Sunday, June 4, 2023
I was going to start this off with a knock-knock joke because I started the afternoon off going to three houses trying to get permission to get close enough to a Ford Fairlane to make a good photo of it. The punchline was the same for each of the houses though; crickets. Yep, I drove 45 minutes away on a hope that I might get access to this car and failed miserably. It all started a couple of weeks ago when I was coming back from visiting my Dad. I was in the Miata, which meant that I was taking the back roads and enjoying the fresh air. Of course, any time I am out driving in areas that I don’t frequent, I am always looking for new subjects to photograph. While this trip didn’t take me on completely new roads, I will say that I was on roads that I don’t get to visit all that often. In fact, Union Grove is one of those areas that has probably been a year since I’ve been through. What caught my attention was a ’56ish Ford Fairlane which was about 100 yards off the roadway at the top of a slight hill. The area was largely farmland, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get anything with the car or not. Of course, I didn’t have the camera with me as it fills the trunk and keeps me from enjoying the spirited drive.
On the way back, I slowed in the area and gave it another look. I thought that there might be a chance that I could make it work, so I remembered the cross street so I could try and figure out which house the property might belong to. When I got home, I started to do a little research on the area and found that it could be any number of the houses that were to the side of the car. There was going to be no better way than to go back out there and start knocking in order to find out if I could gain closer access.
The timing might not have been the best as I have been pretty serious about my landscapes here of late, but I just can’t pass up on the chance to photograph rust if the opportunity presents itself. I just bided my time and waited for a good weather day before I would head back out there again. There were actually a good many decent weather days that happened between me seeing the car and finally going back out there. We are still working with the house, and we ended up with our Granddaughter for a week which we had not planned for. By this weekend though, things were starting to calm down and I had the urge to go out and get some photos done.
Looking at the weather, there was a heavy overcast during the morning which would be breaking up after lunch. The remaining clouds would be in the lower and mid altitudes which always appeals to me. With those types of clouds, I get good, diffused light, and visual interest in the sky should I need to include that in my composition. It is the kind of conditions that I love for my decay photography. It usually leaves the landscapes a little flat, but I enjoy having even light when I am going hunting for rust.
I left the house around 12:30 or so and headed out to Union Grove. The clouds were already starting to break up which was providing some wonderful light which I was looking forward to using. The trip out there was pretty much as expected. I passed a couple of locations that had caught my eye previously, but I didn’t like what the compositions were enough to stop. I was determined to go and try the Fairlane before I did anything else.
By the time I got to the Fairlane, I had seen three locations that might be alternates if I had the time. One was a Mercedes Benz parked at an old gas station. The other two were some old cars scattered in the yards of two different houses. None of these were enough to distract me from what I was here to capture so I started to dial in what house might belong to the car. I started with the house on the corner since it had what appeared to be the only operational car in the driveway. There was no answer at all at the front door. I didn’t feel comfortable going to the back door because of how the property was laid out. I went to the next house that I thought might be the one, but it was obviously vacant with inoperable cars parked next to it. The last house I went to really looked uninhabited and I didn’t even get out of the truck. I spent some time along the side of the road trying to figure out if I could get a long range shot that would work.
I ended up giving up on the idea because the composition that I was going to need to shoot was going to be a tight one. Having the car fill the frame so much, I was looking for detail and texture which I was going to be unable to achieve at that distance with the extender on the telephoto lens. The composition would have been possible I think, but the sharpness would not have stood up to the size print that I would want to make. I was going to have to get in closer, and there was no way around it.
Feeling a little disappointed, I drove on down the road to another later model Fairlane that had caught my eye. This was in pretty good shape, and it turned out that it was at a dealership. There was a lot of writing on the windows, and there was too much surrounding it to be a good photo. That was strike two. My next stop was a yard with a couple of old and rusty trucks that I thought might be interesting. There were really no clear angles on them, and the house in the middle of the property was caving in. There were no obvious signs of who might own the property, and nothing was close enough to really consider knocking. I wasn’t really out anything here since the I wasn’t seeing any compositions anyway.
