Twenty-five minutes and forty-two shots; that's all I had.

I was in Houston one weekend in August, 2002, hanging out with Rice friends. By chance, right before leaving, I found out that the old Wiess was still standing, but abandoned. I hadn't thought about going to Rice campus on that trip, but had been exploring photography over the previous few months and realized that this was a last chance to catch my old home and its distinctive geometry with a camera.

Twenty-five minutes was all I could spare before heading to the airport. Forty-two shots were all that my digital camera would hold at a reasonable quality setting.

The afternoon was typically Houston — muggy, with scattered clouds. I started at the front of the building and worked my way around, concentrating on the intersection of the building's horizontal and vertical lines, on the juxtaposition of its harsh simplicity with the organic complexity of the trees and shrubs around it, and on small details that I otherwise might have forgotten about the place. The light changed steadily through the shoot as clouds of different consistencies moved across the sun. In some of the photos, the building is lit diffusely and evenly; in others, sharp lines of light and shadow help make the image.

That afternoon, I was struck by how empty the building was — with the people gone, you could really focus on the structure itself. Even the faint, glorious odor of stale beer that always hung over Wiess was gone. I felt a little like an intruder, as though I were in danger of waking a sleeping friend. I hope that some of these images reflect that sense of solitude; it's the source of the site's title.

As I went, I had to kill off mediocre pictures quickly to create space for better ones in the camera, and may have lost some I'd have wanted to keep. I missed a few shots completely — I'd kill for a good close-up of the steps leading up to the second-floor balcony from the acabowl, to catch the gentle depressions worn in them by hundreds of thousands of footsteps. But in the end the photos turned out better than I could have hoped, considering how little time I had that day and how little experience I have as a photographer.

Details: I used an Olympus CE-3000 digital camera with a UV filter attached. To save time, I set the focal and exposure point for each picture and let the camera balance the aperture and exposure time. Most of the photos were framed as you see them here, but some I had to crop or rotate slightly. I also photoshopped a few to correct exposure and color levels. The black and white versions are just desaturated versions of the color images.

about the site

I build websites for a living, so when I realized that these pictures had turned out pretty well, it was natural to decide to build a site based around the best of them. It turned out to involve a lot more balancing (and a whole lot more time) than I expected.

For instance, I wanted people to be able to look at the site in several different ways — sequentially as a slide show using the previous/next buttons, topically through the thumbnail pages [spaces 1, 2, 3...], and as color or black and white. It was difficult to marry that degree of flexibility with the graphically minimal layout I wanted to use to keep the attention on the photos. I also wanted to pay close attention to the order of the photos in the main sequence and as they're arranged on the thumbnail pages.

The navigation probably ended up a bit too cryptic; think of it as a (rudimentary) puzzle and have fun with it. An interesting thing to do — flip between the color and black & white versions of the same photo and watch how the image changes. It's taught me a little bit about color and how it works in a composition.

I also had to make sure that the site looked good on computer monitors both large and small. Minor differences in display size, color intensity and the like almost drove me crazy, so what you see here is firmly a compromise. It's just going to look better on some machines than on others, but that's true for most of the web.

Technology: I built the site entirely using Photoshop, Textpad (a powerful text editor I use for coding), and a browser. Old school, but precise.

Comments or questions? Drop me a note at cpd@edesigns-graphics.com.

Colin Delany
Wiess '91

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