Monday, June 9, 2025
Yes, and I feel guilty about it too. Yesterday was a week since I last mowed, and up until yesterday, the yard wasn’t really looking all that bad. However, with the recent rains and the very warm temperatures over the weekend, I think the grass decided to wake up. I had decided that I was going to mow this afternoon after going out for a little fun ride in the Miata to start the day off. Well, I got the drive done and had quite a nice time until it got hot. I was noticing that the clouds were looking pretty good to the West and had remembered that they were supposed to be coming into the area during the afternoon with some showers and storms expected in the evening. I would be long finished with the yard by the time the rain was supposed to hit, but I wanted to make sure that things weren’t changing up too much.
When I got home, I pulled out the phone and started to look at the weather and saw that the clouds were actually going to come in kind of thick around 3pm or so which was when I was planning on working with the yard. My original intention was to get out early on Tuesday morning to do some photography, but looking at the weather, it appeared that my better option would be this afternoon. I could gamble and get the yard done and then plan on going out in the morning, but I knew that there was every chance that the weather was going to change between now and then. It is always better to take advantage of the conditions at hand or a subject that presents itself rather than waiting for something that you hope will be better.
The decision was made to make a decision at 2pm as to what I was going to do. I spent the next hour and a half watching the weather and eventually making a late lunch that would serve as my dinner since I was going to be occupied in one way or another when I would normally be eating. I also spent a good bit of that time trying to decide on what I wanted to shoot. I don’t have a really long list of locations currently because this is my least favorite time of the year to engage in photography since everything is just so green now. I do enjoy landscapes, but the lighting would not be great for that until much later in the day, so I kind of dismissed the landscape options though I did keep Doughton Park in my back pocket since it is now accessible again.
When the time came, I looked outside and checked the phone one more time. I gambled and made the decision to go out and do some photography while I had good clouds to work with. I still wasn’t really sure where to go, but I had remembered a location near Roaring River that I had tried to shoot many times over the last few years. I know I’ve stopped and knocked on the door at least three or four times without luck. There have been two Fords sitting in a shelter since Toni and I moved out this way, and recently they have been moved out of that shelter and placed next to another barn on the other side of the property. In many ways, this was a much better location for them to be photographically, but it was also a bit more difficult because they were still parked very close to each other and there were other vehicles around them which would make compositions kind of difficult. In my mind, having them in the shelter created a story that I could work with in a photo, but with them outside, that story no longer worked, and I was going to have to come up with another story for them.
I slowly got my stuff together as I looked out at the sun going in and out figuring that 25 miles to the East was going to have less clouds at this point, but I did want to make sure that I had time to work the scene if I could get permission and if not, I wanted to have time to find another option to shoot nearby. When the garage door went up, I decided that I was committed and would deal with whatever I came up against and if things just completely fell through, I would probably be back in time to still do a quick mow before the rains hit.
As I was driving East, I had my sunglasses on which is usually a pretty bad sign that the light is too bright for photography. At least the way that I like to do it. Any light can work for photos; I just like the more diffused light from a cloudy day. It makes things much easier to work with in my opinion. All I could do was hope that the building clouds would find their way over the sun when I was needing the diffused light. I was also hoping against hope that I was going to be able to make contact with the property owners who, up until now, have been rather elusive. The only thing that I was holding onto for hope was that this was probably the latest in the day that I have tried to knock on the door since I am usually going out that way in the morning.
It really didn’t take too long for me to get out there and I slowed down as I drove past to get an idea of how things were looking. The cars were in the same place, but there was now a trailer with some building materials on it parked right in front of the two cars. They were still right next to a barn as well as a late 70’s Camaro and a Mitsubishi truck. There were no obvious compositions, but the cars both looked fantastic. Since I was already past the property, I spent a few minutes pondering what I would with them if given the chance to photograph them. Obviously, there would be a lot of isolations, but I really wanted to try and get them both in a composition together also.
After a few minutes, I was in the next town and found a place to get turned around. I also scoped out my alternate location which failed to excite me much. Just a few minutes later, I was back at the location with the two Fords and as I was slowing down, I spotted somebody moving by the shelter where the cars had been. Could I be that lucky this time to actually catch the owners outside? I pulled in and saw a man and woman outside and they were watching me with great interest as I’m sure they don’t get too many strangers pulling into their driveway. I got out and introduced myself and let them know quickly what I was hoping to do. Initially I didn’t think that this was going well, but the body language changed up pretty quick and we started to chat about the cars.