I had now struck out three times in about two miles worth of road. I had one more place in mind, but I really didn’t hold out much hope for it. I had been to this next place several times and had seen all of the “No Trespassing” signs and knew that the amount of clutter around the car was going to be problematic. I was here, so I thought I would go by and check it out once again. A couple miles down the road, I found the blue Mercedes next to the gas pumps. Nothing had really changed over the years, and I was still having a hard time seeing the composition. As I studied things from the shoulder of the cross street, I started to consider an option that I had not thought of before. Usually for something like this, I would shoot it with my 24-70mm lens. This time, however, I thought about using the longer lens and staying further back at the road. There was a fair possibility that this would work as long as I included the gas pumps, and possibly the support beam for the island.
I parked across the street in a public parking lot and grabbed my camera. I fitted the 70-200mm lens along with the polarizer because that was going to be the only way that I was going to be able to get a workable composition. I considered bringing a grad filter as well in case I wanted to include the awning over the island but decided against it. This was one of those cases where I really needed a direct composition and adding too much to it would really dilute the reason for the capture.
I was careful to stay within the utility easement of the property and began to work out the composition I had previsualized. As I suspected, I was going to have to include the gas pumps which actually helped the story significantly. There was also the roof of the metal shelter behind the car which had to be included as well. I didn’t really like this at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I knew that with a bit of color grading, I could get the hues to match up nicely for the needs of the photo. It all came down to just how much to include in the frame before it got too busy.
Playing it safe, I started off with framing the image right at the rusty post, or just inside of it. There was a white truck parked just out of the frame to the right that dictated that side of the frame. The top of the frame was going to include portions of the roof behind the car which was fine as I had decided earlier. As I started to shoot the compositions, there was a lack of balance, and I didn’t like how the pumps were getting cropped out. I really felt that the pumps were a crucial part of the story and needed to be included. If I cropped the frame just to left edge of the post, that post became a distraction. If I cropped at the right edge to remove it, I took half of a pump away. Not really liking how this was going, I decided to open the frame up and include all three pumps as well as the post in its entirety. This opened up the top of the frame to get both roofs as well as the trees behind the building. This gave a nice scale to the image and the post wasn’t nearly the distraction that I thought it would be. This was something that I thought would work well.
I ended up committing to this and worked with different exposures using various depths of field. This gave me plenty of options when I started to cull the images. I also worked with the angles a bit to try and get the different elements to line up the best that I could while using the car to mask some of the clutter behind it. After about three years of driving past this scene, I finally had a composition that I liked of the car. The colors would need a little work when I got it into Lightroom, but I already knew the color profile that I would be assigning it in order to get the right hues and intensities of the colors.
I had shot a good many frames of this car as I was dialing in the composition and exposure. I knew that the basic composition was the same so there would only be a single image that I would have as a keeper from this one. I wasn’t wild about calling it a day after only a single composition, but so far, only 25% of my locations had panned out. I had to be happy with getting a good photo out of so many failed attempts at other locations. At least this was a spot that I had been interested in for a while but had just not figured out the right way to shoot it until now.
Not wanting to go home just yet, I started doing my aimless driving again. I no longer had a destination in mind, I was just along for the ride. I looked for clues that would get me closer to the good subjects and found myself in areas that I had not been in before. This is when rust hunting gets interesting. New areas have a certain excitement when it comes to exploring them. I wasn’t really seeing anything yet, but all the clues were telling me that I was in the right neighborhood.
All of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of one of the most recognizable Chevy’s of all time. It was a blue ’57 Bel Air parked behind an old house. I didn’t see much rust on it, but the grass was very grown up around it which fit my neglect criteria. I slowed down and looked at the area. It was behind a basketball goal, and in front of a power pole, with a water spigot just off the quarter panel on the passenger’s side. It wasn’t going to be easy to shoot, but I did like the house and the tall grass around it, so I thought it would be worth asking the owner for permission. I got turned around and pulled into the driveway. As I got out and started walking the length of the house where it looked like I might find an owner, I could hear a big dog barking. Fortunately, it sounded like it was inside. When I got to the door and knocked, the dog went nuts inside and I started to wonder exactly what was going to happen when the door opened up.
