Bottles Of Fun At Bodie

Here is another photo from my recent trip to the Eastern Sierras. This one is from Bodie Historic State Park.

This was my first visit ever to Bodie. I heard and seen images from this place, but they were generally the same image, over and over. When I arrived here and started walking around, I could not believe the abundance of photo ops here and wondered at the same time why there wasn't a much larger variety of photos available to view, on the internet. There are the wide angle scenes and the plentiful amount of details, as well. In the photo, I used my 135mm lens to focus on the details.

The bottles on the window sill caught my attention. What I like was the wide variety of bottles. A secondary subject in this photo is the rickety, wooden picket fence. If you walk around Bodie, you see this wooden texture everywhere. Therefore, when composing this image, I included the fence, but still didn't blatantly give away the place. I left some intrigued. At the same time, if you have been to Bodie before, you might be able to recognize this.

Now, I could have just composed the bottles in the window and that might have worked just fine. But, I felt like a little more context might be needed and make the image, once again, more intriguing. The context being perhaps a worn, old, vintage, abandoned place, etc... A place perhaps that once was bustling with activity. I also just liked how this fence was and the tones of it really pop out and the missing pickets in the fence, really work well. When we see a fence, of course our curiosity makes our eyes want to look past the fence. Here, you eyes see the fence, and then walk right through the fence, where the opening is, due to the missing pickets. Your eyes then scan and examine the long row of bottles on the window sill. Even in an image like this, where I have used a medium telephoto to isolate on some details, there are many photos within this photo, as well.

Bodie is truly a photographer's paradise and there are plenty of bottles of fun to be had here. My recommendation is if you visit here, you do it during the weekday and right as it opens. It does tend to have many tourists around and once noon hits, you are really dodging them.