Sunday, November 28, 2021
Let there be clouds!
After struggling for about six weeks to find clouds, I finally got a slight break in the sunny and clear routine that has settled over my stomping grounds in Western NC. The last time I went out with the camera was well before Thanksgiving for a day exploring in the areas of Ashe and Allegheny Counties. I had pretty good fortune that day and had a good bit of time to really look at lots of different areas. This time, I had a substantially smaller window of time to work with. The day started out like so many before it with clear skies. As the day progressed, the clouds started to move in, but they were very thin and weren’t doing much for the quality of light falling on the landscape. Looking at the cloud forecast for the area it was appearing that there would be some mid-level clouds moving in around 3pm which would make the sky interesting and hopefully diffuse the light on the landscape. Around 2:30 I could see that the clouds were building, so I looked to see where I was going to get the most bang for the buck considering I was only going to have a couple of hours to work with.
It appeared as though the clouds were going to be most interesting North of home in the areas of Lansing, and Glade Springs. That was going to be my direction. I didn’t have anything in mind for a subject which I don’t really like going out without at least a starting point. I didn’t really have time to formulate much of anything and just knew that there were areas out in that direction that had some great potential. I was just going to have to follow the light and hope for the best. If nothing else, I was going to be able to get out and do a little photography which is getting more and more important these days as I’m feeling more and more down about my own work. I really need to get out there and create new images that will help get me over this slump that I’ve been in since mid-October.
I started out going up the main road into Jefferson as that was where the clouds were looking the best. My intention was to get onto US221 and work my way around the back roads between Ashe and Allegheny Counties. This was an area that I hadn’t really explored that much in the past, but have found myself coming back home that route which opened up the many possibilities which I was hoping to capitalize on with this trek.
As I proceeded along that route, I was poking around on the side roads and not really finding anything at all to photograph. There was a lot of potential, but nothing was really jumping out as a composition for me. I finally made it right to the line and found a location that I had passed before which had interested me. It was a large property with a lot of old cars on it and a house situated down a long driveway. I really couldn’t tell if the house was occupied or not, and the Nissan truck out front really could have pointed in either direction. Regardless, the light was great on the property so I pulled into the driveway and went down towards the house. I got out and knocked on the door. I heard nothing but the whir of something electric. There was no sign of movement inside, and I just couldn’t tell if this was a lived in house or not. I waited briefly before giving up.
On the way back up the driveway I was looking at the different cars that would make great images and just wishing that I could get the needed permission to photograph these subjects. When I got to the road, I saw a house across the street that looked much more lived in and there was a truck in the driveway. I drove up there and got out to see if they knew anything about the property I was just at. I was greeted at the door and she was very nice about being interrupted by a stranger. She had no connection with the property unfortunately, but stated that the owner lived in the house across the street. I asked for clarification that she did, in fact, mean the house I was just at. She confirmed and added that the truck that was right by the house was his. She didn’t know the name, but said that he was a bit hard of hearing. I thanked her and drove back across the street.
This time I knocked louder and longer. I go the same response, so I repeated the knock once more. Without any signs of movement from inside I slowly went back to the truck and climbed in to leave. It really hurt to drive past at least three subjects that I wanted to photograph without being able to. I kept looking in the rear view mirror to see if he ever came to the door. He didn’t and I was back out on the road once again. I’ll be back here again because I really do want to capture those old cars before they are gone. For now, though, I was back in search of something to photograph.
A short distance from that location I came about another old house that I had thought about photographing the last time I was through here. It was an interesting house, but there was just no composition to be had for it. The sky was good, but the background trees did nothing for the image and really made it heavy on one side. I abandoned that thought and went a little further down the road to another property with a lot of old cars. Looking up at the property, I wasn’t seeing but one composition that was jumping out at me. There were a lot of other potential scenes within the property. It appeared as though the owners were home, but looking at the time, I was only going to have about an hour of light which was not going to be enough time to really get anything out of this property. I was going to have to spend at least two hours or more to get the really good compositions. I decided to save it for later on when I had more time to work through the property…that is, if they would be willing to let me do it at all.
I was not feeling very good about this trek so far. It was feeling rushed since the light was going to be fading quickly at this point. I hadn’t gotten anything at all captured and had no prospects at all. I was now into Allegheny County and snooping around on those back roads feeling like it was all going to be for nothing. It is times like this that I realize that I can get quite desperate for a photograph and I’ve learned to see the signs for that. The last thing that I wanted to do was to capture a scene that was only kind of decent in hopes that I could pull something special out of it. That never happens, and invariably, I end up either trashing the whole attempt, or I edit the image and realize later on that the image was no good to begin with. I didn’t want to create a forced image at this point so I started to be even more particular about what I considered photographing. Of course, that meant that I was passing by several possibilities, but ones that I wasn’t really feeling confident about. The light was falling and I knew that I had about an hour left before the light was going to be gone.