Well, I could hear a person coming to the door and the door opened. Right when the opening was big enough, a German Shepherd came out. This was the dog attached to the bark, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but I had a feeling that I wasn’t in any danger. Sure enough, I got jumped on a little bit and ended up making friends with the dog pretty quickly. The owner was quite nice as well and when I asked to take a few photos of the car, he had no problems with me doing so. With his blessing, I went back to the truck and grabbed my camera with the long lens attached. My thought was that I was going to want to minimize the background as much as possible since there were so many distractions I was going to have to deal with.
The closer I got to the car, the more I started to understand the story of it. The car had been painted kind of recently and much of the chrome had been painted over with a chrome spray paint. There was little doubt that the car was in service not that long ago, and I really liked the color. There was no rust which is usually a major draw for me, but when it comes to this body style, I think that the lines of the car warrant some love and attention, especially when the car is parked in tall grass and looks like it has been left there for a while. This was the story that I wanted to go with, and what I started to frame up with the camera.
I went for the easy shot to begin with. I framed up the car with the basketball hoop to the right of it. I was able to omit the power pole and water source with this composition. It was a basic one, but the goal really didn’t add to the story like I had thought it might. The light wasn’t all that great in this direction either. I started to look for other compositions that might work out better. Since there was no rust on the car, I was having a hard time figuring out isolations since there wasn’t the texture that I was used to in the rust. I ended up gravitating towards the rear of the car and those iconic fins. I noticed that there was an antique tag on the back of the car which really popped on the color of the paint. The rear emblem matched up nicely with the taillights, and the brightwork was perfectly dull which made it much easier to photograph.
Since I liked the old house that the car was parked next to, I decided to frame up a shot that included the wooden siding. It wasn’t enough to tell what the structure was, but I liked the added texture of the wood as well as the color that it introduced into the composition. I had to be very careful using this much blue in a composition, so I had to include some grass to warm the scene a bit. The wood had a slightly warm tone to it as well which complemented the blue paint just right. This composition was working out much better than the previous one and I was happy to commit to this. I figured out the depth of field that I wanted in the frame and then waited for a lull in the breeze to get the grass still.
When I was finally satisfied with that corner, I went to the other side to see how that corner looked. I quickly saw another composition with this fin. I tell you; I love the lines of these cars and can never get enough of shooting isolations on them. On this side, the fin started to look like a “Z” which make the composition read very well. This was going to be a much tighter shot and I knew that the blue was going to overpower the composition if I wasn’t careful. This side was in the shade which seemed to dull the color anyway, which made me want to do this one as a black and white image. I didn’t bother switching the camera over to B&W though, there really wasn’t much color to the image so it was easy to imagine it as a monochromatic scene.
I shot this one vertical paying particular attention to keeping the entire emblem in the frame as well as the full shape of the rear of the quarter panel. To simplify the composition, I elevated the camera to use the trunk as the upper portion of the frame instead of introducing the rear window as I had in the last composition. It gave a much more direct view of the body line which I liked. Once again, the spray-painted chrome saved me from being a cameo in the frame. There is an aerosol that can be used to dull highly reflective surfaces. It is used in the movies and I’m sure I could get my hands on it, but it would go against my main principles of shooting a car as I find it. It just so happened that the reflective chrome was photo ready on this car which made me very happy.
When I had finished with the rear of the car, I moved my attention once again to the front. Since the car had all the pieces in place, I really wanted to make a tight composition of the easily recognizable front quarter just as I had the rear of the car. I started to frame things up and every time I would get close to having the right composition, I would see that the decoration on the passenger side of the hood was entering into the corner of the frame. This wasn’t good at all, and I needed to figure out a way to get that out of the frame. If I just tightened the crop, I would cut the “Chevrolet” emblem or where the crest would have gone on the grill. I kept playing with camera positions until I was sure that I wasn’t going to be able to get it to work with this lens.
