Thursday, July 4, 2024
If you have taken a little bit of time to read my last two entries, you will know that I have been struggling lately with creativity but have started the process of getting back on track. I’m basically following my own suggestions for dealing with the ebbs and flows of creativity which is hopefully going to show that this works in the real world. The creativity didn’t just stop, it faded away due to stress and having a lot on my plate. Fortunately, I was still able to step up to the plate for several client shoots that I have done as well as a few test shoots that were scheduled. That was actually a pretty big deal because once upon a time, when I was in a creative slump, I would have not been able to perform, much less get some really stellar photos along the way. That wasn’t the problem, it was the motivation to get out on my own and get photos for my own reasons. That was where things were kind of falling apart.
I realized that was happening and just let it be. I knew that I needed a break from photography because I had been creating at a pace I had not seen before. I knew that I was going to hit a wall sooner or later, and I was expecting it at any point. When it hit, I didn’t really fight it and just used my time to take care of all the things that had been stressing me out beforehand. I didn’t force anything and just let myself recharge. When I got to that point where I started to be comfortable not being creative, that was when I started to worry. That was when I knew that I had to make myself go out there and try to get the momentum going once again. With a short session at an old house, I found some clues that got me back on track. I was happy going back to my roots in a manner of speaking with some very simple compositions of a rural setting. It wasn’t much, but I did like the one photo that resulted.
Waiting for the next day to edit the photos helped as well because it gave me time to digest the time behind the camera before trying to translate it into an edit. The following morning showed that the photo was better than I had thought that it would turn out. I could feel the energy returning, but never in the history of photography has a single photo turned a slump around. When I got finished with the edit and the blog, I went back to my normal day’s activity where I read a little and watched a half season of a series that I’m currently working on. by the time that night came, I was considering doing some more photography, which was a familiar, yet distant memory for me.
I batted around the idea of doing some studio work with some still life subjects but couldn’t really work through all the moving parts that I would need to get that set up. The other option was a bit better and would allow me to take advantage of the clouds that were forecast to happen before noon. There was rain in the afternoon, but a nice mix of clouds from 10am on. This was what I was wanting to work with, and I had just the subject for those clouds.
There is a barn in North Wilkesboro right on the side of the main road which I have photographed several times since moving out here. Most of the time, I am working it in the cooler months when the vegetation is dormant, but I had seen it recently and there was a lot of greenery overgrowing the barn which I thought was rather interesting and appealing. I knew that there were a couple of compositions, basically dependent on framing as there was really only a single angle to shoot this barn from due to its position in the field. Pretty much all of these compositions relied heavily on the use of clouds in the sky for some visual interest and balance to the frame. The forecasted clouds were going to be workable it appeared, so that became my plan.
Now, I got to bed kind of late, and I didn’t set an alarm. There was still a bit of that object at rest will stay at rest going on and I recognized that fact. When I woke up at 8:30, I did start to think about going out, but I could tell that the sun was very bright through the closed blinds. A quick check of the weather showed that there was no hurry at all to get out there as the clouds weren’t going to show until the middle of the day, and even then, there was rain chances that came right along with the clouds.
Toni and I got up and did our normal morning routines and I stayed down in the studio for a bit where there were no windows. All I had to go on was the little icon on the bottom of my computer screen which showed clear skies still. When I did get finished with all my morning stuff, I went upstairs where Toni asked if I would mind taking an Amazon return to Khol’s for her when I went out to photograph the barn. I could tell that the sky was much too clear for any photography, but I was happy to go out and scout in the Miata to take advantage of the clear conditions.
I grabbed my shoes and her return and headed out. Man, it was already hot!! I don’t like hot like this, especially this early in the day. It was still nice to get outside with the top down though. I made the return and then decided to head out to where the barn was. The clouds were starting to come in as forecasted and I had hopes that I would be able to get out with the camera and get some photography done as I had it fixed in my mind that I was going to shoot the barn.
When I arrived, the sky was actually looking quite good, but the light on the barn was still too harsh because the sun was uncovered and sitting at the highest point in the sky. It was just not the time to photograph the barn just yet. It also looked as though there was rain falling from the darkest clouds to the North. Not wanting to drive the Miata in the rain (hasn’t seen rain in its life), I decided that this was a good time to practice my spirited driving so I could get home quickly. I managed to beat the rain and checked the weather. There were now storms in the area and several just around us. Not wanting to get caught in a storm, I decided to wait until the clouds had a better configuration which was going to be around 4pm. That left me time for a bit of reading, so I finished my book a little before 3pm.
