Sunday, March 23, 2025
Sunrise Sunday is a thing…right? Well, it is Sunday, and I was out at sunrise, so there’s that. I’m going to go with Sunrise Sunday. If you have been following along over the past six-ish weeks, you might remember that Toni had a disagreement with a deer on the way to work in which the deer won. Fast forward all these weeks later and we still don’t have the car back. It has been painted, and the last bits are being done to it now, but it has taken longer than anyone expected. The rental coverage ran out after a month, but Toni talked them into extending for another week at the insurance rate which she did. This past week though, I have been providing Uber services to and from work which I have tried to use to my advantage. I really don’t like getting up that early in the morning, but having to get her to work by 7am when work is an hour away tends to force the issue a little bit. The very first day I took her to work, I managed to find a cute little cottage that looked great during the sunrise. As I look back, that was on a Sunday as well. Most recently, I was out there this past Wednesday shooting a tobacco barn not too far from the cottage.
Spending time in Surry County was offering some new locations to shoot and different scenes that I had not had the opportunity to see before. There is a lot of potential out there and I have had a good amount of luck finding really good subjects to work with. I would be lying if I said that luck wasn’t a big part in the actual creation of the images as well because in each case it was the weather conditions that brought the image home. I’ve said many times over the recent years that it takes three aspects to make a photo. The first is an interesting subject, the second is a compelling composition, and the third is beautiful light. If you have two out of three of these things, the chances are pretty good that the photo will be pretty good. If you can manage to get all three in your photo, then you have an outstanding photograph. Picking out the subject is only a part of the plan. The composition is something that I have total control over, so I can usually get that part of the three in pretty good shape. The last bit of the puzzle, which I have no control over is the lighting over the scene. In the previous visits out there with the camera, the lighting has really happened for me with very little planning since the time and date that I was going to be there was pretty locked in.
Now, originally, I had planned on taking the camera with us when I took Toni to work on Saturday but decided against it since I had developed a to-do list at home that included servicing the mowers, tracking down a transmission leak, and mowing the yard. That would take most of the day and would leave me without much time to do photography related tasks. Keep in mind, that between the editing, processing, and blogging, I am usually looking at around six hours’ work for a quick morning trek. The fact that the sky was going to be totally clear kind of sealed the deal for me as far as photography.
I did manage to get all the chores done and found that the leak wasn’t nearly as problematic as I had first thought. With my mind cleared of that problem, I was able to think about photography once again. Since I was having to go out and pick her up, I decided to take the slightly longer way that took me through Traphill to get her and do a little scouting. I was looking for one more barn that would look good in the morning light. The vibe that I have gotten from Surry County so far has been that of a rural area and the barns have a certain quality to them that works well during sunrises.
I had an idea where one was because I had seen it on another trip. There were actually two white barns off on the side of the road that looked like I might be able to get either an individual image or two or be able to photograph them together. I had not really had time to look at them critically to evaluate the compositional aspect just yet. It was just an interesting subject to work with. When I went past on the way to pick Toni up, I slowed and looked at it critically for the first time. The smaller barn had a banner on it which I didn’t really care for as an element to the photo which kind of eliminated that barn as part of the composition. This left me with the larger of the two which was arguably the better one. It was far enough away that I felt confident that I could isolate it easily from the other barn. more importantly, I saw compositions from either side of it which was actually quite important.
You see, when photographing at sunrise (or sunset), the sun will be quite low in the sky and that sky will likely be brighter than the landscape which will be in the shadows. The way that the barn was situated, I would more than likely be shooting in a Northern direction with the rising sun out of frame to the right, or over my right shoulder. In the first situation, I would have to really work the exposure so that the bright sky didn’t overpower the shaded landscape. If the sky got too bright as the sun came up, I would be able to move to the other side and hopefully get some sunlight on the barn to balance out the exposure. The barn was surrounded by trees on the left and in the rear of it while there was a small field to the right which would possibly allow the sunlight to hit the barn. Not knowing the cloud situation for the morning was causing me some difficulties in predicting the composition since it was going to be very dependent on the lighting and sky.