I went back to the truck and swapped in the 24-70mm lens since I was staying right at the 70mm end of the telephoto lens. I put the camera back on the tripod where it had been left and found the composition had changed ever so slightly with the different lens. I went back to changing the camera location and height until I found the sweet spot where I could eliminate the bullet on the passenger side. I now had all the elements that I wanted in the frame while keeping anything else out of the image. This is the key with photography, it will always be more about what you don’t have in the frame rather than what you do have in it. By eliminating the extraneous details, I am forcing the viewer to look at only what I deem important in the image.
Having the standard lens on the camera made me want to try an overall of the car once again. I was still pretty unhappy with how I had started out the session and wanted to get a better overall capture. I decided to shoot from the passenger side to avoid the basketball hoop, but that gave me more problems. I now had a water point to worry about as well as a power pole right behind the car. On the other hand, I did get more of the old house in the frame which I was really liking. I started to work out the angles and the right focal length to get the image to work out. It took a few minutes, but I was able to eventually get it dialed in the way I envisioned it. My only qualm was the power pole that was behind the car. I struggled with where to place it. If I moved it out of the frame, I would end up with a stop sign and street sign in the background which I felt were a bigger distraction. The only way to eliminate them, as well as a small white structure in the background was to get the camera rather low and have the power pole right at the rear fin. There was nothing else that I could do to move that power pole out of the way without causing other issues.
The more I looked at the back of the camera, the more I started to not be bothered by the power pole. I figured that it was placed in a way that I could leave it, or I could clone it out. I would have preferred to have had it separated a bit more from the car for cloning purposes, but I felt confident that I could work it out should I need to make it go away. With the composition finally figured out, I set out to find the right exposure values. I wanted to have the background go soft which would keep the attention on the car, and I needed to make sure that the breeze didn’t cause me any issues with the grass blowing. It was all coming together nicely, but there was something that I wasn’t quite happy with. I wasn’t sure what that issue was, and I wouldn’t know until I got home and started to work the image out.
When I got home and started to edit the image, I found that the issue that I was having with it was the blue of the car. Had there been rust on the body, the blue would have been fine, but without it, the car almost looked too good for the scene and the blue stuck out too much for my tastes. I thought about desaturating the blue so that it would not stand out so much, but then the image would loose its visual appeal since the car was supposed to pull the majority of the attention. It was just pulling too much the way that it was. I decided to go black and white with it since the composition was so strong the color just put things over the top. Going with monochrome really seemed to help the image and my attention was reeled back to where I needed it to be. I could now visually explore the image from the car to the house and then to the grass in the foreground. The car was no longer dominating the frame and the color of the car became unimportant in comparison to the shapes that it offered. This was the way that I wanted the image to be seen, and I finished up the edit in black and white.
I took one last look around the car to see if I had missed anything and then went back to the truck to put the camera away. I was pretty happy with how this had gone and could now go home feeling like I had accomplished something for my time out. I didn’t go directly home though, I kind of went the roundabout way just in case I stumbled onto something else that I might want to photograph. That didn’t happen, and I found myself back on the main road heading back home.
I settled into my cruise with the radio on and was thinking about how I was going to edit the images from the day. Almost by chance, I happened to glance over to the left of the road and spotted a post-war sedan at the top of a hill. I had seen this car before but had dismissed it because there was a newer model Mercedes Benz parked next to it. I was also going to have to get permission to be that deep on the property. It didn’t seem worth it to me the other few times I had noticed this car, but seeing the sky above it made me really reconsider my options. Since I was here, and had the time, I figured I would ask permission and see what happened from there.
I got turned around and went up the long driveway to the house. There were several vehicles in the driveway so I felt like somebody would be home. I walked around to the front door and knocked. On cue, a dog started barking which caught my attention quickly. I just stayed where I was and waited to see if anyone would come to the door. After a minute, I could hear that the dog was being taken away from the door and I could hear somebody coming back to it. The door opened, and I started to explain why I was there. Within a few minutes, I had the needed permission to photograph the car, and even got the name of the actual owner since the car is for sale. If you are reading this, and would like more information on this car, just let me know and I’ll get you in touch with the owner.