Of course, while I was reading, there were two pretty good showers that came down and made me feel good about my choice to stay home for a bit longer. The rain squalls were still in the area but seemed to be a little less numerous now that the temperature had dropped a few degrees. The clouds were not looking nearly as thick as they once were, so I was a little worried that the light wasn’t going to be what I was wanting. I began to have second thoughts about heading out.
Toni chimed in and suggested that I go because it just might work out if I was there, but it certainly wouldn’t work if I wasn’t. She was right. It also reminded me of the second step to my plan to get my creativity back. Not only do I need to get the momentum going, I also need to show up. That is, I need to make the time to get out there and try for photos so that it becomes part of my routine once again. When I am really on, I can easily go out a couple of times a week for photos, but usually I’ll go out at least once a week. Heading back out right on the heels of another trek was a good way to just show up and be a photographer. With that in mind, I took Toni’s advice and grabbed my gear to go out and photograph the barn.
I knew that it was going to be humid when I was putting the camera in the truck, so I opened the bag to let the camera acclimate itself to the temperature. I left the windows down in the truck and suffered through the muggy heat for the sake of the camera. I knew it was bad when I pulled out of the garage and the windows all fogged up on the truck…even the mirror fogged heavily. I was very glad that I had opened up the camera bag because I was remembering horror stories of fogged lenses at the beach when I would go out for sunrise.
The barn was just eight miles from the house, so it didn’t take long at all to get there. I pulled off the road and parked where I have every time that I have shot this barn. I got out and took a look at the barn to make sure that things were looking good. The light was right on the barn with just a kiss of sunlight coming from the opposite side to give it a bit of depth. There were clouds, but they were restricted to a section of the sky directly above the barn. This wasn’t terrible as the lens of choice here was the 70-200mm due to the distance. I have done this subject as both single shots with that lens as well as larger multi-frame panoramas. It didn’t look like the sky was going to support a panorama, and if I was being honest with myself, the vegetation was also preventing that kind of framing. There would have been no flow to a panoramic capture of this scene. I was going to be very happy with a single frame 3:2 composition.
I pulled out the tripod and camera along with the long lens. I immediately noticed that everything was cold to the touch still after being in the A/C in the studio. It was time to kill the vents down there to help keep the camera a bit better able to acclimate to the outside when the time came. Once I got the camera built up, everything fogged up so bad that I wasn’t able to see through the viewfinder at all. It took about 10 minutes for everything to clear up including the filters that I was going to need.
Once the fogging was cleared from the camera, I started to frame up the first composition. I used a polarizer to pull the glare off of the tin roof as well as saturate the greenery. There was a 3-stop ND Grad filter that was added to keep the clouds exposed correctly while I allowed for the shadows around the barn. This made the exposures pretty easy, and I was able to play with the framing of the composition more than fiddling with the exposure. I knew basically how this was going to work, but needed to take into consideration the peaks and valleys of the trees as well as things like the power pole support wires and a few bushes that were kind of close in.
It didn’t take long to get things dialed in as far as a composition and my first keeper was the third frame that I shot. This was one of the last ones that I did with a sweeping view of the sky. The clouds were moving off stage right very quickly and leaving me with much flatter clouds without texture. Had there not been a ground wind making the trees move, I would have considered a long exposure here, but there would have been much too much movement in the trees to make that work. As the broad view of the sky started to fail, I took the opportunity to frame tighter compositions on the barn. In some of them, I cropped the tops of the trees off to really focus the attention on the barn, but started to realize that by doing that, the composition was feeling very claustrophobic. I opened things up just a little bit and grabbed the tops of the trees above the barn, but the sky was not looking all that great with this framing.
Looking off to the left, I noticed that there was a small section of interest coming towards the barn, but it was still a few minutes away. I just sat there and waited as I really looked at the edges of the frame to see how things might be looking when the clouds rolled into the view. I was able to really make some minute adjustments in the time that it took the clouds to arrive. By the time they entered the frame, I was ready and fired off a number of shots as they moved through. It was the last of this series that became the second keeper and the one that I chose to do in black and white.
I had shot 22 frames at this point and felt confident that I had something worth keeping. Looking at the clouds, there wasn’t really much else coming over the barn that would interest me in the foreseeable future. I had shown up and gotten some photos. I didn’t need to prove anything else, plus I was dying in the heat. The decision was made to pack the camera up and head on down the road. I felt good after this quick session. Better than I had after the one the other day. I was almost feeling normal and didn’t really remember much in the way of struggling to get the compositions that I had done. Things had just kind of happened and the camera had become an extension of myself once again.
