Andrew turned the corner and stopped, it was for him a very familiar spot, a place where he came every day to catch the bus. In fact he came here so often to wait for the bus that he had made his own bus stop bench by bringing over three lawn chairs that he had stolen from Wilson’s house. He had, at first taken one chair and brought it there but it seemed out of place, unbalanced and so he brought another, and another until he had what amounted to a bus stop bench where another person could sit down without the social awkwardness that comes from sitting right next to a stranger. Andrew doubted that Wilson had ever even noticed that the chairs were gone; his yard was like a great resting place for the rusting, unused, discards of an entire city. There was a sense of finality about this moment though. He wasn’t just waiting for a bus, he was waiting for the bus. The bus which would turn the corner, travel down Nicol street and stop around the corner from the Salvation Army Men’s Shelter and stop, it would continue on its route circling the south end of the city until it travelled past Andrew’s improvised bus stop bench once again. This time though, Andrew would not be on it, he was leaving and he didn’t expect he would return.

One morning I was driving around the south downtown area of Nanaimo looking for good images. I spent a good part of the day looking around for images and two of my best are in the posts here and here. As I turned a corner I noticed a very large abandoned lot that was completely overgrown. Living in a temperate rainforest means that it doesn’t take long for nature to reclaim its primacy over the sculpted lawns and neat curbstones. Someone had left three lawn chairs sitting right at the corner of the intersection and the ivy and the grasses had grown through, around, and over them. There was an interesting story here and I wanted an image that helped to start the story. When I pulled the image into Aperture I knew I wanted it in black and white and as I started to play with it in Nik Silver Efex Pro I decided to create a bit of an area of mystery and depth so I darkened the triangle in the upper right area of the image until it was almost black. I wanted to create the perception that something could be coming out of the forest behind you, if you ever sat down in those chairs.

-Russell Berg