DESOLATE BEAUTY

Photographer John Busch of St. Thomas, Ont., takes us on a tour of the area’s abandoned barns

I first took up photography in earnest back in 1979, using a 35-mm camera with a basic wide angle and a telephoto lens. Although I was able to take a lot of excellent photos with that camera, I could never be sure what the photos looked like until I paid to develop the complete roll! I have since progressed to a full-frame digital camera with two great lenses. The advantages of digital are many, including the fact that you can take all the photos you want at various exposures, check them out on your computer and save only the ones you want to keep.

It’s interesting how you can photograph the same subject several times in one day and capture a different result each time, depending on the location of the sun, cloud cover, and location of the point of view. I learned through experience that my best colour photos are taken on cloudy days, but it is hard to exclude sunny-day shadows for good contrast.

I enjoy taking on photo projects, one of which was to photograph barn quilts. A barn quilt is basically a large piece of painted wood that looks like a single quilt block, which decorates the side of a barn. During one of our local trips to capture these photos, and after I commented about the many abandoned barns we came across, my wife Mary Lynn suggested I photograph these old barns. Many of them were built in the late 1800s and are still standing today.