I took another walk to continue exploring the weathered details of my local town of Petchaburi in Thailand. Choosing a different road than last time I walked passed a hospital, a large school, a Buddhist temple, a small shopping complex and a few bored street dogs.
Navigating the pavements here is always a bit of an obstacle course because nobody walks! It's too hot and taking the motorbike is much easier. This means that the pavements get taken over by food-stalls, parked motorbikes, bus-stops, trees, adverts, street-dogs and plant pots. Half the time you end up walking in the road but you get used to it. Thailand just does not have a walking culture in the way my British homeland does. But it does have lots of nicely weathered urban surfaces and that was what I was looking for...
General view of the type of road I walked with tables at a street-food stall blocking the pavement and a rusty old sign just a little too high for a good photo!
This road-sign doesn't look particularly weathered but up close it had some lovely intricate detail. The sign is actually telling drivers to wait for the green light if they are turning left (traffic drives on the left in Thailand) - the usual assumption is that you can turn left at a red light if nothing is coming.
*The more I look at this battered advert on a trash bin, the more I like it. It almost looks like somebody with a green marker and a shaky hand has been trying to get a good doodle going but was never quite satisfied with how it started. *
Almost like an abstract Christmas tree I suspect these heavy scratches on the base of this temporary sign were created by it being dragged around.
There is almost too much fine detail on this very worn advert. It would have been nice to get closer to reveal it more clearly but I hadn't brought my SLR plus tripod so had to make do with my iphone.
Some lovely blue showing through on this old metal gate but I didn't understand why it was only in such a small area of the gate until I realised it's actually part of a hidden letter "F" that hopefully you can just about see above. I have no idea what's going on with this gate but I suspect a cult.
I try to be conscious of how people will see what I am doing but at one point today I was a little careless. Taking a picture of the rust on this shuttered doorway I heard someone calling. Looking up I saw a woman about twenty metres up the road demanding to know what the hell I was doing taking photos through her front door. Whoops! I explained, showed her the harmless photograph on my phone and apologised that I hadn't noticed her or asked permission first. She was placated and we had the usual conversation about where I am from, how long I've been in Thailand and if I am married yet. This would have been much harder when I started out with rollfilm in the pre-digital age - "But I can show you the photo in a couple of weeks!"
I can't get my head around why these heads on this road-sign are a different colour to the bodies. Whatever the reason I like effect, particularly when combined with that dramatic cracking in the paintwork.
This worn paintwork found in a temple was created by a Buddhist monk's backside!
The wear on the lid of this large cool-box looks like it must have been caused by being opened and closed but if so the owner must have very sharp finger-nails! Perhaps it's also used as a cutting surface that has produced this rain of arrows.
Part of me wants to strip away all that dull grey paint to see what's lying beneath, perhaps there's more of that nice yellow that goes so well with the blue, but another part thinks it's more attractive left like this. The colours are in interestingly-shaped patches and the hint of what lies below is actually quite a nice artistic touch.
Another cool-box but it's not just the cracking pattern that I love, it's the subtle tones that weathering can give to something like this. It takes the hard edges of whatever the original surface was and plays with them. The bright whites become shaded so that they merge and blend with far more subtlty, and they can hold my eye for much longer than the original garishly bland adverts ever could.
*"Dead End" - I am starting to wonder about the quality of the road-signs in this town. There seem to be a lot of a similar age that have weathered to the point they are not very useful as signs any more (although very nice as artworks!). The temptation is to wonder how much of the original sign-making budget was "skimmed off" so that only low quality materials were used and somebody in power could buy themselves a new car. That may be unfair but it could also be exactly how it worked!
Happy walking!*
