Cement Silos of Redwood with Fomapan 100 Film

In 2010, I wrote about the deserted cement silos in Redwood, Mississippi. They are still abandoned and loom up above Hwy. 3 in all their concrete ugliness. It is a good site to test film, and I returned to test Fomapan 100 Classic film in my Fuji GW690II medium format camera. The tracks lead to the International Paper mill just to the north.

The brush is pretty thick and it is hard to reach the silos from the former work yard on the west. This photo is not completely sharp because of camera motion.

A hulking ruined concrete mass is in the work yard. Did they pour unwanted concrete into some sort of bin?

This is a loading dock on the railroad side of the main building. Being winter, there were no obvious snakes, bats, or poison ivy present.

This is one of the chutes that would dispense powder into trucks. This was a 4 min. exposure at ƒ/11. The light meter indicated 30 sec. at ƒ/11, but I knew that to adjust for the film's reciprocity, I should use 8 times the metered exposure. Reciprocity failure means that in dim light, film no longer responds in a linear fashion to increasing exposure time. Most film is linear in the range of 1 sec. to 1/1000 sec., but if you are in the range of many seconds or minutes exposure, you need to multiply the light meter setting many times. A Wikipedia article describes the phenomena, or contact me if you want to do some film photography and I would be glad to help.

Film: Fomapan 100 Classic.
Camera: Fuji GW690II with 90mm lens.
Development: Xtol by Praus Productions, Rochester, NY
Scanning: Minolta Scan Multi using SilverFast Ai software, 2820 dpi.
Resize for web display: ACDSee Pro 2.5.

Deserted cement silos in Redwood, Mississippi

Redwood is a small town north of Vicksburg at the junction of Highways 61 and 3 and the Yazoo River. Driving north on Highway 3, just before you reach the International Paper plant, sits a deserted silo and some steel sheds.

I do not recall the facility being used in at least a decade. It's site near a bend in the Yazoo River indicates that the operators once could load product onto barges.

Grain elevators (and silos in general) have a following among photographers in the Midwest. They represent a functional architecture without decoration, noble in their plainness and single-purpose design. At this site, the silos consist of concrete cylinders held together with wire (or rebar) bands. Definitely crude but strong.

Pigeons live here, and maybe some snakes, but there is not much else other than the deserted machinery. I need to return with a 4×5" film camera for some real photography.

A few years ago, I saw this deserted store off Highway 3. It was rather overgrown then and obviously had not been used in years. On my last drive north to Yazoo City I did not see it, but may have forgotten where to look. (May 2020 update: the store is no longer extant.)

(Black and white photographs based on RAW files from a Sony DSC-R1 camera, processed in Capture One LE software).