How to Photograph Ruins - Luis E Gonzalez. Originally posted to HubPages, 2014. Site is closed.

Your goal is to capture the romance and nostalgic feeling that is often associated with these former structures and not so much on their tourist appeal since most major tourist ruins have been photographed to death.

Photograph your subjects from various angles, perspectives and by day and by night. Using flash will be required at night and a diffuser will probably be handy during the day. It is always better to photograph when you have a diffused ambient light condition such as when the sky is overcast.

If you take a photograph of a rock structure upon which there are some reliefs during the midday sun and when the sun is about to fade or even at dawn you will see much more detail and the reliefs will be easier to admire during dawn,dusk or when overcast.

Midday sun light creates a "washed out" effect and most details will be hard to distinguish not to mention a noticeable lack of visible texture. This is why photographing while the light is diffused makes sense to most photographers.

Also, don't just focus of capturing images of the subject's exteriors include aspects of the interiors whenever possible and safe to do. Take long shots, wide angles, close ups and include elements of the surrounding scenery to put into perspectives the location where your subject is located.

A lot of photographers like to include the human element in their ruins photography, I do not since if I wanted to take photos of people I would do it under another theme. I just want to concentrate on the ruins themselves and allow my viewers to immerse themselves in the images before their eyes. This will often lead them to imagine the history of the place without the interference of modern details.

A good staring point to ask yourself is "what photograph can I take that will let others feel as I felt ". Seek more than ordinary pictures. Instead capture photographs that invoke a feeling instead of photographs that just look pretty.

I prefer daytime adventures too. I like to see everything and I'm not looking around hoping to scare myself with ghosts.

Day time adventures are my personal favorite because I can take pictures and actually see the building in natural lighting.  Although the buildings are losing their old looks, they’re gaining new characteristics such as vines and erosion that give them a unique, beautiful look.  There’s a rich history to be accounted for once you really take a look at them.  Each place has a story to tell.

Source: Your Guide to Urban Exploration | EVERYTHING EXCLUSIVE MAGAZINE

Jeff Chapman (1973 - 2005) #RIPNinjalicious

Jeff Chapman was a Canadian urban explorer, known as Ninjalicious. Jeff published Access All Areas and the founder of Infiltration, zines and website.

"It's the thrill of discovery that fascinates me. Yes, I know I'm not the first person there, but I can honestly say I found it and I earned the experience for myself. After exploring for a while, you get a wonderful feeling that you're "in on" the secret workings of cities. You know what's under your feet and what's behind the closed doors and what the city looks like from the highest office towers, while almost everyone around you only ever looks at the public areas and never truly pays attention to urban structures unless they've paid admission to take a look." - Jeff Chapman/ Ninjalicious

Source: Interview at Philadelphia City Paper with Neil Gladstone (1998?)

This month, August 2015, marks ten years since Jeff Chapman passed away. I thought someone should post in his honour. I never met him personally. I did email with him, twice. I met his wife, Liz, at a Broken Pencil Zine Festival in Toronto.

I attended the Festival to buy Access All Areas: A User's Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration, see some of Jeff's (and other publishers) zines and take a look at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. I was just beginning to explore with a digital camera then. Before that I just didn't know what I was doing had a name (and film was expensive!).

A tribute can still be found at the Toronto Architectural Conservancy 

Jeff Chapman (September 19, 1973 -- August 23, 2005), better known by the pseudonym Ninjalicious, was a Toronto-based urban explorer, fountaineer, writer and founder of the urban exploration zine Infiltration: the zine about going places you're not supposed to go. He was also a prominent author and editor for YIP magazine, as well as its website, Yip.org. Chapman attended York University in the early 1990s and later studied book and magazine publishing at Centennial College. He went on to serve as Editor at History Magazine and as Director of the Toronto Architectural Conservancy board.

Chapman died of cholangiocarcinoma on Tuesday, August 23, 2005 --- three years after a successful liver transplant at Toronto General Hospital (a location he loved to explore). He was 31 years old.

Source: Wikipedia: Ninjalicious

Toronto's own late Jeff Chapman (a.k.a. "Ninjalicious") published his first printed issue of Infiltration, "The zine about going places you're not supposed to go," in 1996. Though Toronto may not live in the imagination of people around the world, Chapman made this city's sewers famous for his global readers. His work lives on in Access all Areas, his book published just before his death to cancer in 2005, and at infiltration.org.

Source: Shawn Micallef: Getting to know Toronto's sewers

Under the alias Ninjalicious is where Jeff made his biggest mark. In his early twenties he spent long periods of time in the hospital battling various diseases. Often bored, he and his IV pole would go exploring the hospital, investigating the basement, peaking behind doors, looking for interesting rooms and equipment. It was here his love for the under explored side of buildings developed, and upon returning to health he created Infiltration -- the zine about going places you're not supposed to go.

Infiltration has had a profound influence on urban exploration in Toronto and around the world, as evidenced by the hundreds of tributes left for him in the Urban Exploration Resource forum. Ninjalicious had a strong code of ethics which he promoted, including no stealing or vandalizing while exploring. Issue 1, all about Ninj's beloved Royal York Hotel, was published in 1996, and the zine was continually published throughout the years ending most recently with Issue 25: Military Leftovers.

Source: Sean Lerner: Torontoist: Death of a Ninja

About ten years ago I was in a Toronto bookshop and found a copy of Infiltration. Subtitled "the zine about going places you're not supposed to go", it was devoted to the escapades of the author, Jeff Chapman _{or "Ninjalicious", to use his nom de plume} as he explored the many off-limits areas in famous Toronto buildings such as the Royal York hotel, CN Tower, or St. Mike's Hospital. In each issue, Chapman would pick a new target and infiltrate it --- roaming curiously around, finding hilarious secrets, then describing it with effervescently witty delight. Chapman had the best prose of any zine author I've read anywhere. Many zinesters are clever, of course, but Chapman wrote with a 19th-century literary journalist's attention to detail; nothing escaped his notice, from the relative fluffiness of the towels in executive lounges to the color of the rust pools in a mysterious, hangar-sized room buried below Toronto's subway system.

Source: Clive Thompson: Collision Detection: R.I.P. "Ninjalicious" --- the founder of urban exploration

infiltration The zine about going places you're not supposed to go, like tunnels, abandoned buildings, rooftops, hotel pools and more.

Source: Infiltration

See also:

• This American Life from WBEZ: Audio interview with Ira Glass
• The original thread from the UER forum.
• Broken Pencil: 50 People (And Places) We Love
• Broken Pencil: Access All Areas: Remembering Ninjalicious and Infiltration Zine 

cancon
what is it that attracts you to going where you're not supposed to go?

Ninjalicious
Healthy human curiosity about the workings of the world I live in, of course. I mean, it's free, it's fun and it hurts no one. A harder-to-answer question would be: why doesn't everyone?

cancon
what are the tools of your trade?

Ninjalicious
Usually I travel very lightly, with a pen, paper, a Swiss army knife, a camera and a flashlight. That's about all the equipment I need to have a good time in 90% of the places I visit. I take along more specialized equipment, such as rubber boots or various props, for specific targets.

Source: Cancon Interview with James Hörner

Sign Collectors on Facebook inspired me to write about collecting signs. I don't collect them myself but I will photograph old signs I see along the way.

I also found a Facebook page about fake signs. How would you know if an old sign was really old or just made to look old and weathered? I wouldn't even have thought about someone creating fake old signs.