Misdemeanors and Photoshoots

My assistant Chris Tittle and I were driving around looking for a new location when we stumbled on two old houses in the middle of old downtown Layton, I've probably driven by them hundreds of times in my life but I never bothered to pay attention. They both looked like they may be abandoned so we stopped to investigate.

Our deductive reasoning skills slipped into high gear as we started the arduous task of determining if someone still lived there, sure we could probably just look into a window but we're just not rated high enough of the creep-factory scale to go start looking into windows of unknown houses. Chris pointed out that there was a full garbage can by the garage, nearly overflowing. Once again, not obsessive enough to actually sort through garbage but I couldn't help but notice the box on top was extremely faded, like it had been sitting out there for weeks, a very good sign! A trip to the front door and the pile of weather worn phone books resting there was another good sign, good enough to warrant a quick peek in one of the windows at least.

One glance inside and I knew we had to shoot there, vintage appliances, vintage cabinets and vintage wallpaper - absolutely perfect! A quick visit to the neighbors told us that the owners had rented the house out for years but it was vacated months ago, nobody knew who the actual owner was though... not good. We started considering our options, we could go down to the County Registrar and locate the owner that way and ask them permission to shoot there... but Chris (who rates higher on the creep scale than I do) notice one of the windows was not locked. Now we had a moral dilemma on our hands, do we respectfully trespass and sneak some photos doing absolutely no damage - OR - do we spend a few hours tracking down and contacting the owner and risk getting turned down? Well, just as luck would have it a car pulled up as we were contemplating our next step. Her family had owned the houses for decades and she was getting ready to demolish them... and sure, we could take photos there, but she mentioned we'd better hurry! No problem there, we returned with a model less than an hour later!

-Jake