Having choices was something that was very important to me because I wasn’t going to have time to get an alternate location if this barn didn’t work out. If I stopped here and got the camera out, I was essentially committing to this subject and the light that was present. The only thing that I would have control over was the composition. Fortunately, I saw a couple of possibilities which should make it work regardless of the light. I felt confident with this subject for the following morning after looking at it critically.
Looking at the weather forecast when I got back home, it was looking like high clouds with good coverage leading up to sunrise. Right about the time of sunrise, those clouds were supposed to break up, leaving a clear blue sky behind. If I was lucky, there would be some stragglers in the sky as the sun was at the horizon to reflect some color. My luck had been pretty good out here on the previous days, so I kind of felt like the odds were in my favor. If I could get the light right, and the composition was solid, I felt like the subject was pretty good which would make for a very special photograph. Only time would tell if this was going to work out or not.
After I dropped Toni off at work, I got on the road back to the barn which wasn’t too far down the road. It was still mostly dark when I arrived, so I almost missed the barns on the side of the road. I got turned around and found a place to pull off on the shoulder while giving myself room to work. Looking at the sky, there was a general overcast with some really nice textures visible in the clouds. This was looking really nice. I got out of the truck and started to look at the different angles of the barn so I could plan out how the composition was going to look.
I had some really tall trees just to the left of the barn which almost touched it. This meant that those trees would have to be in the frame. Just on the other side of the trees was another field which would be a distraction when shot from the left side, but from the right, the field gave some nice depth to the scene. There were also bare trees in the background from either direction. I felt that the stronger composition was going to be shooting to the Northeast which was also going to be the more difficult lighting scenario as the sky would be the brightest in this direction. The other side was a little less interesting of a composition because the partially opened door would block the doorway, and the shelter part of the barn would have been much less prominent. I did like the fact that the field showed some really nice depth to the frame once you got past the row of trees beside the barn.
My plan was to start off on the left side of the barn shooting it in the shadows under the sky hoping that some color would come into play at some point during the sunrise. Because of the size of the barn and how close I was going to have to be in order to be out of the road, I opted for my wide-angle zoom which is usually not a lens that I shoot with for structures because of the perspective distortion. I felt that it would flatter this barn though with the slope of the roof and that sheltered portion. I just had to keep the camera elevated to reduce the converging verticals. With very little light happening, I didn’t bother with any filters because they would just darken things down way more than I could deal with.
I set up the composition which was pretty basic and fired off a test shot at 30 seconds. I looked at the frame in the image review and found a couple of interesting things. First of all, there was no breeze, and the trees remained tack sharp. The second thing I realized was that the clouds were moving at a pretty good pace. There was a softening with the movement in the clouds which I quickly decided was a good thing. I decided to keep my shutter speeds relatively slow to get a little motion in the sky. Something else I noticed when reviewing the image was that the trees to the left were very heavy in the frame. With them being dark and closest to the camera, they just took up too much visual space in the frame. I needed to fix that by recomposing slightly and zooming in just a bit. I would have liked to have included more of the sky and trees to the right, but just out of the frame to the right was the smaller barn which I didn’t want to include because of the banner on the side.
The new composition was solid, and I made another test image to see how the clouds were looking. It was the very next frame that turned into my first keeper from the day. Now, there was just a hint of color in the sky with some magenta hues deep into the right side. However, the scene was far too blue for my tastes and any warming of the scene would have made the light unreal. I liked the way that the clouds looked at 25 seconds and wanted to do something with that frame. The easiest thing to do was to make it a black and white image because color and color temperature would no longer matter except in the realm of tonal separation. It is not the first time I’ve done a sunrise, or even blue hour photo as a black and white image.
