Thanks everyone for the comments!
Mad Jew, a body shop as in automotive repair.
And thanks for the compliment on the last shot. That was a nice segment of wall, I thought.
Balin, thanks for all the suggestions! I will play around with some B/W and some Sepia tones, and if anything good comes up, I will post.
I think that first picture is definitely blown out.
It was the best of the bunch I took, but I did not get adequate differentiation between the building and the sky. I think I need to possibly go back a tad closer to dusk (to get even more red light
) and also maybe go full manual and crank down the exposure time. As far as spot metering...hmm...the sky is what blew everything out. So I guess if I metered on the sky, then it might have been better. Hmm.....
Lee, thanks for the website! I think it's really interesting how much of this stuff is just sitting around. I grew up in Detroit, and there this was very visible... there was such a weird assembly of very new buildings and bombed out ones, because until recently, there was very little effort to get rid of abandoned buildings (devil's night aside).
Thanks again, guys!