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Vacant Store, BZ Corner, WA, 2011.
All the pixels, can't miss them, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/6110374799
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The hippest thing that town ever knew was that sign. When bulbs started going out and no one had a ladder tall enough to reach, well, folks say that's when the town started dyin'.
Charles Nelson Reilly drove through once.
Captured with a small mirrorless camera and 21mm lens, on a compact travel tripod.
This was a case where I hadn't really planned to make formal architectural photos and so had only a small camera with me, with no shifting lens. I made do by shooting wide with the camera level and cropping, which works but costs resolution and constrains how you can organize the frame. It worked well enough here, but I always feel like I'm leaving something on the table when I don't have the right gear with me.
The composition plays with the contrast between the ambitiously-sized sign and the humble, rustic old store. The photo is about shapes and scale.
This is also a bit of a nod to Grant Wood's famous 1930 painting, American Gothic. (See https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6565/american-gothic). Wood's painting was inspired by a grandiose, ornate attic window in an otherwise humble rural farmhouse that Wood happened upon during a road trip. The absurdly oversized, incongruously Googie-style arrow sign here reminded me of that.