Personally, I like this approach because it makes the time of day more ambiguous and even when there are few clouds, there are no deep shadows. I get the look that I like with cloudy skies, only I don’t need nearly the depth of clouds to create the soft light. This was a great example to make black and white because the colors were just not making a difference to the image at this point, but the subject and composition were pretty strong. By making it black and white there was a little subtle manipulation of the light which filled in that last part of the puzzle for me.
I stuck with this composition for a while and kept adjusting the exposure so as to not blow out the highlights in the sky while maintaining a longer exposure. There were times when I went with a faster exposure just to make sure that I had alternatives when I started the processing phase. There were about 16 frames in total spent capturing what I would consider the blue hour lighting around this barn. After that 16th frame though, the color started to come into the sky as I had hoped.
The long exposures seemed to be working pretty well, but I had maxed out the aperture that I was willing to use at f/16 which gave me only a 3.2 second exposure. This wasn’t quite long enough and with the color coming into the sky, I wanted to stretch that color as much as I could without losing the definition in the clouds. It was time to add an ND filter. Since I had been happy around 25-30 seconds, I figured that a 5-stop filter would be the best choice. I ran back to the truck and slid the filter into the holder before running back to the camera to fit it to the lens. I reworked the exposure values and came up with the shutter speed that I was wanting at f/11 which was a better aperture for the scene.
I did another five exposures while the clouds got more and more colorful. I jogged the aperture to keep the shutter between 25 and 30 seconds through those exposures. It was the third exposure I made with the ND filter attached that turned into the keeper. The clouds hit their most vivid color for this one shot, and I really liked the way that the clouds were cradling the focal point of the composition and adding a perfect balancing element to the barn. The clouds made the composition so much stronger and added interest to the subject. All I needed to do was to pull the detail out of the barn in post and try to bring that interesting light back out of the scene.
Some might consider it cheating to pull this much detail out of the shadows, but while I was looking at this scene with my eyes, I saw the detail in both the shadows and in the sky. The camera wasn’t able to accurately depict that due to the limits of technology. However, because I know my equipment and how I intended to process the scene, I had made sure that I captured all the luminance range of the scene. The unprocessed image showed mostly a white sky and dark landscape which was far from what I was wanting. However, there were no lost details in the sky, and the shadows still had plenty of information there in the areas where it counted. The processing actually didn’t even take that long, and the end result looks just like it appeared to my eyes at the time.
When I noticed that the light was fading, I decided to move to the right side of the barn and set up the shot for when the sunlight would kiss the side of the barn. I pulled off the ND filter because there was no need for that anymore. The clouds were not nearly as interesting in this direction. Sadly, they had been moving from left to right and what I had caught with the end of the color was pretty much the end of the clouds. I was left with a pretty solid sky without clouds. If the kiss of sunlight was warm enough, I could deal with the lack of clouds though. I even placed a polarizer on the lens to deepen the blue of the sky. Of course, at 24mm, I was getting a bit of polarization banding in the sky, so I had to back that filter off just a little to the point where I could add a gradient to the sky to even it out. I waited and shot several frames as the light began to change, but I never did see the warm light on the barn. The sky just got clearer and clearer along with losing the blue color because of the rising sun.
After a few minutes, I realized that the light wasn’t going to work out at all for this composition. The fact that the composition was weaker than the first one which made the subject less interesting forced my hand to call it a day. I had at least one really good image out of the original composition, and I felt that this was certainly well worth the stop. It was time to move on though.
Since I had a photo walk workshop planned in two more weeks, I wanted to get down to North Wilkesboro to do a dry run of what I wanted to cover. I still had plenty of time to get some more photos before heading home to start the processing portion of the day. My only problem was that it was really cold outside, and I didn’t feel like spending time walking around between buildings looking for scenes to shoot. I would actually have some time for that during the workshop since there aren’t that many signed up for the day as of yet. This means that I would be joining in with working the scenes to show how I do things on a photo walk as opposed to spending all my time going around to all the participants and helping them through the day. While I love a full workshop, there are benefits to smaller outings.
