| Vulture City Ghost Town |
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 A small cloud of dust blows by, a door creaks and the wind whistles through the cracks of a dilapidated building. Sound like a scene out of a old western movie? In this case, this is the scene that played out in front of us as we took an early morning stroll through the empty streets of Vulture City Ghost Town.
If you did not already know, we love to photograph ghost towns and we have visited a number of them throughout the west. Arizona has several ghost towns, one of the best is Vulture City Ghost Town. Vulture is a true ghost town, due to the fact that no one lives there, the buildings are slowly disintegrating and the previous caretaker reported that he routinely had ghostly encounters.
Vulture City is what remains of Arizona's largest producing gold mine (total production was over $200 million). In 1863 gold was discovered in Vulture and the town quickly grew to a peak population of over 5,000 residents in the 1890's. The mine had operations buildings, mess hall, hotels, school, jail and a post office. It was closed in 1942 due to World War II and the town was abandoned.
Vulture has many of the original buildings which are still standing and some contain period furnishings.
Originally most of the buildings where built using the tailings from the mine. The assayers office pictured below is a good example of this construction technique. 
As the technology for extracting gold from poor ore improved the majority of the original buildings were torn down and walls were run through the crushers and replaced with wooden buildings.
Besides having a large number of standing buildings, one item that makes Vulture City special is that you can spend the night (if you dare). Vulture City is privately owned and managed by on-site caretakers and overnight camping is available for a small fee. We took full advantage of this. On the night that we visited, it was just us,the caretakers and a group of ghost hunters. Ghost hunters frequent this site as at least 18 people where hanged in the middle of town for stealing gold from the mine.
Spending the night allowed us to walk the town and take some sunset photographs.
 This sunset panorama was taken looking northeast out of Vulture City. Because of it's unique size we cannot sell this panorama on our website. It is 10" x 42" for $200. Please contact us directly if you are interested in purchasing this photograph at (877) 4tkimages. Vulture City also provides a unique backdrop for portrait sessions. We recently did a High School Senior portrait session there.  If you want to see all of our Vulture Ghost Town photographs please click here. If you wish to schedule a photo session at Vulture Ghost Town or any other location please contact Teresa@Imagesbytk.com or call us at (877) 4tkimages. |
Making A Difference
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 We live in the west valley of the Phoenix area. Due to the economic down turn, the housing prices in the Phoenix area crashed. This caused a large number of families to loose their homes. From Nov 1 2009 to May of 2010 the number of homeless school children increased by 47% to over 1,400 students in the west valley alone.
The Homeless Youth Connection was created to raise awareness, feed, clothe, and obtain safe shelter for homeless children who live in our communities. We want to make a difference in the lives of homeless children.
To that end T&K Images is providing computer hardware, software and financial support to this worthy cause. For more information, or you want to help out please checkout www.hyconnectionkids.org.
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Going Green
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Each month we like to highlight information that we found to be interesting in the area of green technology. This months article was suggested to us by one of our collectors (Thanks Cheryl). When we think of "Going Green" we typically think of reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. However there are other issues, one if which is the amount of garbage that we produce each year. This months segment actually combines the two with some interesting results. The following link is a youtube video from a Japanese company that has created a process to convert plastic garbage back into oil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGGabrorRS8. This process allows for the reuse of the oil thus reducing the CO emissions. We find this invention incredibly exciting since could solve our huge waste problem and our dependence on fossil fuels! |
| Changes at T&K Images - Contacting US |
| Our business has grown over the years, mostly due to great feedback from our customers. So to help continue and enhance these communications we have created a Fan Page on Facebook.
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