Day 189

189/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

I headed back up to Mammoth today to do some snowboarding, but this time I got to make a pit stop.  
There's a place called Jawbone along the 14 freeway that you pass on the way to Mammoth. In this area, there are clusters of abandoned houses and shacks, and I've always wanted to explore some of them. This particular one was a few miles past Jawbone (pretty much in the middle of nowhere). 


I spotted it from a decent ways back and Kyle and the rest of the car were down for an adventure, so we pulled over, crossed the highway (which was sketchy) and ducked under a barbed wire fence (equally sketchy) to get here. 


The house itself was pretty gnarly, I have no idea what purpose it served. Inside, it was torn down to the studs. The floor was rotted out and the entire place was filled with debris (including what seemed like a perfectly good oven and stove top). The inside was cool, but not very photogenic, I didn't have a wide enough lens to make it translate into a picture. 


The front was really cool, it had some funky looking scarecrow-type stuff in the front yard:




I liked this picture a lot, it almost was today's picture. I had my 430ex II on me, so I used it as a fill flash and I dig the high-key look of the front wall. The dark interior of the house is cool, and I love how the window on the other side frames the shirt and hanger hanging from the window.


Ultimately I liked the picture at the top better, though. I like the simple, head on angle. I absolutely love how you can see through the window on the left and the window on the right goes totally dark, and I like the desolate landscape. I really like the chair in front of the house, too. I pulled that from inside and added it in. I think it adds a lot to the picture, in the frames without the chair the place just looks like a shack. I think the chair adds a human element, it turns it into a house, it shows that someone might have lived there once. It's almost as if they were having some lemonade in their backyard, got up to go to the grocery store and never came back.