Guest post by Tim Anderson
For more than 30+ years I had been photographing landscapes, portraits, nudes, etc. More recently, I have shot several times at the historic Albuquerque Railyards (Santa Fe Railway Shops, below) using models and conducting workshops. When the opportunity again presented itself for me to shoot at the Railyards, I didn’t waste any time accepting, even though my studio partner and I would be hosting a workshop focused on the building itself. 
Once we arrived at the site we had a meeting and told everyone to split up and get back together an hour later. Being one of the workshop leaders I began to walk around the main buildings supervising as well as seeing what I could find of interest to shoot.
My interest was peaked when I first saw the red door (left). I was watching a couple of students photographing on the other side of the door and as I was going over to meet with them I looked again at the door. But this time the peeling paint caught my attention. From that moment on I became more of a student than a teacher. I looked for the abstract in everything I saw. No detail was too small, no peel of the paint too insignificant. I was hooked.
I began to look at the details instead of the whole picture. The main building, the machine shop, is more than 165,000 square feet of empty space, with a multitude of nooks and crannies just waiting for me to discover them. And that is just one building on this 27-acre site! After more than four hours of shooting I came away with almost 200 photographs, mostly abstracts, some of which are pictured (below) in this post.
As a result of that shoot I now look at things much differently, whether it be the expanse of a mountainside or the landscape of a nude.
You can see more of Tim’s Railyards abstract work, here.
