Not much to say about this shot in the Adirondacks other than it’s one of my favorites. The composition was decided by the motel in question, really, but I still think I really nailed it and got a postcard-perfect image out of it. I did a teeny bit of desaturating in post-process work—I could probably do a sepia-tone version that would also work, but I prefer this.
There’s a genre of architectural and landscape work that is in between “pictures of iconic places” and “pictures of forlorn ruins”. The iconic places are generally only for selfies these days or if you have access to a unique location to shoot from and some unusual atmospheric conditions. Otherwise, what’s the point? There’s a zillion pictures of that place out there in the world. The forlorn ruins I get the appeal of, but I really am drawn to “ordinary places”—and they’re actually very hard often to parse in compositional terms. A whole street? A single place? How do you frame an ordinary moment is a way that makes it visually interesting?