Finding Textures and Using Them

I've been eyeing this place for a while now. Abandoned factories provide endless photo opportunities. I would love nothing more than to get a bride and groom in there for some sunset shots amid the ruins. (It's all the rage.)


But today I wasn't looking for people shots. I was looking for grunge, rust, filth, and most of all, texture. Because among the other great rages of the photography world is textured applications. You can buy CDs full of textures if you like. But you can find them for free by just walking around the right trashed building.

The key is to look for areas of nice, random decay. A couple samples from today's trek are below. By the way, if any photog who sees this wants these, send me an email and I'll get you a link to high res files. For my other readers, read on.




And now that we have those, let's take a look at the application of those textures to an image. In this case we'll use a photo from a December photo shoot as the base. In this image, I have used the first texture above as an overlay to give the photo a very different look.