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As my friend and I were headed back down towards New York city from the Rhinebeck, N.Y. area, I spotted this gem and yelled "Stop!" This was actually still in or very near Rhinebeck. It must have been a beautiful home at one time and circumstances caused it to become neglected and/or abandoned.
These abandoned homes always make me wonder about the back story, what happened and at what point did it no longer become a place someone called home. Perhaps an elderly person or couple passed away and there is no family around to care for the house, or maybe not ready to move on.
It does look as though there may be someone going in or out of there at times as noted by the trampled area of vines in front of the doors.
I shot this from across the road which may have been about 100ft away using a 70-200L 2.8 IS Canon lens. This allowed me to frame it as I did including the steps, porch and awning trimmings and side windows compressed into a neat composition. It was shot at about 148mm using three bracketed exposures which were later blended together in Photomatix Pro and then cropped and color adjusted in LightRoom 4. The IS (image stabilization) made it easy to hand hold this shot at those settings (slowest shutter speed was 1/40) and still have it all very sharp.
