups. 

There is something strangely beautiful about the different colors, layers and levels of decay.  

I spent about 4 hours walking around and taking pictures. I even spent some time talking to the owners of the junkyard. I asked them why they had so many old airplane and one of the owners said that when he was 20, he went over to Lakehurst and bid $20 dollars on a couple of F4 phantoms because he thought they were cool and then kept buying more and selling the parts and metal from them. I also asked how they got people from Hollywood to film at the junkyard and he said that some people scouting locations for Eddy and the Cruzers in central NJ got lost and ended up at the junk asking for directions. Once they saw the junkyard, they thought it would be a good place to film some of the outdoor scenes. Then they became known by a few Hollywood people who kept coming back either for the location or to borrow some junk for a set. Now the junkyard makes a good amount of revenue from the move business although their main business is still dismantling and selling scrape. 

There were about 18 of us in the photography workshop. It was good talking to some of them to see how they were shooting the junk. I was hoping to get some time with Richard himself to get his take on the best way to shoot some of the junk, but he just gave us a tour of the place and a couple of quick tips. I was hoping the workshop would have included more instruction. 

I did learn a lot about composition, color a light from all the pictures I took. After I got home and reviewed all the photos I even worked on improving my photo editing skills so I could bring out all the colors and textures that I saw.

This is probably the best picture I took and with a little creative editing I got it to look almost like a painting. I still have a lot of room for improvement but taking the workshop and stretching the type of photographs I try to take is definitely helping me improve my skills.