Saturday, May 3, 2025
This was a rough one, and I’m actually quite fortunate that I managed to get any photos at all. The fact that what I ended up capturing with my camera was nowhere close to where I went today is testimony to just how difficult this day turned out. It has been about a week in the making since I happened to drive through the area that I intended to photograph earlier this week when I was going to visit my dad. I had taken the back roads since I was in the Miata and ended up going down 901 and 64 for most of the ride. It wasn’t the first time I had been out that way, but it had been a while since I have taken that route. Of course, my eyes were peeled for anything that looked good to photograph for the entire two hours that I was driving out to his house.
I saw a lot of potential and several places that I had wanted to photograph before but had never found a property owner for. I made a lot of mental notes about the trip and figured it would be worth coming back out this way to explore some more in the future. It wasn’t until I spotted an old Chevy panel wagon sitting under a tree down the embankment from the road that I was inspired to make a photo. The car looked pretty good sitting there, but it was well down a hill from the road which made it absolutely necessary to gain access to the property for the right perspective. I would also want a little less sunlight on it for a bit more even exposure over the scene. I noted the nearest cross street and continued on to Dad’s.
On the way home after my visit, I checked the car out again and found that it had a lot of things going for it and there were some other cars further into the property which might yield another subject or two. I also looked at the other scenes that I had spotted on the way out and considered how I might handle them photographically should I come back out to them. By the time I got back home I was really looking forward to heading back out that way with the camera to see what I could do with the different scenes. The only issue was that the main one that I was interested in happened to be right at an hour and a half from the house which would make it somewhat of a time commitment to go out and get the photo. It seems that most of what I have been shooting here lately has been a good distance from the house, so I suppose I should be getting used to it by now.
The only thing that I needed to wait on was the weather. I knew that I was going to need a cloudy day for the light that I was after, but those cloudy days started to get harder and harder to come by. The first day at home after my visit kind of set the stage for the rest of the week. It was supposed to be cloudy with rain falling off and on. This was going to be a good time to get the Miata cleaned up from the long drive though the bugs. As it turned out, there was a lot of sun and no clouds until the thunder started as I was pressure washing the driveway. I headed in as the clouds built up for a short time before clearing off. The following day was supposed to be cloudy as well, but it was mostly clear through the majority of the day. Even Thursday, which was supposed to be cloudy with rain turned out to be mostly sunny except for those moments of rain that came with every passing cloud. Friday was a partly cloudy day, but the clouds gave way to too much sunlight for the most part until the afternoon when it started to rain. Those clouds looked really good, but the rain was falling much harder than I would have wanted to deal with.
Saturday was supposed to be cloudy in the morning with storms developing in the afternoon according to the forecast. Based on what I had seen for the days leading up to Saturday, I suspected that the sky would be sunny through the morning, and the clouds would come in and bring rain in the afternoon. I wasn’t holding out much hope at all as I went to bed on Friday night. As a matter of fact, I even stayed up a little later than I normally would have because I really didn’t think that I was going to be needing to get up any time soon at all.
Well, Toni got up around 7am to go to Bible Study and I kind of opened my eyes and looked at the weather. It was actually showing clouds outside and they were building nicely in the area of Lexington where I was planning on going. There was rain in the forecast for after 1pm, but there was a good period between 11 and 1 that would have really good clouds to work with. I decided that it was worth getting started with my day and heading out that way early enough to give myself some flexibility with the light.
I actually left before Toni did around 8:30 which would have me out at the Chevy by 10ish. This would give me time to talk with the owners if they were talkative folks and still leave me plenty of time to work with the light. I grabbed my camera and put it in the back of the truck as I have done so many times during the year so far. It had been a little over a week since the last time I had loaded it up and it kind of felt odd going through those motions. There was no way I was rusty with only a bit over a week’s downtime since my last trek, but something just felt off. Even driving down the road didn’t feel quite right to me. Granted, the last time I had driven the truck was coming back from Catawba Falls and the wash that happened the day after. Since then, I had put several hundred miles on the Miata while enjoying the weather, but it wasn’t so much the difference in driving dynamics that was throwing me as it was actually going out on a trek. I was wanting to create photographs, but at the same time wasn’t all that motivated to go out.
