Inside the Abandoned National Silk Dyeing Co.: Paterson's Forgotten Textile Mill (Photos)

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  The text message from my friend J was simple: a list of addresses in Newark and Paterson. An invitation. An urban treasure map with Xs marking forgotten places. I picked the one on Piercy Street. Pulling up, I saw the building wasn’t exactly hiding. It was a behemoth of brick and colorful lettered graffiti, a whole city block of decay. A door gaped open next to an old loading dock, but the scene gave me pause. Mounds of illegally dumped trash lay along the floor of the loading bay. This part of Paterson has a tough reputation, and the open doors felt less like an invitation and more like a dare. I took a deep breath and stepped inside. The air was thick with the smell of dust and damp. I found myself in a vast, open space littered with plastic containers and skeletal metal shelving. I moved deeper, drawn toward the old boiler house section. Before I reached it, I walked into a room that stopped me cold. Everything was stained a deep, blood red. A fine crimson powder coated the fl...
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The eXperiment #2

While reading an interesting article on Petapixel on the sweet spot of lenses. It came to mind that maybe if I shot at the required aperture of 5.6 @10mm which I shoot almost always I would substantially control variables in my little AEB experiment using my camera setup. It makes sense to shoot at the best aperture that produces the sharpest images I can get during my explorations.


In eXperiment #1, my aperture was at different settings and may have skewed the final photos before blending them together creating slightly sharp photos due to the aperture. It is true that shooting at the sharpest aperture of your lens is important in this little eXperiment but found out that in the field shooting at aperture 5.6 @ 10mm didn't always produce the correct and proper exposure for the scene.

Continuing on in the field I came back with the following.



6 Images



12 Images



I could not discern any notable differences in image quality in both sets of images. Nothing popped out at me as found in eXperiment #1. I surmise that maybe the blending software has its limits passed a certain amount of numbered images. I would love to get my hands on some raw Sony A7R III files to test the comparison between an 18MP camera and a 42MP. I'm curious to see what the outcome would produce.




6 Images Edit


12 Images Edit



I may have found in another subset of photography that macro photographers use stacked images of insects and flowers using hundreds of images than my 12-image roster here. Some final images can surpass 300 images all stacked into one clean image of a well-defined, detailed, and sharp final image. A veteran of this subject is none other than Turkish photographer Can Tunçer.

To see more of his work check out his website here and Flickr page here.

Now it may be back to the drawing board for me as I head out with more knowledge and hypotheses.

Continuing on to eXperiment #3.

Stay tuned.

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