Comments

  1. cicely says

    Ooooooh! Nice!
    --
    ‘”My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
    --

  2. blf says

    The mildly deranged penguin remembers that sadly aborted gig. The idea was to excavate a fecking huge hole in the ground. The elaborate set — what you see in the pictures — would be constructed as the hole was being dug, and then slid into the hole on gopherwood rails. The gopherwood would then be recycled and used as roofing to support the excavated ground as it filled back-in the hole (with the excess fill being used to built a mesa-like hill on the top).

    However, during construction, it all went wonky. Some arsehole — thought to be a zoophile called Noah (something of a Keyser Söze–like creep, he’s said to have planned to drown the entire planet as a revenge) — snuck in one weekend and stole all the gopherwood. Why? Who knows. Neither it nor this Noah kook has ever been seen again.

    Anyways, that scuppered the gig. Much to the disappointment of the mildly deranged penguin and presumably many others.

    The band, by the way, was Moar Cheese Slippery!, a quartet playing Big Instruments. The violin, for instance, was about the size of a Boeing 747.

    They broke up a few years later after the violin crashed when attempting to land on Atlantis. Which didn’t sink, albeit it did wobble a bit. The resulting motion illness is now known as the “Moar Crash Sickfest”.

  3. blf says

    (The missing paragraph…)
    The reason for the elaborate set-in-huge-covered-hole-topped-with-a-mesa is acoustics: Gopherwood is easy tuned, and the resulting soundscape is amazing. Especially when the violin revs up its engines.

  4. blf says

    No, the venue would be too intimate for Disaster Area.

    As far as the mildly deranged penguin can recall, the opening act was a mass Entwive a cappella group, Wooden Toes.

  5. rq says

    Saad, these are amazing!!!!!! Wow. You’ve captured a very lonely, desolate feeling -- and no, that doesn’t come naturally from photographing ruins. Thumbs way up to you.

  6. says

    rq:

    You’ve captured a very lonely, desolate feeling – and no, that doesn’t come naturally from photographing ruins.

    That, and for me, there’s an exquisite sense of history, and just how enduring it is, and how very fleeting it is. Outstanding photos.

  7. Saad says

    Thanks, Caine & rq!

    You’ve captured a very lonely, desolate feeling – and no, that doesn’t come naturally from photographing ruins. Thumbs way up to you.

    That took a lot of patience just standing there and waiting for people to move out of the frame, especially the first two photos. The few lingering people were shooed away digitally.

  8. rq says

    That took a lot of patience just standing there and waiting for people to move out of the frame, especially the first two photos.

    So they’re not usually that tourist-free? :D I was wondering! But it’s also the focus and the lighting that you’ve captured. I think ‘epic’ is the word I’m looking for, with an emphasis on the ‘historical grandeur’ aspect of it. :)
    Love the mosaics, but I have a thing for lonely gates -- second picture and fifth picture down, for example.

  9. Saad says

    Actually, it wasn’t terribly crowded. The issue was that most of the people were gathered around the structures you’d want to photograph so after a crowd left, I had a small window of time to take the shot in before the next crowd showed up.

    I’m glad you feel that way about the lighting because that’s exactly the mood I was going for in the editing process. I wanted the images to have epic video game like tones and feel.

    And to clarify, by “shooed away digitally” I didn’t mean I gave them the middle finger :-P

  10. Lofty says

    Looking at the well ordered farmland in the background this is a much visited area. Well done Saad on composing the shots minus people.

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