I got my truck parked out of the way and grabbed my bag and tripod. I had no idea what I was going to need because I had not been up close to the car yet. I made the walk across the field to get to the car and I started to look at options. I had figured that I would be shooting it from the passenger side, but there was a long building in the background which was about the same color as the Plymouth. That would leave me with no way to separate the car from the background which meant that I wasn’t going to be shooting from that side. It was all for the best though, because there was not a good angle on the car where I could use the car to block view of the Mercedes convertible parked just beside it.
Not wanting to give up on this car just yet, I started to look at shooting it from the driver’s side front and rear quarters. The rear was not nearly as interesting as the front, but the background was much simpler. I started with the front because I felt that was going to have the strongest presence. When I got myself situated at the front quarter, I could see the owner’s house and vehicles behind the car, and the street with houses behind the car. There were also a lot of power lines I was going to have to deal with. I moved in closer to see what a wide-angle lens might do for the scene and liked my chances with that.
In order to minimize the background distractions, I went with my 16-35mm lens and got in really close to the car. Several things happened when I did that. First and foremost, the houses and roadway disappeared behind the car. The presence of the car took up so much of the frame that the trees which were well in front of the car were now encroaching on the front of the car which gave two benefits. First of all, the power lines were all gone and out of sight. Secondly, the tree helped to give separation to the hood ornament which would have blended into the sky. I was also able to block some of the distractions to the rear of the car due to the extreme angle that I was shooting at. By framing the right side where I did, I was able to eliminate the distractions just to the right of the frame. In short, by using a wide-angle lens, I was able to compositionally eliminate all the distractions and leave me with an image that required no cloning at all…well, I did clone out a fly that landed on the fender.
I loved the composition and committed to it. I started to play with depth of field and shot many frames as the sun changed and the wind died down. Eventually, I was satisfied that I had at least one good one out of this group. With that, I moved to the rear of the car and started to work on the rear quarter. I wasn’t all that happy with how it was looking but figured that a high contrast black and white image would look pretty decent. I didn’t spend a lot of time with this composition though, and when I got home, I ended up trashing them all because there was just not enough visual interest there to make the photo work. It was the one from the front that won my heart.
When I was finished with this car, I took one last look at it for any isolations and considered shooting the Mercedes again. I was seeing nothing else that interested me, so I went back to the truck and loaded the camera back into it. By this point, I had 64 frames saved on the memory cards and felt that I had done pretty well for myself after falling flat on my face for the first part of this trek. Those 64 frames turned into six new photos for my collection which I am very happy with. There were another three that I could have added in, but they just lacked the visual interest of the others. The goal is to always put my best foot forward with these treks and keep the quality of the images as high as possible. These six achieve that goal I believe.
If you enjoyed this trek, let me know. I know that there are many of you who follow me for my decay subjects and tend to lose interest with my landscapes. This time of year is usually better for landscapes, but I do still enjoy finding a good rusty scene. If any of these images strike your fancy, I would love to make a print of the image for your wall. You can either order directly from this website, or you can contact me for special order sizes and media. There is just no substitute for holding a print in your hand and knowing that this is exactly the way that the photographer intended for it to be seen. You have no idea how much variations in monitors can affect the viewing experience of photos. Rest assured, when you order a print, you are getting exactly what I intend for you to see with my photos.
If you are wanting to learn more about photography, consider joining me on a mentorship session. I have different programs set up for quick email correspondence, hourly field work, or longer term advanced mentorships. No matter what you choose, there is a free consultation before anything is finalized to make sure that I am a good fit for your needs, and that we have the right level of program selected. it is all about you and your learning process. If I can help you in your journey, I would love to talk with you further.
Thank you for joining me on this first trek of June. I’m hoping to get out and have some more adventures very soon. Stick around and see what I’ll be photographing next. If you haven’t had the chance yet, be sure to read my last Behind the Camera where I talk about whether or not photography matters and whether or not I matter in the world of photography. I think you can gather that I think that photography matters at least a little bit because…well, I just spent nearly 12 hours for six photos.
Until next time….
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