Capping off my first full PaD month of 2008.

This was a tough one, last night I saw lights in the lot that is just above our parking lot at work. I thought it was snow removal. This morning when I came in and looked at the lot, there was a pile of rubble instead of a house. There are (or were) a few houses left up there. Where I work and the surrounding area, used to be Officer Base Housing when the Tradeport was Pease Air Force Base.

My interest piqued, I decided that I'd investigate at lunch for my PaD. I called it the "Destruction Site" since there was nothing but the fireplace & chimney left from the house (and the foundation). I started taking photos of all the carnage. Off the back corner of the foundation, there were a number of beams that had been placed or dropped during the destruction process. Between the foundation and the beam pile, I noticed a few old crumpled newspapers. At first I disregarded them, thinking they were relatively new, but then decided to check them out since their color showed some age. The date on the most legible one was 28 Mar 1968. About 2 1/2 months before I was born (interestingly enough, my mother used the base's services while pregnant with me since my father was in Viet Nam).

I figured the newspaper was used by the construction crew to shim the beams. There was a relatively clean hole through the middle of one of the crumpled newspapers, about the size of a large bolt. The newspaper had been sandwiched into the walls of the former house for almost 40 years!

I decided that the newspaper on the foundation with the carnage of the former house in the background would be my goal. I tried as hard as I could to get the date in focus. It was in the 20's, I was crouching, in mud, fingers frozen. Thank god for Live View! I was able to compose the shot, check focus, and get a number of decent shots.

Ideally, I'd have gotten more of the concrete in the foreground to add to the depth of field. As it is, I had to be generous in my cropping in order to keep the date fairly legible.

I decided to keep this a color shot, since the colors are really what drew me. The paper itself was already sepia...

Here's a few that didn't make the PaD: