In the Rust Zone

Friday, December 10, 2021

If you are subscribed to this blog, which you can do from the home page at the bottom, you are looking at the date on this and realizing that it is yesterday’s date.  Actually, it could be two days ago by the time this email goes out.  You see, I went out on Friday and shot three different locations.  I didn’t start going through the 136 frames until Saturday morning around 6am.  I am starting to write this blog after finalizing the edits on these images and it is now 4pm.  At the risk of spoiling the surprise, I’ll go ahead and let you know that I have 23 photographs to talk about from this trek, so I will be typing for a good while.  I’ll need to take a break at some point because I haven’t eaten since 5:30 this morning.  Depending on how things go, I should have this entry done around 7-8pm, but there is a chance that it will go longer than that, and potentially into Sunday.  Gosh, I hope that isn’t the case.  I’m ready to get away from this computer and out of this office chair!

Considering the amount of images that I have here, I’m going to do things a little different.  I had originally thought about doing like I do with the beach trips and breaking the images up into three different blogs, but there would still be like 17 photographs in the second blog so I figured I might as well jump into the pool and start swimming.  In an attempt to keep this entry from getting redundant with how I set up the shots, I’m just going to kind of go through the day and what I was thinking as the photographs help illustrate the adventure.  What I used was the same for each image with my standard 24-70mm lens along with a Color Combo Polarizer.  That is my go-to for this type of photography and you will see why when you see the images from the day.  I get a wide variety of compositional choices with that lens, and it just makes things very simple to deal with for 95% of the situations that I will come across.

I suppose I should get into how this trek came to be before I get rolling with the actual trek.  As has become the routine, the weather has been pretty much clear for most of the recent days which makes for terrible photography in my opinion.  When a cloudy day pops up, I tend to take notice.  Looking at the forecast on Thursday, I was seeing that there was going to be mixed clouds in the morning followed by some thicker clouds in the afternoon.  This made for a potentially favorable full day of shooting.  I even had my choice of what direction to go in, but it was looking like the Northern areas were going to be the most favorable once again.  I had been interested in going out to the area of West Jefferson for a while but didn’t really have anything in mind specifically.  I was just going to be in the area that I had wanted to go when I ended up chasing the clouds in Wilkes County a few days ago.  The plan was to get started during mid-morning when the clouds were building up and to go until I got tired, or the clouds left me.

When I started out, I got onto 16 and went North, but as I was traveling out of the Millers Creek area, I was seeing the clouds actually going away right before my very eyes.  This was not good at all, especially since the cloud forecast had pretty uniform clouds across the area.  I didn’t give up, but I was feeling like this was going to be a rough trek already.  When I got to the fork where I would have turned to head towards West Jefferson, I was seeing more clouds to the North and East than in that direction, so I just continued on my way changing my plans as I drove.  Since I was finding myself going through Ashe County, heading towards Alleghany County I figured that this might just be the chance I needed to stop by the area where I had seen several cars I wanted to shoot, but had never found anyone home.  There was another location in the same area which had even more cars, but I wasn’t really seeing but one composition there.  Since I was going to be out there though, I figured that I would give them both a try.  I was just hoping that the clouds would hold long enough for me to get something captured with the camera.

The further I got down the road, the better the clouds were looking.  There wasn’t a lot of definition in them, but they were producing some wonderful light.  It was great light for waterfalls as a matter of fact, but there was just not that much water to be had in the area since we are in a rare Fall drought here in Western NC.  I was left with finding some old rusty cars to work with because they work well in that light as well.  After my last trek, I was feeling pretty good about rust hunting again.  It really has been a while since I’ve done more than a photo here and there in my travels of a rusty vehicle and I’m kind of missing it.  I guess I realized just how little I have done with this genre while I was hosting the Decay Workshop for the Charlotte Camera Club last weekend.  I was hoping to make up for lost time today, as long as I could find people at home to ask permission to be on their property.

As I was making my way down the road, I passed a large parking lot that belonged to a trucking company which I have been by many times now.  There was a VW Bug sitting close to the road tucked in with some other vehicles which had always caught my eye.  It had that perfect patina to it and really looked good to me.  The problem was it was in a terrible location with much nicer vehicles parked in very close proximity to it.  There was no way to get an overall shot of the car even though it was just totally beautiful.  As I drove past, I found myself listening to a mental recording of a presentation I had heard a while back, as well as a workshop I had attended.  The voice sounded a lot like my own, and he was saying crazy things like work the subject within the context that you are given.  If you can’t shoot the overall, go for the isolation.  Of course, I realized I was remembering things that I had been telling others during my presentation as well as during the workshop.  Hey, everyone needs reminders from time to time, even the ones that give those reminders.  I figured that this was a good starting point for the day, and I would be able to get some isolations done of this really cool car.

I got turned around and pulled into the parking lot near the car.  Before I got out of the truck, I took stock in what I was looking at to see if I was seeing what I was hoping that I would see.  Sure enough, I was seeing some areas of the car that caught my eye on the front.  The one that really stood out to me was a simple capture of the hood down at the lower edge.  I think that everyone can recognize the panel lines and shapes there.  I also liked the passenger side fender since it was still partially blue with some great rust on it.  It was a starting point for me, so I turned the truck off and grabbed my camera.  I started to slowly and methodically work the bug paying attention the areas that I liked on it.  I was going for more of an abstract feeling with most of the image and looked at lines and shapes more than the car.

At this point in the process, I was recalling an email conversation that I have been in with Patrick for a few days.  Part of that email conversation had to do with how photography tends to mirror how you view the world.  It is a concept that I have held tight for years, and I was starting to see the practical application of that theory developing here.  For as long as I can remember, when I am stressed, or there is a lot going on, I tend to see the world as individual details.  It gives me the opportunity to focus on the simple rather than the complex.  I have been unstressed for most of the time since retirement, but these last six months or so have really been building a lot of stress around my photography.  I’ve been adding new techniques to my toolbox to handle completely different types of photography, and then struggling to find good practice for those skills.  It has been weighing on me and it has ultimately caused me to start having a hard time getting motivated to do much photography.  As I was working this Bug, it hit me what I had been doing wrong all this time.  I had forgotten how I use photography as a stress relief when I am dealing with complicated things…I simplify what I am shooting and pick out details and isolations.

I was doing just that with this simple car.  I could feel my attitude getting better and better as I found new areas of the car to work with.  I couldn’t help but remember the four or five times that I had looked at this Volkswagon in the last month thinking that there was no way to photograph it because of the environment.  Silly photographer forgot rule number 1 with photography…be creative with how you capture the images.  With each frame, I was feeling better and better about my creative abilities and for the first time in a while I wasn’t forcing anything with the camera.  The compositions were coming quickly with this car and it seemed that everywhere I looked, there was something there to photograph.

I just can’t quite explain what came over me with this car.  It was almost like I was having an out of body experience and everything was just falling into place without me having to even try.  There was all this creative energy that had been pent up for much too long and it was all coming out all at once it seemed.  I remember thinking to myself that I was becoming a rust savant of sorts.  In my defense, it really had been a long time since I’ve been able to really let loose on a rusted car.  I just really hadn’t run into that many in my travels here lately and I had been focusing more on the barns and old houses when not shooting landscapes.  This was a nice change of pace and more my typical subject matter for this time of year.  I was really having fun and I’ve said it many times before.  You can’t help but smile when you see a VW Bug, regardless of its condition.

I was probably at that location for about 30 minutes or so.  In that time, I shot about 25 frames, and there were just a few duplicate images where I changed the exposure or focus point.  Most everything was its own composition which was a lot of different ways of viewing this car.  I’m sitting here shaking my head thinking about all the times that I told myself that there wasn’t a good composition to be had here.  If we look at the scoreboard thus far, it would appear that there are five examples of how I was wrong about that.  I’ve never been so happy to be wrong before.  I left the camera put together and slid it into my bag and got back on the road again.

I was feeling really good about the day and I was excited about the chance to photograph another bug that I have been wanting to which was just about 10 more miles down the road, nearly in Alleghany County.  The clouds were holding up which was a nice change of pace for me.  After seeing all of the clouds clearing off on the other side of the mountain, I had been worried that they would do the same where I was at, but it wasn’t looking like that would be the case.  I was watching the sides of the road with a newfound energy that reminded me of treks from a year ago when everything out here was still very new to me.

I didn’t really find anything else before I came to the house that I have stopped at so many times before.  I saw nothing at all different about it, and really figured that I was going to get the same lack of an answer if I were to knock on the door once again.  Instead, I decided to go on down the road a little way further to the other location that I had been interested in working.  I knew that it was going to potentially take quite a bit of time due to the number of cars on the property.  Since the forecast was calling for clouds through the day, I felt that this would be a good time to give this location a try.  The last time I had been through here, I had looked pretty hard and determined that it didn’t look like there was anyone home to even ask.  When I got there, I missed the turn that would take me past the back yard where it appeared that the owner would park.  I just slowed down and looked to see if I could make out any new vehicles near the house.  What I saw was even better than a vehicle.  I saw a man walking back around the back of the house.  I had just enough time to pull into the driveway and work my way over to the side of the main house.

I didn’t take the time to park all correct and just got out and went to the back of the house saying “hello” in a slightly louder than normal voice.  I got around to where I had seen him and couldn’t see any signs of movement at all.  I called out a couple of more times without luck.  At this point, I was thinking that I might have seen things that weren’t there, but I persisted because there was a lot of really great vehicles on this property that I really wanted to photograph.  I went around to the side door and knocked.  Again, no answer at all.  I was really getting concerned that I had been imagining things in my hopes of finding an owner at home.  I slowly turned and stepped off the porch.  I looked around the front of the house and started to walk over to the other house as the same guy came around from the back.  OK, I wasn’t going crazy and I had seen a person.

I introduced myself and said how happy I was that I had found him.  He seemed happy enough and wasn’t concerned as to why I was there which takes a lot of the stress off of the situation for me.  After I had the basic introduction out of the way I went into telling him how I had driven by here several times and was amazed at the collection that he had.  He then threw a curve ball at me and said that he recognized me from when I had come by before wanting to buy a car.  I let him know that wasn’t me and I wasn’t trying to buy anything, nor sell anything.  We had a laugh over that and continued to talk about photography.  He wasn’t surprised that somebody wanted to photograph his rusty junk and told me about another photographer who had stopped by to get some pictures.  He had sent some of the pictures to him by mail and apparently, he was pretty good.  I told him I would be happy to share some of the photos that I got from here provided they were any good.  I still hadn’t worked out but a single composition of a 40’s Dodge that was sitting on the side of the property.

Things actually got very strange at this point because he told me that I was welcome to photograph whatever I wanted and that he was going to be heading out to go and check on a car.  If I was hearing this correctly, he was going to leave me alone on his property for an appreciable amount of time.  This is not something that I ever expect, and actually fully expect to be joined by the property owner when I am in situations like this.  Danny was fine with me staying here while he went and took care of business though and even said that I could move whatever I needed to in order to make the photograph.  I ensured him that I wouldn’t be moving anything at all, and that I liked the challenge of working around the visual distractions.  I love shooting a scene as I find it and I don’t like to start changing things around because that is a slippery slope in this type of photography.

Danny went to get ready to go and I grabbed my camera.  Not knowing what I was going to run into, I just grabbed my bag with everything in it.  As luck would have it, I didn’t have to go into the bag but a single time to get a lens cloth to take care of a smudge I put on the polarizer while twisting it with the lens hood on.  It was still nice to be prepared for whatever might present itself since the property was rather large and I would be spending a good deal of time on the other side away from my truck.  I found myself feeling like a kid in a candy store because I just had no idea where to start.  I figured that I would go with the low hanging fruit first and shoot the Dodge that I had been eyeing from the street.  It was probably the simplest one to capture because it was off by itself, and that would get that out of the way so I could start working with the other subjects and try to find suitable compositions with them.

The Dodge wasn’t quite as easy as I had thought.  There was a lot of added distractions to the scene around the car like a fence with plastic sheeting on it over to the left.  There was a small barn to the rear, and a small house up on top of the hill to the right.  I tried vertical and horizontal compositions from both sides and finally decided that the horizontal worked best from the passenger’s side.  I was able to get a good 3/4 view of the car with a good perspective.  If I were to make the barn go away in the background, I would have to get down low enough to have the roof obscure it which would lose a lot of the visual interest of the car and make the sky too much of the image.  I could go higher and provide separation between the barn and the car, but that would give the car a funny angle.  I just decided to embrace the barn and let it sit on the roof and be slightly blurred for separation.  I shot a couple of different variations here that included the small house at the top of the hill which made for a more interesting composition I thought.  When I started to edit that, I ended up cropping the house out in favor of a 4×5 ratio but found that just too boring and went back to the original crop to include the house.  The end result yielded an image that asked more questions than it answered, and I was happy with it.  I wasn’t quite feeling the same energy that I had with the VW earlier but knew that I could regain that if I just stuck with things.

I tried to look for isolations on the Dodge, but never could find anything that I liked on it.  My next stop was the house at the top of the hill.  I wasn’t so much after the house as I was the Chevrolet pickup that was parked next to it.  It was a very interesting shade of gray.  There was a bit of the purplish paint bleeding through the gray primer that gave a tint to the truck.  It was hard to explain, but I found it interesting, and with it in close proximity to the, shall I say, colorful house, I felt that there would be a quirky composition to be had here.  Again, things looked much easier than they actually were when it came to a composition.  With the truck lacking a bed, it was kind of difficult getting a composition that provided the right sense of balance to the scene, so I ended up cropping in just at the rear of the cab so that the bed wasn’t even missed.  I had to be careful of the angle that I shot this at, so I could keep the back of the cab in view so there wasn’t a visible cut in the truck.  From there, it was just all a matter of elevating the tripod to figure out the relationship.

All of this was not going nearly as easy as the VW had gone.  Those compositions just jumped out at me, and here I was fighting for compositions.  The difference was that I was looking at a very complex scene when I was tired of looking at complex problems.  What I needed to do was to get in close and shoot isolations on this truck.  That was just what I did, and once I had that mental switch, the compositions started to come one after another just like with the Bug.  I was working with the grill, the headlight bucket, and the side of the hood.  Once I started looking small on this truck, the compositional issues just faded away and I was having fun once again.  I was finally feeling like I was going to be able to make use of this grand opportunity that I had been given by Danny.  While I was working on this truck, he had gotten into his truck and headed off on his errand.  I thanked him again, and went back to work finishing up the isolations on this truck.

I had shot the two vehicles on that side of the property at that point, and I was ready to go over to the other side where there were quite a few more vehicles.  I was really worried about the compositions that would be available over there.  I was pretty sure that I was going to be shooting a bunch of isolations because the setting reminded me of a salvage yard with the way that the vehicles were all placed together.  Fortunately, I love shooting in that kind of environment, especially when I am of a mind to think in terms of isolations.  When I got over on that side of the property, there was a GMC pickup that caught my eye.  It wasn’t a rusty truck by any stretch, but it had been brush painted by the looks of it, which kind of counted for this type of photography.  It wasn’t a showroom paint job, and there were missing parts that countered the fresh colors of paint.  The teal and black worked well together on the truck and it was set off from the rest of the vehicles which gave me the idea to shoot the overall composition of it.  Since there was a lack of rust here, I didn’t really see much point in doing isolations on it, but with the clouds looking decent in the sky there was a good chance for a keeper in an overall composition.

The problem that I was running into was that the sky was quite a bit brighter than the subject because the sun was well behind those clouds.  I could have used an ND Grad here, but the trees sloped down from the upper right, and there was a bare tree that went way up into the sky on the left.  The use of the filter would have darkened those trees too much.  I was very fortunate that there was no breeze at all at this point, and other than a little bit of drizzle, there was no issues with taking my time on each image.  I decided to shoot this composition as an HDR series, so I set things up to do a four frame and a three frame blend of this scene with slightly different compositions.  I wasn’t sure how it would come out, but the sky was interesting enough that I thought that it would carry the image well enough even if the truck wasn’t quite the decay masterpiece that I was after.

When I got done with the “easy” composition, I started to look around to see what kind of isolations that I could find.  There was a big Chevrolet truck parked near the teal GMC that caught my eye first.  It was covered in beautiful rust and textures.  There was no way to get an overall composition of this truck because the cab was the only interesting part of it, and it was parked much too close to other vehicles.  It was going to be isolations that were on the menu here.  The first thing that I set up was a grill shot because the grill was rather interesting, but I wasn’t able to get the symmetrical composition that I was after due to body damage.  That prompted me to focus on the part that really caught my eye and seemed to sum up this wonderful old truck which was the hood emblem.  The Chevy bowtie was still in place, although rather faded which was not a problem for me.  What I was really after was the bits of bright orange rust that were above the emblem.  To me, this looked like fire burning on top of the chrome, and that was the story that I wanted to capture here.

I had that shot set up really quickly and it only took two exposures to get exactly what I was after with plenty of room for some fun editing of it.  That is the beauty of this type of photography.  Rust can be quite colorful and quite beautiful when processed certain ways.  As I teach in my workshops, I was shooting for how I wanted to edit the images at this point, and I was already seeing the end results in my mind.  I knew that I was going to be taking a poetic approach to the colors and textures here, so I wanted to make sure that I had an image where I had lots of wiggle room with the exposure values.  The extra saturation that I would be pulling in would push the pixels and I just needed the best capture that I could get to be sure I could do that.  I was definitely getting back in the zone with my rust isolations once again which was feeling quite nice.

After getting things rolling with the hood emblem on this truck, I moved around the front to see what else might appeal to me.  I loved the headlights here because they kind of reminded me of an Apache, and the buckets were still in decent shape which contrasted nicely with the surrounding rust.  The headlights being in those buckets was a bonus that I wasn’t going to let get away.  Going back to something that I will share in my Decay Workshops, I was looking between the two sides and determining where the most interest lies.  The biggest difference in the sides was that the parking light on the driver’s side was broken which added just a bit more visual interest to the composition.  That was the side that I decided to shoot, and I worked the scene with the headlight as a visual anchor.  I really got excited about how this one was looking as I was shooting it from slightly different positions.  I wanted to get all of the little elements lined up to work as a cohesive composition.  It was looking really good, but there was too much thought going into this one, so I decided to look for something that didn’t require quite as much thought.

I moved around the cab to see what else I could work with and found the area around the fuel filler.  This is a composition that I have worked before on different trucks, and I knew that it would work.  It is a simple portrait oriented image that shows the weathering below the filler neck.  That was what I went to first, but quickly decided that while this composition required no thought at all, it was actually looking rather boring.  I wanted to do something different here and I wanted to let my instinct lead the way.  I started off by getting off of the perpendicular plane that I had been shooting from and I moved off to the corner to add depth.  I didn’t want to keep that vertical orientation, so I flipped the camera horizontal.  This caused me to break one of my rules where I put a body line right through the middle of the image.  It worked this time though because the angle that I was shooting this from gave a nice curve to the line which gave more dimension to the scene.  Everything was then balanced out with the door handle for the image that I liked a whole lot more than I thought I would.

I made another walk around the old Chevy and found that there was really nothing else left to photograph on it that I could find.  There was, however, another GMC parked behind this big Chevy.  Kind of like the other GMC, this one had some interesting paint choices on it, but there was still some rust showing through which made me very happy.  It had an odd stance though and the bed was placed over the rear wheels as it should be, but it was the wrong bed for the truck which left a huge gap between it and the cab.  The question was how to photograph this rather interesting truck to get the best results.  I walked around it for several minutes just taking it all in.  I eventually started to see some isolations to it, and I began to look at the best opportunities.  The first one that came to mind was my favorite composition on this this body style of truck.  We have already seen it once in this blog from the purplish Chevy that I had shot a little while ago.  This time there was an interesting emblem in place that advertised the transmission which the truck was equipped with.  It was surrounded in that blue and black paint, but the rust was still shining through. It was one of the more interesting patinas that I had seen and that was what I wanted to capture here.

I moved around the truck to look at other areas, but none of them really measured up to the look of that rusty part of the cowl and hood.  I really liked the truck as a whole, but with the paint that had been applied to it, I was having a hard time finding good isolations that didn’t focus on the odd paint.  Had my mojo gone away?  Surely, I was going to be able to get something else with this truck, but I was just at a loss for the moment.  I went through all of the things that I liked and didn’t like about it and found that it was actually isolated enough to get an overall shot of it which would give the patina the context that it needed.  I could also photograph it from an angle where you wouldn’t be able to see the gap between the bed and the cab.  The biggest problem was going to be the stance which was a little odd on this truck and made it look a little too modern in my opinion.  It was worth a try though.

What I ended up coming up with was a composition that looked like a postcard shot of the truck.  It was there in the frame, slightly off to the left with the white fence running off from the front.  It wasn’t bad, but it was boring and there was no story behind it except for the paint that interested me.  I needed to do something else for this truck because I didn’t like how it was looking so far.  I stopped what I was doing for a minute and thought through things logically.  I needed something else in the frame to help balance the truck out and to give some kind of context that might indicate some more of its story.  There were two things around that I could use.  The first was the truck that I had just photographed, but there was nothing but a frame behind the cab.  The truck that was parked next to it was facing this way, but the truck wasn’t interesting and would force me to have to include much more of the property than I wanted to.  In short, that direction was too complicated to work with.  Behind the little GMC was a camper that was designed to fit in a pickup bed.  There was stuff piled against it which indicated that it hadn’t been used in a while.  That was the vibe that I wanted for the truck, so that became my secondary element for the composition.  It allowed me to keep the white fence in the frame, using the trees as a background, and there was a worn place in the yard which brought the eyes through the frame.  It was everything that I was hoping for but hadn’t realized it until just now.

I managed to frame up a nice composition of the pair and chose to go with a 16:9 aspect ratio, cropped in camera.  It helped to elongate the scene and keep the attention between the two main elements.  When I was finished with that, I stopped again and looked at the scene to see what else I wanted to photograph.  I had shot everything that was situated away from other vehicles.  In short, I had picked the low hanging fruit already, but I was still wanting to do more.  There was so much more that was here, and I just knew that I would be able to find more isolations at the very least.  Many of the really cool cars that were here like an El Camino, Buick Skylark, and four Corvettes were all in a condition that didn’t really lend themselves to photography.  There was not that much rust on them, and none of them were situated where I could get overall images.  My only option was to do isolations, but without a nice patina, I didn’t really see much point in it.

It was the El Camino that volunteered first for the camera.  While I didn’t find anything at all that I liked all around the car, the grill had a really nice SS 396 emblem in the middle and there was just enough age apparent in the chrome to make it an interesting little composition.  There wasn’t much color to be had around the emblem, so I shot it with black and white in mind.  I started with my typical symmetrical composition and found that to be quite boring indeed.  I was about to give up on it but then thought about going off to the side which would add all kinds of visual tension to the composition.  The depth would come from grill trailing off in the distance with a softening of focus.  I was thinking it would be a simple, yet effective composition.  As it turns out, this is one of my favorites from the day.

Fresh on the heels of the El Camino, I moved over to the Red Skylark.  This car had decent red paint on it with minimal patina.  The top had been painted with what appeared to be POR-15 and was black.  There really was nothing anywhere on the body that made me think photograph.  That was, until I went to the front of the car as I had done with the Chevy.  It was the grill once again that caught my attention, but this time there was a big difference.  The only emblem on the grill was the GS over on the driver’s side next to the twin headlights.  Normally, I would have been all over this, but there was just nothing about that which grabbed my attention.  It was the lettering for Buick along the leading edge of the hood which got me excited.  I would have much rather the hood been rusty with nice chrome emblems, but the red wasn’t too bad, and it would add some drama to the composition when added with the angle of the hood.  To capitalize on that drama, I shot it from up high to accentuate the “V” and made sure that the center bar of the grill was visible beneath the hood.  It was all balanced out with the bumper at the bottom of the composition.  There is a bit of abstract quality here that I really liked, and I think that went a long way to making this image a success.

By this time, I had pretty much worked around all of the cars that were out in the open on the property.  I had been holding off on working the two Corvettes and LeMans that were parked in the open garage.  I wanted to give them a try because I’ve had really good luck with garage photos in the past, especially when the light was this soft.  As I started to look at this setting, I was a little concerned that one of the Covettes and the LeMans were nosed into the garage leaving two fairly good condition tails available to photograph.  There really wasn’t a composition to be had with either of these, but the blue Corvette on the left side was a different story.  it was not the prettiest of cars, but it did have a noticeable amount of patina to the front clip and had obviously been sitting there for quite some time.  This was where things got kind of difficult.  Garage shots are difficult because you will always have different garage items laying around and being stored.  These items either have to be cropped out of the frame or embraced and used to tell the story.  I had some choices to make here, and I didn’t really like many of the solutions that I came up with.  I tried a lot of different ways of shooting this car not really knowing if any of them were going to work or not.  I did compositions straight on, from the driver’s quarter, vertical, horizontal, and so on.  Part of what really drew me in was the drop cord on the wall that was next to the sign that said “Danger, Live Wires” which was ironically positioned right under a hanging plug.  You know how I like to find humor in my images where I can.

the other aspect that I decided that I liked about this scene was the wooden rafters for the roof which had a really nice warm tone to them.  The way that the supports were put in provided a nice framing element with a built-in vignette for the Vette that really helped with the composition.  One of the aspects that really couldn’t decide on at the scene was whether or not to include the slightly custom sign above the garage which had “666” between two arrows.  having talked with the owner, I realized what this signified.  No, not that.  His number has 666 as the last three digits and he finds that funny, so this sign goes along with that.  It also gave an interesting element and part of a story for this old Chevy as well.  I was able to get that sign as well as the main crossmember of the face of the garage in a vertical image.  The angle on the car isn’t quite as good here as it was with the car alone, but it really isn’t too bad at all.  When I got the images home, these were the two that I liked from this scene and just couldn’t decide on which one worked the best.  They both have completely different stories to tell so I decided to leave them both in the collection.

If you will remember, Danny said that I could move any of the boxes, or anything actually, that I wanted to for photographs.  That is just not my style so you will see the long box just to the side of the Vette in both images.  I could have moved this easy enough, but I chose to leave it there because it was part of the scene, and I didn’t want to mess with it.  I actually ended up using it as a part of the composition and looking at the images in edited format, it served a valuable purpose in both images.  Since the car is pretty well framed by the wall, ceiling, and ground, it is that driver’s side that tends to go into the openness.  By including that long box, I am actually able to introduce a visual boundary to the composition which overpowers the diagonal piece of gutter in the rear that would otherwise pull your eyes out of the scene.  The box which I might have moved, was actually a saving grace to the composition and I didn’t even have to stage it for it to work out!

I really wasn’t too sure about the Corvette compositions, so I went back out to the yard and started to look for other ways to shoot the garage area.  There was a black Chevy with some half-painted flames on the front fenders that I hadn’t really worked with yet, so I started to consider using it as a foreground for the garage.  I was able to frame up a composition with the front half of the car as a foreground leading to the Skylark to the left.  The El Camino was just slightly out of the way of the garage where you could see all three cars.  There was a lot going on with that composition and it looked fair in the camera, so I tried a couple of different variations on that idea.  I was pretty sure that one of the would work out, but when I got the images home, none of those panned out at all.  They were just too complex and there wasn’t a strong enough visual anchor to really make the image work.  I ended up trashing that series which I’m not sad about at all.  I have plenty of images from the property that I liked much better.

I wasn’t done with this property just yet though.  While I was working on that overly complex composition, I saw the opportunity to shoot the teal GMC one more time.  The sky was looking good overhead again and I wanted to try and get something with the clouds looking like they were.  I moved into a different position from my original attempt and worked on vertical compositions at this point.  The lighting was much better, so I didn’t have to worry about doing HDR blends this time.  I was certain that these images would be better than what I had shot earlier in the day, so I went with several of them using slightly different framing each time.  I actually did find one of them that I liked when I was going through the day’s photos, but after I had gone through the editing process, I found that it wasn’t any better than what I had shot to begin with, and I liked the original composition better.

Just as I was ready to call it quits on this side of the property, I saw a potential composition with the GMC from the opposite side using the rusty Chevy as a background element and that white fence as a line through the image.  This shot came together much easier than the last few compositions that I had been working on and that was a relief.  I had been in the zone earlier in the day, but I could tell that my creative energy was fading.  I had been at this now for over two hours in the same location.  I was thankful for the opportunity, and I was really happy that the weather was holding.  I had figured that it would be about two hours’ worth of work to go through this property and I was apparently correct.  After a couple of months of suffering a creative block, expending this much energy at once was rather taxing, so I was not going to look the gift horse of a composition here in the mouth.  I just framed it up and shot it.  I did a couple of different variations here with some different focal lengths and camera height to make sure that I had the right perspective and relative proportions between the two trucks.

When I had that one in the bag, I was ready to head back over to my truck and get things packed up.  I had carried my bag around all day for no reason at all because I never once strayed from my initial setup.  I’m telling you, that 24-70mm lens is incredibly versatile when it comes to this kind of photography.  I started to walk back to the truck but stopped to look at the old Sinclair gas pump by the garage.  It was interesting and I wanted to photograph it, but there just wasn’t a composition to be had with it.

Or was there?

I saw a pile of old wheels at the base of the pump kind of spilling off to the right side.  Just beyond the pump was the odd GMC with the different paints on it.  I could see a composition developing here and decided that I would set it up and give it a try.  I got the camera in a rough position and started to play with the focal lengths to get the perspective right and to hide the camper that was behind the truck.  The gas pump did a great job of hiding that bit white box that would have been a distraction in this composition.  Once I had it all figured out, I did a focus stack of it to make sure that I had an option if f/20 didn’t quite do the trick.  I tried my best to get this as a single image and by using hyperfocal distance focusing, I was able to get it all in adequate sharpness with the truck going slightly soft which was understandable for the distance involved.  It helped to show depth without being a distraction.

For a quick moment, the sun came out and illuminated the scene, but when I looked at the images on the computer, there was just too much contrast to the scene, and I liked the more evenly lit images that the clouds provided.  I liked the composition enough that I committed to it and stuck here through a good bit of changing light.  during that time, I altered the composition slightly, changed the focus point on occasion and just really wanted to make sure that I had at least one good shot from this scene before I broke the camera down.  When I was done here I had over 100 frames for the day, and more than 70 of them were from this location.  I was really impressed with it considering that from the road I was only seeing a single composition.  It was that composition that landed me in this treasure trove of classic vehicles which I had spent nearly three hours photographing.

I started to make my way back to the truck and stopped off at the Dodge one last time.  While I was looking at it to see if there were any compositions that I missed there, I heard a truck coming into the driveway.  I turned and saw Danny pulling in.  He came up to me and rolled the window down.  He made mention of the fact that I was still working on the Dodge picture and stated the obvious that I was fascinated by the car.  I was, but I let him know that I had spent the majority of the time over on the other side. I was just making sure that I had everything that I had hoped to get which I had.  I thanked him again and said that if any of the images worked out, I would bring him some prints.  He didn’t use a computer and had no email, so I couldn’t wait for him to look and see if there were any that he liked out of the bunch. Since he had been so generous, I wanted to bring him a print or two if any turned out.  I guess you can see that I got more than a couple keepers from this location, so I suppose I’ll be making some small prints tonight.  It was very much worth it I think, and he has invited me back any time to do it again.

