I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of this little shack used to be, but I’m guessing it may have been where the scorekeeper used to sit during the game. It took a bit of creative maneuvering to get my tripod and camera into a decent position to take this shot. The door to the shack was not being particularly helpful, and I kept getting smacked in the face by some unruly little trees, but in the end, I was relatively happy with this composition.

I decided to go with a pretty dark look when editing this image. I really wanted to emphasize the deep shadows and bright highlights, and make sure that the chair and lone paintball strike were the focal points. To achieve this, I selectively applied the ‘Midnight’ and ‘Tonal Contrast’ filters from Nik Color Efex Pro on top of my usual application of a number of filters in Phototools. My processing for this image was definitely inspired by urbex HDR master, Jacques Gudé (aka fotofreq). If you’re unfamiliar with his work, be sure to check it out!

This old baseball diamond was the first real abandoned location I have ever tried to shoot, and I’ll admit, it was kinda scary walking around this place on my own at first. Once I got over the feeling that zombies were going to jump out of every nook and cranny, I was able to have some fun and take my time with some of these shots. Now that I’ve got a bit of the urbex bug, I find myself searching everywhere I go for more locations to explore. It’s just so much fun to capture and process the images from locations like this.