Anyway, when I got into town, I saw that the sun was really bright and harsh which was actually a good thing for this type of photography since it gave me lots of shadows to work with. The problem was, I wasn’t really in the mood for a photo walk now. It was still cold, and I was anxious to see how the barn photos looked. While I wasn’t really wanting to walk aimlessly around this morning, there was one place that I wanted to check because I had seen an old Dodge Panel Truck there a couple of times over the last month or so. I don’t know what made me think of this subject under the lighting conditions though. Normally, I wouldn’t want to mess with this type of subject except on a cloudy day. I had seen it on a sunny day, but it was much closer to noon, and I didn’t like how the sun was falling on it. I had seen it on a cloudy day, but it didn’t feel interesting to me with that light.
One of the biggest problems with this truck was that it was parked next to a building between other vehicles. This greatly limited compositional possibilities when it came to capturing an overall and establishing shot of the old Dodge. Now, you might remember over the last couple of treks that I have gotten a little better at incorporating the extraneous details and other cars into the photographs. That really only works when the other vehicles are closer to the era of the main subject. That wasn’t the case this time, and there was no compelling reason to include the surroundings with this Dodge. The other issue that I had was that this was a panel truck which basically has large slab sides with very little detail. The truck was painted black at one time which is not a favorite color to photograph usually. The rust was interesting, but there were very few bits of chrome on the truck to give the rust structure. In short, there was a lot working against this truck for a subject. However, I had that creative wild hair that was pulling me into the parking lot to look at this truck for like the fourth time.
When I got there, the sun was bright and harsh which I expected. I saw the truck still sitting there which I really hadn’t expected. It was fully bathed in the morning sunlight, and it did look better than it had on the previous visits. I really did like how the colors were looking in the full sunlight and was still drawn to the “tan lines” of the Dodge emblem on the nose. You could still make out the letters under the Ram emblem which I found rather interesting. There wasn’t much other chrome on the truck to work with, but I really liked how that particular section was looking. It was enough interest for me to park and get out to work the truck. I had good light, and a reasonably interesting subject. I just needed to find a strong composition to pull it all together.
Knowing that I was most interested in the Dodge shadow up front, I started out there. Just because I felt like it would be the right choice, I fitted the 70-200mm lens which was pretty good at getting the detail shots along with the polarizer. I knew that I didn’t want to get the boring straight on shot here. While the symmetry would have worked out, I thought that it deserved something more than that. I started to look at the truck from both sides and found that one side of the ghost lettering was a little more interesting than the other. I started to play around with compositions that incorporated that section of the front as well as well as the emblems.
What I landed on was an abstract view of the scene with some interesting diagonals to add to the visual interest. I was even able to get a bit of glare on the first slat of the grill which balanced out with the really bright Ram emblem. There were lots of textures all over within the frame, not to mention the vivid colors thanks to the sun. After many times of looking at this truck, I finally had an image from it that I thought was really good. It kind of fueled my creativity and I started to look for other options around this same part of the truck.
I reverted to my old habits and looked to include the headlight bucket as well. Since the patina was better on the passenger side, I moved over that way and got the headlight bucket in the frame as a foreground element that led up to the emblem and lettering. I needed as much diagonal here as I could get, so that meant extending the camera well above eye level which made composing a bit trickier. Originally, I had thought about limiting the depth of field to keep the focus on the lettering, but after I thought about it, I wasn’t able to pass up on that great texture of the rust closer to the camera. I also really liked the frayed wire that was coming out of the bucket. Those little details played a part in the photo, and I needed to have them sharp too.