Then it happened. While driving down the road, I remember seeing a rather ugly Cadillac Fleetwood sitting in the parking lot of one of the hotrod shops here in town. I hadn’t really paid that much attention to it as I was enjoying the ride in the Miata at the time, but I wanted to see if I could do something with that car. It wasn’t but about 5 miles South, so it didn’t take me long to get there. I pulled into the parking lot and started to size up this monstrosity of a vehicle. It was beige car with some rust. Parts of it were jacked up, the trunk and hood were open with a missing engine. It was a boat of a car, but I noticed that the Cadillac emblem on the grill was missing a couple of letters and I liked the angles that I was seeing at the grill. It wasn’t going to be an easy subject, but I somehow felt that I needed to shoot it. Part of that was knowing that cars don’t stay in this parking lot long before they are pulled into the shop, or hauled away after the parts are farmed from them.
Almost without thinking, I grabbed for my 70-200mm lens once again. This time it was not because I was shooting something 75 yards away. In fact, I was able to get right on top of the car, and in several cases got within the minimum focusing distance. I just felt that this focal length was going to be the right choice for this car. That was something normal that I had missed over the last month or so. Lens choice had become something that I really didn’t think about, I just “knew” what would work. That was exactly what happened here when I fitted the lens onto the camera body. I just knew that it was the right choice, and I didn’t even consider the standard zoom which I would have relied on exclusively not that long ago.
I began working the car at the point of interest that I had noticed upon my arrival. That grill emblem seemed to say so much about this car and I was interested in what it had to say. I photographed it from the right and the left side. I included the headlights, and eventually I just concentrated on the shape of the bumper and grill. I shot most of these with the intention of making them black and white, but as you can see here, most of them turned into color photographs because I felt that the colors balanced well and helped to tell the story. You can even see in in a couple of them the fact that the sky was now mostly blue overhead. The thick clouds that were supposed to show up just never really did.
Here I was photographing a car under basically full sun which I try not to do. However, there have been a few times over the last year or so when I have used the full sun to my advantage. I used those self-taught lessons and worked the scene despite the sunshine. I felt that it was going pretty well as a matter of fact. I didn’t linger the entire time at the partial grill emblem, but used some of my time here to look for other areas of the car that would make for decent compositions. There really wasn’t much there that interested me outside of the large grill, but I did find an area of rust on one of the C pillars that caught my eye.
I spent a bit of time working out a composition to showcase the rust where the vinyl top had been installed. I used the small window at the rear of the door for a bit of shape and contrast to the overall composition and framed up something that showed the pattern of rust and the staining from the water pulling the rust down over the paint. I really liked this one in the camera and hoped that it would turn out during the edits. It just felt like one of my photos and it had been quite some time since I had been able to do something like that as efficiently as I had just done it.
When I got it home, I wanted to see what would happen if I flipped the image horizontally so that the window introduced the rust as opposed to the rust being the first thing seen and the window looking more like an afterthought. At first, I didn’t like it as much and flipped it back. That looked better, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was just because that was what I was used to seeing from working the composition out. As I was doing my final saves, I decided to flip it back once again to allow it to read a bit better. Now that I have lived with it in this orientation for a bit longer, I think that it was the right choice to make for that particular image.
In just a short time, I had shot an additional eleven frames of this ugly Cadillac bringing my day’s total to just 33 frames. It was actually more than I thought I had shot, but I was feeling pretty confident that I had at least three keepers out of this group of images. At the end of the edits, I had a total of six keepers which really kind of surprised me. It was almost like a regular trek, and I was feeling pretty good about the day. I had showed up and made big strides in making photography part of my routine once again. I even got the edits done and this blog written in record time having started some four and a half hours ago. I count that as a win for sure!
I do hope that you have enjoyed this trek and decay subjects. If any of these photos speak to you, and you want to enjoy them in their full resolution beauty, you can order a print right here on the website, or we can discuss special order sizes and media through email. There really is no substitute for seeing these photos in the way in which I intend for them to seen. There is no way I can control your monitor or device to make sure that the colors are rendered the same as I see them, or that the brightness is adjusted the right way. All I can control is my own monitor and the final print which is exactly as I see it after the editing process. You just can’t beat seeing a photographic print in a physical form. It blows these digital presentations away. By purchasing a print, you are not only going to have an original piece of art, but you will also be supporting my craft and allowing me to go on these kinds of adventures with the camera. Let’s dress up your walls!
For those of you out there trying to learn photography, don’t forget that I offer mentorships both in person and virtually. These mentorships are designed to increase your photographic knowledge and skills at a rapid pace as we learn to photograph the subjects that you are interested in capturing. My offerings are fully customizable and have a range in price that will fit everyone’s budget and needs. Let’s have a quick discussion about what you are interested in to make sure that I can help you. These consultations are always free and have no obligations. I look forward to speaking with you.
Until next time…