I kept thinking about that physics lesson that I learned in high school that said something to effect of an object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest will stay at rest. I’ve kind of been an object at rest here for the last week or so. Not necessarily “resting” but staying at home and taking care of chores and catching up on some television which has been kind of nice. I hadn’t really been doing a lot of active work with my photography, and I think that was where the odd feelings were coming from. For so much of the year thus far, I have been going out a couple of times a week or more which keeps a creative rhythm going for me. It becomes routine and I end up maintaining that rhythm. The little break that I had been taking from photography had interrupted that rhythm and I was going to have to get it back before it turned into a creative slump. Yeah, I’m still a little raw from my last slump and how long it took to come out of.
All indications pointed to this trek putting those concerns to rest. I had a lot of locations that I could shoot and had a specific location in mind for some photos. Once I got there, things should come together pretty well for me. I started to give myself pep-talks as I was driving down the road while looking for anything that might capture my attention and creative eye. This is always an odd time of year for me when it comes to photography, and I had to take that into consideration. With the colors of Spring popping up, I always feel like photographing the Landscape is a better choice over decay, and the decay subjects generally don’t look as good when compared with the late Fall and Winter months. That being said, the areas of the Parkway that I like working are still closed down, and traveling along the Parkway is a lot more difficult than it usually is which has made it much less of a destination in my mind for this year. With my current inspiration coming from decay subjects, I wasn’t wanting to fight that which left me focusing on a subject that doesn’t really fit the season.
On the way, I spotted barns that had vines overgrowing them which would be nice except for the fact that the greenery was taking over the barn and disguising the structure of the building. Those weren’t going to work for photographs at this time, but maybe in the later Fall months I could come back to them. A lot of the potential that I had seen on the sunny drive in the Miata was not really living up to the hype as I made my way East. Everything that I was seeing had some fatal flaw to it that made the photography less likely to be successful. The first spot that I saw that I kind of got excited about was a Ford truck about halfway out of a barn behind a house. The scene wasn’t terrific, but I saw a lot of potential with it. I figured out a composition in my head fairly quick and decided to note the cross street and some of the landmarks so I could stop here on the way back. My first priority for the day was to shoot that Chevrolet that was down the embankment. Of course, there is some very good advice that we should never pass up on a photograph that is right there in the hopes that our destination will be better, or work at all. Essentially, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I disregarded that advice and continued on to the Chevy, knowing what I might be giving up.
A few miles after the Ford, I spotted several old cars behind a business and thought that there might be something there worth shooting, but I didn’t see anything right off except for some interesting subjects to work with. I was feeling pretty good though, I had two additional spots to stop at after working the Chevrolet, which was going to make for a full morning as long as the weather would hold. I checked the phone and saw that I was about 10 minutes from my destination and the lighting was looking perfect for what I had in mind. This was going to be a good day!
I started to recognize the area before I spotted the Chevy and knew that the house I wanted to stop at was the next driveway. I slowed and pulled in without thinking about the subject or the compositions at all. I had come all the way out here to get the photo; there was no reason to stop and critically contemplate the scene before asking permission. There were several cars by the house, and I parked by them before going to the front door. There were spider webs at the door which indicated that nobody had been through here in a while. The blinds were all pulled and from the looks of it, this should be the main entrance based on the cars and the driveway design.
I knocked on the door and waited. There were no signs of any movement within the house. I started to say “hello” really loudly in case somebody inside might not have heard the knock. There was still no reply at all. I got back in the truck and pulled back down the driveway and looked at the satellite view on my map. The only other property that would make sense to be connected to the field would be the house on the other side, but that one was on the other side of a lot of trees, so I really doubted that it was related. It was worth the try though, so I drove over there and pulled down the driveway. This time, there were no cars, but the trailer looked more lived in that the previous one which was a good sign.
I went to the front door and knocked. Once again, I wasn’t able to hear any response inside at all. I looked around for any signs of life, but all the blinds were pulled and there were no lights on at all. Apparently, nobody was home here either. I slowly got back in the truck and pulled back out to the road. I waited for a break in the traffic and pulled out slowly so that I could pull off on the shoulder of the road and look at the Chevy critically for the first time.
