Windsor

The warmer months tend to increase my work load.  Although I don’t do weddings…spring in Vermont means it time for outdoor portraits, annual reports and family gatherings.

Recently I have been shooting images for an annual report for Housing Vermont.  Housing Vermont is a non profit development organization that develops permanent rental housing units.  What I love about them is their focus on the rehabilitation of older buildings and homes.  They have taken a number of abandoned industrial buildings and turned them into apartments.   Every year about this time I travel around the state photographing their current or finished projects.   This year the projects ranged from rehabbing the former Windsor prison apartments, rebuilding the Springfield Movie theater to brand new housing in Rutland

What is fun about these projects is that I am given an opportunity to shoot a broad range of images.  Not only do I take a ‘beauty’ shot of a building I often will look for  visual details in a project or interesting angles.   I find the report designers tend to use these shots more than the straightforward images.

The former Windsor prison gave me plenty of opportunity for interesting images.  This is an imposing brick and wood frame building that has been an apartment house for several years but if you look carefully you  can find a few prison cells still left in the basement.    The challenge the day I shot was that there was a lot of construction still going on and much of the window framing and interior work still needed to be done.

I just spent my time there wandering around the site and taking pictures.   I even got a chance to photograph one of the tenants who had lived there for years.    I found beautiful old doors, gardens by stone walls,brick against stone, guys fixing the roof.

It is such a wonderful experience as a photographer to just shoot what your eye is attracted too and to stretch your brain enough to see beauty in the most mundane or seemingly ugly.

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