Postcard from Somewhere in WA

If you take Highway 25 north out of Davenport, WA, you will pass through some lonely farm country, small obscure towns and some of the best artistic photographic opportunities in the Northwest. Now, mind you, your mind must be prepared for all things old and rustic, and you must stop and look at places very carefully to find your best photo opportunities. It will also help to have a good post-processing software like Photoshop to make these images a little more interesting.

Highway 25 takes you by old wooden barns, both standing, half standing, or fallen down…by old abandoned vehicles (they are everywhere), a casino, and some beautiful scenery along the shores of Lake Roosevelt. And, if you stay on the road, you will eventually hit the Canadian Border. But it’s the rustic buildings and cars that captured most of my attention.

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you’ve seen many many photos and digital painting of scenery along this road. And there are a few that you have not seen…yet.

This is an old barn that is much closer to Davenport than Canada, but darned if I can remember exactly where it is. A friend of mine, who has been on this road recently, said this barn is now gone, blown over by a major wind storm that hit northeastern Washington. I imagine some of the other barns along Highway 25 also suffered the same fate.

I took several images of this barn, trying to find the right one…and it was this one that had the most possibilities. By the way, I did very little to the window frame…like make it black and white. What you see is the real color.

If there is any lesson to be learned here its just that you should not be afraid to take a photo of something old and broken down. I took this photo over four years ago and it was only very recently that I decided what I wanted to do with it. All it took was some cropping and some creative solutions inside Photoshop. But, that is true with most of my images. They almost never come out of the camera ready for display. But the majority are still well composed images that just need a little help to make them pop. Welcome to the digital photo age!

(To see a larger version of this photo, just click on the image)

To see more of my work, both in photography and digital painting, please visit my website, www.corkrum.com.