Showcase-Sunday — Back To The Old New Angles About My Small Hometow...

Greetings, everyone!

Have a good, good Sunday morning! Or...you know...whatever the time is there right now.

I am going to take you back with me to a story I collected about a year and something ago. Do you say things like "a year - a year and something"? You should ;) There are places where time flies...but slower. Small towns. Like my hometown. Of which I found there were always new things to discover if you are of the discovering-things variety.

Have fun reading!

Yup. You just can't have been everywhere, can you? And it's as true on a macro level, or...global level, as it is on micro level or the places not that far from you. Or from where you've grown up. Technically, I am not near my hometown of Karnobat any more. I go there during some vacations, holidays or other special occasions.

I had a walk there, less than two weeks ago and it started at the railway station which stands a couple of kilometers from the town itself.

There's a straight alley connecting one with the other and it's a road I've walked on perhaps hundreds of times. It goes near some factories of old that are now used as whatever people might be using them for but not their original purpose. Some of the old signs still standing in front of the largest one. Here's a blast from the past:

People used to strike heroic poses while welding the Socialism dream together. (Wow, that sounds so good in English I might consider patenting the quote :P)

Anyway, I'll go into retrospection for a while and toss a couple of photographs from the park, the only one in the town at the end of that road. Or the beginning of it. The point where it goes into the town past the...wait for it...

THE

traffic lights. The only ones in Karnobat.

And here is a view by day of the park but inside the painting of a friend of mine I met once, painting in that same park, while I was walking from the railway station to my family's home.

There. We have it. Did I distract you enough? That's how my unedited thoughts flow, too. All the time.

Now back to the path I chose to take. Just to see what was there. I do remember going along it once before with friends of mine. But I remembered not much. I only knew it might be giving me a new point of view to the west and the approaching spring might make some fields look nice from there. Well, I was mistaken. No view yet. Not west enough. And it leads through an industrial zone as far as some industry does still happen near a town of no more than twenty thousand people.

Construction materials mostly.

And the old chimney of something no longer functioning. A food can factory where my father had one of his first jobs as a high school student. I think.

A note on optics.

That shot above was taken, like most of them, with a 70-200 mm zoom lens and at 200 mm focal distance at that point which is the greatest zoom it's capable of. And due to distance to that scrapping yard, it made the hills behind it might look close. They're not. Those hills and TV and radio antennae are actually about five kilometers further away. Maybe more.

I was happy to see the scrapyard there. Yeah, I'm sick like that - I am happy seeing scrapyards and other fiction worthy sites. Anything out of the ordinary everyday life. And mind you, there's not a lot of diversity in a town like this, not if you are a kid with less experience than a thirty-three-year-old photographer. My pre- and early highs school life consisted of two main hobbies - basketball and computer games. Alright, four, after adding books and music to the mix.

So,

Now those are not artistically worthy shots. Not really. But I have registered new things on my mind map. Potential. For what? For a future session, perhaps and a photo story or essay. For a project I would like to transfer to my hometown after seeing what happens elsewhere. For a blog post, even ;)

I brought scrap metal to another place not far off in the past. With my grandfather some twenty years ago. I would not delve into it back then. I would now. Or whenever I find the opportunity. And by delve, now I mean visually. This is one great thing about Photography. We're taking things from people and Nature without actually depriving them of those things. It is very much like the blockchain. People don't lose when rewarding you. And, about photography again...no, we're not taking your souls away. I think. Just to be sure, do believe in the opposite, please.

I took a few pictures only on that road and I kept a few more to my mind. I may try to draw them someday but I wasn't able to photograph the dogs in the shelter I was surprised to find there. Not the way I wanted and from the perfect position before they changed their positions and began barking. Sometimes I'm bad as a photographer because I would restrain from bothering others. That will pass. I will find a good balance there. Someday.

Here's my entry point in town again. West from THE traffic lights I mentioned. Closer to Sofia. By half a kilometer, and with three hundred and forty-nine and a half more kilometers to go ;)

An art installation...