I was approaching 113 and was about to get turned around when I crossed a bridge. Off to the side of that bridge, I spotted an old house sitting in an overgrown field. The house was awesome, but I wasn’t sure about the surrounding landscape. It was bare trees which gave a lot of texture that could very easily turn into a distraction to the house. There really wasn’t much there that I could add to the composition to provide depth and interest either. In short, I wasn’t convinced that this was going to be a good scene at all to photograph. The two things that it had going for it were good light across the scene and a very interesting subject. I went ahead and stopped on the shoulder of the road on the far end of the bridge. I grabbed my camera and loaded up my 70-200mm to see if that would have the right framing for the scene. It looked like that was going to work out just fine, so I added my Lee filter holder and screwed on my Color Combo Polarizer to the 105mm adaptor ring. I secured the camera to the Acratech ballhead and perched the Manfrotto tripod over my shoulder to walk out onto the bridge.
Fortunately, there was just enough shoulder that my tripod would fit out of the travel lane. I had to be careful shooting from behind though as I was standing in that lane. Traffic was very light and I only had to deal with a couple of cars which was nice. I had to really work with the composition for this house though. I didn’t just want a picture of the house, I wanted to capture the story behind it too. I started off by going kind of wide to get more of the environment. I found that there was a bare tree catching a bit of the light to the right of the house that I thought would make a good complimenting element for the composition. I placed the house in the lower left third of the image which allowed me to get a little bit of the sky above for a sense of scale. The clouds were just interesting enough that I felt good including the sky. The exposure was nice and even which meant that I didn’t need a grad filter even though I had set the camera up to be able to take one just in case.
When I was shooting this one, I was thinking that it was going to be a very desaturated color image because I needed that color contrast to help out with all of that texture from the bare trees around it. I wanted to get a mood that was chilly and a little mysterious. In order to do that, I made sure to keep the exposure slightly underexposed to accentuate the shadows. Since the composition was not all that strong, I needed to make use of the light to really set off the subject which I really liked. I spent some time working on this composition and fine tuning it to adjust the placement of different elements and to make sure that I was shooting over the tree tops that were poking up from the side of the bridge. During that time, I started to wonder what an intimate capture of the house would look like.
I ultimately zoomed in on the house and decided to do a very simple image of the house against the background of textures from the trees. After going through the way that the lighting was working with the old house, I had come across a plan of processing this scene and what I was considering doing was going to work well for this intimate view of the house. I worked out the fine tuning of the framing and composition on the house and thought that I was going to like this view better than the more open version of the image. Regardless, I was feeling good that I had the first image in the bag, and possibly two of them. I wasn’t all that excited, but it was nice to finally have something for this evening out.
Since I wasn’t really able to do much more with this scene, I packed the camera up knowing that I was probably going to be finished for the day since the light was falling quickly now. I just got back in the truck and set off North on 113 to see what else I could find this way. I had not been up the road in this direction yet so it was all new to me. I started to pull off on some side roads and eventually ended up on a rather curvy road. As I came to one of the sharp curves, I saw the back side of a barn. It was very close to the road, but it was red, and it had a silo. That is usually a good start for a photograph. I slowed down and saw that the front of the barn was quite interesting and there was a nice fence going down the driveway. I didn’t really see a composition just yet, but I did see some really good potential to the scene so I pulled off onto the shoulder.
I got out with my phone and started to look at how things would look in the frame. I decided that there was a good composition with the winding road framing the barn to the right leading off to the sky. The clouds were looking good above the barn and had started to thin out from what they had been leaving some blue which worked well with the red siding. Knowing that I had about 20 minutes left to work, I went to the back to grab my camera. This time I fitted the 24-70mm lens since I was going to be working much closer and fitted the Lee holder with a polarizer attached to the 105mm adapter. I got it all mounted to the tripod and started to evaluate the scene once again. The sky was going to be too bright to really get the right exposure on the barn, so I decided to slide in a 2-stop soft edge ND grad to keep the sky at bay. Feeling pretty comfortable with the setup, I started to find the location to place the camera.
I started in roughly the same place that I had looked at the phone. I framed up that composition and felt pretty good about it. However, there was something about how the road was pulling my eyes past the barn and out of the frame that I didn’t like. I started to play around with that concept to see if I could do anything to keep the eyes from escaping but found that I just wasn’t able to do it. The composition was just looking haphazard and not at all like I had previsualized. Looking at the sky, I was out of time. I was either going to get something here, or I was going to be done for the day. With that in mind, I started to look at other options and I crossed over to the other side of the road so that I could just eliminate the road completely. That left me with a tight capture of the barn which was better than with the road, but it was a bit boring. The light wasn’t dramatic on the barn since it was in the shade more or less so the whole image felt bland.
