Jann and I hiked very early one morning this weekend to beat the heat. When we got back to our car, I noticed a lot of birds. So, I spent some time photographing them and found we seemed to be in the middle of a warbler nursery. Stay tuned for a future blog on that subject.
I went back the next morning specifically to photograph the birds. Naturally, birds were few and far between. I did spot an active Cedar Waxwing nest, but it was too blocked with leaves to get decent photos of the feeding. So goes the life of a photographer who enjoys photographing nature.
After searching for birds for a while, I left my camera behind and hiked through the brush to a nearby abandoned building. We remembered seeing it a few years earlier. I now found it covered with graffiti. I took a few photos with my iPhone and went back to my car to get a better camera. I am not that much into photographing graffiti; I prefer to photograph nature, action, and people. But this was very colorful, and I found it quite interesting. Perhaps you will also.
The photo at the top of this blog shows the outside of part of the building. Below is a panorama of the inside. The image is distorted because it is a blend of 8 photos. The walls on the left and the right are actually parallel to each other.
You can click the image below to get to a site where you can zoom way in then pan around. When you get there, click the double arrow above the image on the right to see it full frame. Please wait for the resolution to download. You can use the + and – keys to zoom and the arrow keys to scroll. Or use the scroll wheel to zoom and the left mouse to drag.
Outside the building was an abandoned truck which was also painted.
Here are a few more photos of the graffiti-filled walls.
Yesterday we happened to be driving through Newbury, New Hampshire and passed what I consider one of the most famous and long-lived pieces of graffiti in the area – the Chicken Farmer Rock. So I stopped to get a photo to include in this blog.
In the mid-1980s, a shy boy painted “CHICKEN FARMER I LOVE YOU” on a rock near the home of Gretchen Rule, who was pretty and 16. Her parents raised chickens. The next morning Gretchen saw the message and guessed who wrote it. What happened afterwards is a mystery. Gretchen went away to Harvard, but the message remained, faded and obscured by brambles. One day, years later, there was fresh paint on the rock, with a new message: “CHICKEN FARMER, I STILL LOVE YOU.”
There is more to the story. You can read one version HERE.
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