This gave me the opportunity to really look at the scene and determine what my chances were of capturing a good photograph. I could tell that there was no way to create anything compelling from the road because I was much too high up as suspected. I wasn’t sure what the angles would look like from down below, but there would be a much better chance, I was sure. Looking at the property, I didn’t feel comfortable going doing the embankment without having permission from the owners. This was obviously a field that was owned and maintained by somebody and to get where I would need to be, I would be well within their property and arguably hidden from view which I didn’t like.
Just like that, my hopes for this location vanished for the day. There was just no way to capture a photo of the car without blatantly trespassing which I was not willing to do. Oh well, after looking at the car in more detail, it wasn’t as perfect as I had been thinking so it wasn’t a terrible loss to leave it. I still had plenty of other spots to stop at which would yield strong photos, at least I thought they might. I got back on the road headed West this time. As I backtracked, I was watching for anything that might pop out because at this stage of the day, I was more than happy to take advantage of a photo that caught my eye rather than focusing on the destination which was now kind of fuzzy anyway.
I didn’t really see anything that gave me pause in my travels back to Mocksville. I did start seeing the landmarks that I had committed to memory for the first stop I wanted to make that had the lot full of older cars. I slowed and waited for the building to appear. When it did, I slowed more and started to really look at the cars. It was kind of what I had remembered, but I wasn’t seeing as many interesting cars as I had thought. There were maybe two out of a dozen that would interest me, but there were no angles that would allow me to get a full shot of either of them. I would be restricted to isolations which wouldn’t be a terrible thing except for the fact that the patina on the cars wasn’t all that great. The business was closed, and the cars were located in a way that made me kind of reluctant to get in close enough to photograph them as I would want to. In short, this location wasn’t as strong as I had hoped it would be.
I just kept on driving because I knew that in another four or so miles, I would be at the location with the Ford truck partially out of the garage. That was now my favorite scene of the day and was going to be what would make this trip worth the time and effort. I didn’t quite remember what the house looked like in front of the truck, so I missed it on the first pass back through. I knew that I had missed it, so I turned around at the next intersection and started looking for it again. It was very easy to spot in this direction, and I pulled into the driveway for the house in front of the truck.
I saw no vehicles around the house which kind of concerned me, but I’ve run into this before when there were still people inside of the house. I walked up to the front door and saw that there was a Ring doorbell which I have come to really appreciate thanks to their ability to act as a communication device. I rang the bell but heard nothing and realized that the blue light didn’t illuminate like I am used to seeing. It appeared that the bell was dead, so I knocked on the door.
I stood there for a few minutes and listened. I heard nothing at all inside of the house and saw no signs of life. I slowly came off of the porch and looked around. There was another part of the house that didn’t look connected to the right and there was a light lit by the door. I went over that door and saw a sign that said that this was essentially a clubhouse. I knocked on the door but again heard nothing inside of the structure. Neither of these buildings looked occupied, so I pulled out the phone once again and looked at the satellite view. I was looking for another house on the property, but the only other structure was further down the driveway, and I could see it from where I was standing. It was a shed and would not be considered a livable structure. I was at a loss here as there were no other connections with other properties and I could see no other options to find an owner.
I started to walk down the driveway to get a closer look at the Ford and to see if anyone was possibly back around it. There was no activity and there was a fair amount of “junk” on and near the truck which kind of took the wind out of my sails for wanting the photo. Had I been able to get permission, I would have been able to do something with it for sure, but without permission, there was no way. I was too far from it on the driveway and to get this far, I was well within the property and past my comfort zone. It was going to be another write-off for the day it was looking like. I got back in the truck and looked around one last time in hopes of finding a hint that might lead me to the property owners. I saw nothing that made any sense, so I got back on the road headed West.
Things were not going well at all. I had been to three different places and hadn’t even shut the truck off, much less pulled the camera out. I had been gone for a bit over two hours with nothing at all to show for it. I’ve had plenty of days like this in the past, so I wasn’t feeling stressed over it, but it was hitting me in a way that made me question if I was actually still feeling creative. I know that when I am forcing myself to go out for photos, I will talk myself out of stopping and then will give up very easily when I run into situations like this where the owners are hard to find. Was I sabotaging myself on this trek, or was I really running into dead ends? I wasn’t quite sure of the answer to be honest, but I was concerned about what a fruitless trek might do to my mentality after so much back-to-back success from the first third of the year.
