Inside Bodie
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Stephen Fischer Photography
Photographing the interior of these old buildings felt like going back in time. As having visited Bodie many times in the past and being limited to the exteriors, I was also curious about the buildings interiors, and previously struggled to capture some interior shots through dirty glass paines, or cracks in the walls. As I wandered through the various rooms on this visit, I was awed by the age of some of the building interior artifacts. It is as if one day 80 years ago everybody just disappeared, leaving everything behind. Although Bodie was mostly abandoned in the 1940's with the war, most of the people left after 1932 when a big fire had wiped out a big chunk of the town, and the mining here was becoming less lucrative.
For this morning I had full freedom on the inside for my photography based on what I could accomplish in about 10 to 15 minutes for a given building. This challenged your creativity and also required quick and efficient work to be the most productive. I used my Canon 5D mark III with a 24-105mm f/4, and switched that on occasion with my 17-40mm f/4, leaving the camera on the tripod the entire time. To save time, I just kept my off-lens in my jacket pocket, so no fiddling with a backpack was necessary. In some cases it would not even be practical without disturbing the settings. If I had more time, use of a tilt-shift lens would be handy to better control the perspective of many of the angular lines with the furniture, door frames, and windows. But instead for expediency I relied on the auto-focus of the camera for specific selection points I choose, shooting a little wider in order to allow more flexibility in post to do perspective correction in Lightroom where I thought it was necessary.