Feeling like I had done enough with the front of the truck, I started to look around to see if there were any other points of interest that I could shoot. The lack of chrome made things a bit more difficult to pin down, but I did find another emblem on the driver’s side fender that I hadn’t seen up to this point. In fact, I had never seen one like this before. It immediately pulled memories of watching Star Trek with my Dad growing up because it almost looked like one of their insignia pins. With that in mind, I framed up a composition that focused on that emblem and fired away. It was pretty much a sideways “A” and it looked boring to me in the image review. I needed something else to make a composition happen here.
I started to look around the emblem and the only thing that was there was the body seam from the door and the body line above the fender. When shot from straight on like I was positioned, that was just two straight lights running perpendicular to each other. Again, not interesting. However, when I moved forward the straight line of the seam turned into several curves. If I extended the shot up to the top edge of the door, there was another curve and a place where a mirror had been mounted. This was a balancing element for the emblem, and it appeared on the opposite side of the seam which provided the right kind of balance for the image. I liked how it was looking and committed to the concept.
I played around with the framing as I considered what aspect ratio might work best. Then it was a matter of estimating where my cropping would be so that I had just enough in the frame to cover the crop, but not so much that I would toss a lot of pixels away without a real need. All the thinking in my head saved me from shooting a lot of variations and I ended up only shooting two of this composition. The keeper was the second due to a very small change in framing that allowed me to get exactly what I wanted.
I chose to do this one in black and white because I was shooting in the shad and there was a yellow vehicle next to the Dodge which was reflecting back onto the surface. This was creating some very tricky light to work with. With the contrast down due to the shadows, I decided to deal with both problems by stripping away the color. The yellow reflected light was no longer an issue, and I was free to work the contrasts more aggressively than when it was in color. The end result is another almost abstract rendition of the is Dodge. There are enough clues so that you understand what you are looking at, but not so many as to spoil the ending for those that choose to look deep enough.
Before calling it a day, I went back to the front of the truck where I had seen so much luck. I loved the light on the front and the way that it made the rust pop. I just wanted to figure out something else for a composition. I had already featured the emblem and one of the headlights. These were the obvious choices for visual interest, but I felt that there was something else that might work just as well. I just had to find it.
The answer came in the area where a few body panels came together at the hood, fender, and front end. I liked the colors and textures, and the panels provided the structure for the composition. I worked on framing up a shot that had a fair amount of visual balance while keeping some type of form. When I had a shot that I liked, I fired off a shot and looked at it in the image review. It looked good, but the balance was slightly off. I made an adjustment and made one more exposure. This one nailed what I was after, and a really interesting abstract was created.
With that one in the can, I had made a total of twelve exposures with the Dodge that brought four keepers. There were two additional keepers from the first series of 26 frames for a total of six out of 38 frames being keepers. Considering the fact that I was working with an ever-changing sky to begin with, I am very happy with the hit rate for today’s trek. There were actually more photos to process than I was hoping for, but I wasn’t able to turn any of these away because they each tell a different story in a different way.
Thank you for joining me and I hope that you enjoyed both the photos and the narrative that goes along with them. If any of them speak to you, please let me know so I can work on matching you up with your very own print. There really is no better way to enjoy photography than in print form. Sadly, we are moving so far away from seeing actual blown-up prints of photos as everyone has gotten used to seeing digital photos. While this is bad for photographers who like making prints, just think about how unique it would be to have a collection of photographic prints hanging on your wall for guests to see. That alone would make the photograph special in these days and times. Every photograph deserves to have a life outside of a computer, and you can help in that.
With Spring here now, I would like to remind everyone that I also offer portrait services and do fine art portraiture. If you would like to see yourself or a loved one in front of my camera, lets chat. I have a full studio if that is the vibe you are after, and I’m equally at home working in another location, or outside in a place that is special to you. I don’t have a routine of poses to go through, so we will custom tailor your session to exactly what you want. My goal is to create a few special photographs that you will want to be displayed above the mantle or on another prominent wall in your house. Why not make yourself the subject of art in your own home? I do have openings and am looking forward to working with you.
Until next time….