As I was getting back on the road, I thought about a location that I had stopped to photograph probably a half dozen times over the last couple of years. There was a Chrysler out behind a house next to a field which had caught my eye a while back. I had eventually talked to a resident at a house nearby who had confirmed that the owner lived in the trailer by that field, and that they would answer the rear door. I had been to that trailer several times and even left my card in an attempt to make contact with them to no avail. Eventually, I had given up trying and moved on to different subjects and locations. I was going to be driving right by there on the way home and figured that I would just stop and knock one more time. I mean that has worked out for me lately and I was really hoping that I was due some luck on this trek.
As I entered the driveway, I recognized the Lumina pulling into the house at the roadway because this was the man who had told me about where the owner lived. I waved and kept going down the driveway to the trailer at the top of the hill. When I got there, I went to the front of the home out of respect first and knocked. There was no answer at all, so I went around to the back. This time when I knocked, a dog started to bark which I remembered happening the other times as well. I waited for a few minutes because there was a ramp installed which indicated limited mobility. When I didn’t hear anything and the door remained closed, I slowly walked back to the truck and headed back down to the road once again. This was now four failures for the morning, and I was starting to take it personally.
The next major intersection that I came to was for Hwy 21 where I had come through earlier. Feeling that everything from here to home had been locations that I have either seen or shot plenty of times before, I decided to turn right and head up to Yadkin County, or possibly Elkin before turning West again. This would give me a little different scenery than I had seen on the way out a couple of hours earlier. The hope was that I would find something to photograph that would make the drive worthwhile.
It didn’t start out very promising though. There wasn’t anything that jumped out at me and my creativity was feeling the torture of changing up ideas for the different subjects I had been thinking I was going to photograph. Even if I found something, would I be able to come up with a photograph? I wasn’t sure if I would at this point, but I still looked. As I got into Yadkin County, I remembered driving through the area with Toni and pointing out an old Plymouth sedan that I had shot many times since 2014. I even had a story of going out there with Sierra and doing some light painting one night. I think that the last time I went out there was in the Fall of 2017 which saw the car starting to really show the signs of age and cannibalism. Since that point, the car has been stripped more and more to the point that I had kind of lost interest in it. However, when Toni and I drove by it was almost as if it had passed through the awkward stage and was looking beautiful again as pretty much a shell of a car.
It didn’t really hit me right then, but as I was driving towards the car with photography on my mind, I thought that this might be a good time to stop and get a few photos. As I was keeping an eye on the rain, it was looking like I would have enough time to work this car and still get home before the rain hit. There wouldn’t be much to do with the car because there was a lot of clutter around it, and the isolation possibilities were probably rather limited, but I could see getting a photo or two of it.
When I got to the intersection, I pulled into the shop and checked out the views. The business was closed and there weren’t many cars in the lot which made things much easier for me. There were still two cars parked along the treeline and a pickup truck that was in front of the Plymouth that had been there for ages now. I parked near that truck because I doubted that I would be shooting in that direction and wanted to keep my shooting angles clear while staying close to where I was going to be. I finally got the camera out nearly three hours after setting out on this adventure. There was a feeling of relief after getting it mounted to the tripod. I chose my standard zoom because I knew that I wanted to get an overall of the car and that was going to be the right lens for the job.
The lines of the car were much different than the other times I had shot it thanks to the hood being removed and flopped over on the passenger side fender. I decided to embrace that and let it add some new shapes to the composition as well as telling a part of the story of the car. I used the wider end of the lens to make the car larger in the frame while making the two cars in the background smaller so that they would effectively be hidden by the Plymouth. This worked out and I kept the frame close on the right side to omit the light pole from view. The composition was very familiar to me, but it was also a very effective one for the location.
Once I had that first shot in the bag, I moved on to some isolations. There were things like the hood emblem, wire spoked wheels, and the taillights that interested me. I spent some time with these different subjects and decided that I needed to switch over to my telephoto lens to get the right look for the photos. I also picked out an abstract view of the rear quarter panel with the hole from the gas filler neck. The flow of the lines was just beautiful and something that I had not really seen before with this car. It was this photo that turned into one of my favorites for many reasons, not least of which was the fact that it was a new composition here.
