Picture of the week

Farm house from the past

An old abandoned farm house in rural Utah.  Found this particular place off of a rural portion of highway 50 in western Utah while returning from my latest southwest canyoneering and Anasazi ruins trip.  Given I was traveling on my own for this leg of the trip, I had the flexibility to stop and photograph such locations at my leisure without being pressed for time. After listening to a recent radio show on Public Radio International: This American Life; about a similar story titled "House on Loon Lake", I became curious about places like this.

There were multiple locations like this along the way, and it made me wonder about the history behind such old ranch houses and how ones like this fell into the condition it now is in.  Did the younger kids move away and lose interest after the parents died, with nobody staying behind to take care of the place?  Did the family fall onto financial hard times, and forced to leave by the bank or the local government due to bankruptcy?  Did the farming become unprofitable and no longer capable of sustaining the family that lived here?  Or did some other calamity befall them, resulting in an unplanned abandonment of this place? There is probably an interesting story behind this that perhaps we will never learn.

I photographed this handheld with my Canon 5D mark III with the 24-105 L-series f/4 lens, at 50mm, 1/320 sec, f/13, and ISO 400. A circular polarizer was applied to better accentuate the definition of the clouds with the sky.  A conversion to black-and-white during post-processing (using Silver Efex Pro) seemed appropriate to better match the period and tone of this setting.

All content and images are property of Stephen Fischer Photography, copyright 2014.  Last updated: 6/18/2014   ()