When I left the property, I still had the camera built because I wanted to go back to the house where I’ve stopped several times in the past.  I wanted to try one more time since I was out here.  I pulled into the driveway and parked in my normal spot and went to knock on the door.  Nothing at all changed, and there was still no answer. I’m starting to wonder if the guy still lives there.  The truck is currently registered and expires in March.  There is moss growing on it, and it hasn’t moved an inch in the last several weeks, so I don’t think he is driving anywhere.  I might try one more time, but I think that this property is going to be a write-off for me.  I have at least given it the best try that I know how to give.  It was probably for the best as I don’t think I could have done the property justice after my last location.  I was tired and ready to head home.

I found myself back on 16 going South headed for home.  The sky was looking really pretty with the sun getting low on the horizon.  As I passed by a location where I had shot an old VW and a Ford tractor, a vacant house caught my eye on the other side of the street.  The sun was just kissing it in the evening sky and the clouds were amazing above it.  I didn’t want to stop, but this was the first time I had ever really noticed the house before and I loved what the light was doing with it.  I pulled off on the next place I could and got turned around.  I then pulled off on the shoulder where the house was located.  It was up a hill, and I liked the view from the bottom of that hill, so I grabbed the camera that was still built with the 24-70mm lens.  I set the tripod up about a 1/3 of the way up the hill and started to make exposures with a tall tree included just to the left of the house.  It was a nice composition, but the house was framed exactly square to the camera which wasn’t all that appealing to me.  I moved to the right so that I could get some depth to the house as well as the tree, but that composition was awkward, and the background obscured the sky too much.

I ended up going the rest of the way up the overgrown driveway to the same level as the house.  I set up under that tree that I had been photographing and found a much simpler composition that gave me a nice quarter view of the house.  This was the composition that I decided to commit to, and I stayed here as the sky changed.  I waited until the most interesting part of the sky moved overhead which completed the composition.  After that happened, I decided that I was hungry and wanted to go home.  It was 3:45 by this point and I had been gone for nearly six hours if my memory serves.

It had been a very long day, and a very active day which was something that I really needed.  My creativity had been exercised and it felt very good to have this kind of volume again from a trek.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want this from every trek I go on, but when it does happen it means that I was completely inspired and found a lot of subjects that excited me.  I wasn’t afraid of experimenting on this trip after I had such great luck doing the isolations on the Bug to get started.  That was just what I needed to simplify my life, and it really helped drive the point home that I had been making in the conversation with Patrick.  It has actually moved me to do a Behind the Camera on that very topic.  You can look for it on February 1st as New Year’s Day is already spoken for as a wrap-up for 2021.

I do hope that you enjoyed this trek as well as the photographs.  I hope that you were able to make it this far in the reading.  I knew it was going to be a long one, but it actually came out shorter than I thought it might.  For those that are interested in what time I’m finishing writing, it is 8:49 right now.  I did take a break to make dinner a few hours ago, but other than that I have been working pretty steady on this entry.  I’m a little tired of typing now, but it is a good tired and it means that I have had something to write about which just hasn’t been the case here lately.  As always, if any of the images moves you that you find here or in the galleries, please consider purchasing a print.  I don’t get to clock in on this job, and I don’t get paid unless somebody buys goods or services from me.  Print sales is a great way to support me in my art and make sure that I can continue to go on these treks to capture the images that excite my eyes.

If you are interested in learning how to form a composition, specifically in the landscape, be sure to check out my upcoming workshop dealing with building a composition in the landscape.  It is scheduled for May 14, 2022, at Doughton Park off of the Blue Ridge Parkway.  It is a mini-workshop and will allow you to sleep in on the day of.  It will be an information packed afternoon where you will be capturing your own photographs as we work through the different compositional possibilities from one of my favorite areas to shoot.  Get signed up today to ensure your spot.  I’ve already got two that have committed, and another two that are thinking about it thus far.

Thanks so much for joining me on this trek, and I look forward to what is coming up next.  There are several sunny days ahead, but I am sure that I’ll be out again when the weather is good.  All that is left to find out is where I’ll end up. I’m as interested to find out as you are.

Until next time….