The entire time I was shooting isolations of the car; I kept looking at the old drag car behind the Plymouth and wondering if there was a photograph I could make with it. It has been here for at least as long as the Plymouth and has a good bit of personality as well, even if the hood has a bit ole scoop and the entire front end has been removed. There is a lot of story here with this car, and it is a story that I have not really explored in the past. I knew that I had shot the two cars together at one point but couldn’t really remember exactly how that had looked. This didn’t bother me at all since that just meant that I was going into the composition fresh with nothing already in my mind. I liked the idea of putting the drag car off to the left of the Plymouth and capturing them both in their entirety.
That was a bit harder to do that I had anticipated though because the hood was blocking where the car would logically go to keep them close to each other. I decided to change up some of the scaling and make the drag car a bit smaller by going with a wider focal length. This was accomplished by swapping back to my standard zoom from the telephoto. I picked the right spot to set up the shot and had the drag car further off to the left just beyond the removed hood. In hindsight, the hood looks a lot like somebody doing “duck lips,” and I think that was something that I was drawn to subconsciously to have the two subjects relating to each other. It did work, and I saw it immediately when I was starting the edit on it. I did do this as black and white because I thought that the two orange cars were in too much competition visually and with the different sizes of the cars, there was too much confusion. By getting rid of the color, the size alone provided the visual importance that I wanted to showcase.
I would have been remiss had I not gone in for a composition of just the drag car. It was lacking a lot of things that I would have usually considered mandatory items for an overall shot, but the fact that there was a fresh green plant growing through the radiator support kind of made up for the fact that all the chrome was missing from the front. There were really no other elements to balance out the frame, which prompted me to just fill the frame with the car from an elevated position to show the more interesting surfaces throughout the composition. You could even see the graphic on the scoop that had the name “Bart” and what looked like maybe a drawing of Bart Simpson, but I could be wrong about that. It was too far gone to really see what the drawing had been. At any rate, the photo turned out pretty good and the lack of secondary elements was made less problematic through the use of perspective distortion from the wider-angle lens.
While not the best of locations, and certainly not the location that I had had in mind when I had left the house, I was really happy that I had stopped here and pulled the camera out. It was a nice ride down memory lane from the other times that I had shot this car and a great opportunity to track the decay progress that is happening. It is past the awkward years now and is quite pretty again with its current state. I don’t know how much longer this car will be here, but I’m really thrilled that I have been able to photograph it as much as I have. It is really a treasure, and I imagine that it doesn’t get the love that it deserves these days.
It was time to call it a day though as I was still a good ways from home and was wanting to get back before the rain hit around 1pm. I did keep my eyes out for any other potential stops that I could make, or something that I might be able to come back to later on. Nothing really jumped out at me, and I ended up getting home about a quarter till one. Toni met me outside and we were talking about our days as the raindrops started to fall and eventually that turned into a downpour. I had timed it just right and had shot a total 38 frames from one location that ended up providing me with seven keepers. I just can’t complain about that at all, and as difficult as the day had been, it had a very strong finish.
Hopefully, I will be able to photograph the other scenes another time in the future. I think that there is still a great deal of potential out that way and will return at least several more times before I give up. I might have to wait until after the Summer though because I have a feeling that the lush colors might not help most of the scenes I saw. Decay is really a great subject for the Fall and Winter, and I’ll need places to go when the leaves start to fall. I’m still trying to get in the mood for landscape work and am trying to figure out places to go, but my heart is still with rural scenes and rust this year. I’m not going to fight it too much, but I’m sure that there will be plenty of landscapes thrown in through the green months.
Thank you for joining me on this trek, and I hope that you have enjoyed the photos as well as the narrative from the day. Photography isn’t as easy as it might look, and there are days when it is downright hard. Today was one of those days and the most likely outcome was looking like it being a day that I just didn’t talk about. It is rare that you will read a blog that talks about a trek with no photos. Those are usually just classified as scouting days for me, and I just don’t talk about them at all. I was one stop away from this being just that kind of day. I think that there was something driving me to this location because I didn’t think about it at all until I was just a couple of miles from it. There were things beyond my thoughts at work that brought me to this location on this day, and I’m very thankful.
Until next time….
