Its not that I don’t like people!

I just noticed that most of my posts lately don’t show photographs with people in them. Its not that I don’t like people, I do. Its just that for the kind of photography I am exploring these days its so much easier without them. 

Even when people are the object of your composition they are often hard to deal with. They like to move around a lot, scratch, twitch, blink and generally just do things to mess up an otherwise great shot …and then my all-time favorite (after you’ve finally gotten the great shot), they tell you, “I look horrible in that picture. Don’t you dare let anyone see it.”

Its not that people are evil, well, maybe some of them are, but not most of them and  I actually spend a lot of time shooting people. The truth is that most of my photos are of people and do not make it to this blog. They are photos that show up in family albums or on Facebook, Instagram etc. And in the end all photography is after all, all about people. There is always at least one person in every picture – the photographer.

So here we have a picture of an abandoned shopping center shot on CVS 400 color film with the Pentax ZX-L. Well, its not really abandoned because it was never finished or inhabited so there was no one to abandon it. On the North shore of Lake Pontchartrain in the fair city of Mandeville there is a new sprawling shopping center along I-12 which clearly was intended to sprawl even more than it currently has because there is a great section of buildings that look like this. Presumably if ever needed, the shopping center can grow 20% to 30% just by finishing these buildings and putting them into service. In the meantime its an interesting photo subject. I just wish the fence around it wasn’t so high.