I decided to open up the lens just a little bit to include more of the landscape around it which I immediately liked more. I decided that the bare tree on the left side of the frame would be the crop point for the image which left a good bit of the fence next to the driveway for a leading ling. I moved left and right until I had the proper angle on the fence to work with the image. The lower edge of the frame included the driveway, but only enough of it to curve around the base of the barn to frame it. The right side was cropped at the trunk of the tree behind the barn which seemed like a very logical place as it gave the barn breathing room. The horizon was around the upper third and there was enough sky to keep the scene open and airy.
As I was setting this photograph up, I noticed a horse strolling into the scene. Well, this will be wonderful! I go the focus set for the image and confirmed my exposure before firing off a frame. My shutter speed was 1.3 seconds and the horse moved during that exposure so it was blurred. I boosted the ISO to 400 so I could get a shutter speed of about a half second. I fired off another one and that one managed to freeze the horse for the most part. The problem was, there was another horse that was just entering the frame which was in motion that I didn’t see. It was heavily blurred, even at a half second. I waited until it came completely into the frame and stopped moving. At this point, I fired off shots one after another as it looked like the horses were still. I then waited as they moved into different positions. It was just one frame after another as the horses did their thing.
The pair finally got tired of posing for me and meandered back out of the frame. I was left with the scene that I had composed originally, but the light was now gone. As I was looking at the LCD, I was really missing the horses since they had added so much to the scene. I didn’t even try to capture any more of the barn from this angle because the horses had made it work out splendidly. I just looked for other compositions that I could shoot which would make use of the existing light which was getting darker and darker now.
When my shutter speeds crept back up to 4 seconds at ISO400 I realized that there was no way I was going to keep the weeds from blowing around anymore. Once I figured that out, I decided that my time here was done. I packed up my camera and set the GPS for home. I was just at an hour away from home. When I got home, I had 3.5 hour’s worth of trekking done and had traveled just under 100 miles to shoot two scenes. I was pretty sure that I would have two images from the day which was not too bad. I learned that I really didn’t like going out at the end of the day because it really feels rushed with the sun going down. I much prefer the morning because on the days that I like to go out, the good light will last for hours and hours which allows me to get plenty of photography in.
As I was going through these images, I was very pleased to have three that stood out as keepers. Ironically, the scene that I had been the most excited about only yielded one photograph while the one that I wasn’t all that sure about brought two different compositions to the table that said two completely different things. During my time processing these images the thoughts of my own personal style started to seep into my head. I made a realization here as I was looking at what the light was doing to the scene. It is not that clear skies are inherently bad for photography, although it does limit the preferred times of shooting, it is that I don’t like dealing with strong directional light in my images. I’ve known that for a while now and had chalked it up to working with diffused light is just much easier to work with. It is actually because you can shoot in any direction you want to, and you don’t have to worry about deep shadows in the image. That is all true and aspects that I love about shooting on cloudy days. What struck me as a new concept was in my editing style. I’ve often had folks say that my photographs are painterly and that they look more like paintings than photographs. I’ve agreed with them, but never really knew why that was. It hit me as I was editing that I love working with the flat lighting of a cloudy day because I can pick and choose how the light behaves at that point. I achieve that painterly look of my photographs because I start out with very even lighting across a scene. Sure, I’ve worked with high contrast scenes and have created some really nice photos from those conditions, but when it comes down to it, I just love working with flat light most of the time. That is my style and I embrace it.
Thank you for joining me on this kind of short trek. I hope that you enjoyed the resulting images. If you are reading this blog and like the behind the scenes end of things, be sure to subscribe to the blog (link at the bottom of the opening page of my website) and share it with others. I’m getting away from social media and this is the best way to get alerted to new images as they are added to my collection. This website has it all, and I would much rather focus my attention here where I can share my blogs, get comments, have a portfolio gallery, and even highlight my portraiture. You can keep a check on my upcoming workshops as well. Something else that you can do here which you can’t do from social media is purchase prints of your favorite photographs. There is just no better way to enjoy photography, or any art for that matter, than by seeing it in the intended medium of the artist. I never create these photographs to look good online because I have no control over how your monitor is set up. I create them to be seen in print form because that way I can control exactly how the image looks when you are holding it, or looking at it on your wall. By ordering a print, you are helping to finance these treks and the photographs that result from them. It also helps motivate me to get out and do more with the camera.
Keep your eyes out on Wednesday for my next Behind the Camera. I’m going to use this installment to explain why I’ve decided to move away from social media and maybe give you a little insight into some of the struggles of a photographer. It is a bit of a rant, but it was a cathartic experience for me and I do feel better after writing it. Also, at some point during the month of December, I’ll be compiling my list of 12 most significant images for 2021. I’ve just about gotten them picked out. Hopefully your favorite image will be in the collection, but you will have to read through the entry when it is posted in a few weeks.
Until next time….
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