As it turned out, they were both one owner cars and belonged to her parents. She told me a very brief history of them and that one of them was the car that her parents had gone on their first date in. Of course, she is not wanting to get rid of the cars and intends on keeping them forever which I certainly can’t blame her for. I inquired as to why they weren’t in the shelter anymore since they had such sentimental value. They let me know that the building materials that were parked in front of the cars happened to be the new shelter that they would be parked under. It was about to be built.
There are times that my timing is excellent when it comes to this kind of photography. Most of the time, I am talking to the owner days before the cars are to be hauled off, or a restoration started. This time, I was running out of days when they would be out in the open. The light wasn’t looking all that great, but I recognized a last chance when I saw one. I decided that I was going to make this work, and I was going to get some photos from this location even if it meant pausing for some time between shots as I waited for the sun to get covered by the clouds that were plentiful in the sky.
I parked my truck out of the way and pulled out my camera bag to get the camera and my standard zoom out. I knew that I wanted to start with the overall composition to establish the scene as I was getting to know the cars. Before I would be able to effectively capture the isolations, I was going to have to understand what I was working with. I had only seen them from a distance, or in the shelter that they had been moved out of. This was the first time I had really looked at them. They were both Fairlanes, and I could see some interesting trim on both of them which was different from what I normally see. They were also both coupes which was a pretty rare find for me. The badging on the doors seemed to be more intricate than I was used to and I looked closer at those and found that these were both Crown Victorias which was another really awesome discovery here. These were certainly unique cars for me to photograph, and I was pretty excited to have the chance.
Getting the overall compositions was really not that easy to do. What I started out with was one from the driver’s side that included the stump of a large tree in the foreground to help balance out the fact that I had to include a portion of the barn on the opposite side. These elements became framing elements for the cars and seemed to work fairly well. I also went to the other side and managed to just sneak the neighboring cars out of the view to be able to concentrate just on the two cars. In both compositions, I found that I was just about touching the trailer with the building materials on it. I knew that I didn’t want that in the composition, so I worked around it the best that I could.
When I was happy that I had two workable overall compositions, I started to move into the isolations. Of course, my first subject was the door on the tan car where the Crown Victoria emblem was found. I liked the chrome trim below it as well as the crest right above the chevron. There wasn’t a lot of difference in the color tones, so I was pretty sure that I was going to make this a black and white composition where I could concentrate on contrasts and textures which were really the story on this door. The hardest part was determining the angle to have the camera to keep this from being a very stagnant horizontal composition. I’ve learned over the years that angles are my friend when it comes to creating a dynamic composition.
The next spot that grabbed my attention was the V8 badge on the side of the teal car. There was only one present, and it was on the side that was next to the tan car. This made it kind of difficult to get a composition put together, but I worked with it until I had something new in front of the camera. Instead of including the headlights and potentially the wheel, I just included hints of both to frame the emblem and let the paint and rust tell the story of what the emblem was mounted to.
The end result is a little abstract and I liked it that way. When Toni looked at it, she saw the rust as being the silhouette of a cartoon body builder and called it “Muscle Man.” I had to pause and consider that for a title after she said it. It made total sense, and the V8 emblem was a badge of power for these cars and Toni was right about the silhouette. Just like that, this photo was titled. I’m always getting compliments on the titles of my photos, and most of the time I do come up with them on my own. However, there are times when Toni comes up with great ideas and I know that there is nothing I can come up with any better, and it sticks.
As I was looking around for different compositions, I moved over to the teal car and found that the door emblems were pretty much the same as the tan car. The difference was the colors which were absolutely perfect together. The sunlight was also illuminating the door providing a bit more pop to the rusty tones above the chrome trim. I worked on getting another composition put together on this side and found that it came together much quicker than the other side. It also helped that shortly after shooting that other door, I had switched out my standard zoom for the telephoto which would make the isolations a bit easier to deal with in the close confines I happened to be working in.
I ended up with two shots of similar doors that I really liked. One of them I had shot with the intention of making it a black and white while the other one absolutely had to be a full color image. Since I had very different ideas for both of these scenes, I decided to keep them both with the intended presentation done on both of them. I’m happy with the choice and find that both of the images say completely different things which is what I look for if I am keeping similar photographs from a trek.
As I was working with the door, I took particular notice of the broken window and tried to get that included with the door emblem, but really didn’t like the way it was coming together. I decided to make two shots out of this set of elements and when I was done with the emblem, I moved my attention to the broken glass. Only this time I wasn’t really interested in the broken glass as a subject. I was now wanting to use it as a frame for something in the interior of the car. As I looked inside, I saw the Ford emblem on the dash with the large clock to the left. As I moved my head around, I found that the clock fit nicely in a larger portion of missing glass while the part of the dash with the Ford emblem fit within the larger area of missing glass. I pulled the camera over to where I was and found the right composition before dropping the tripod legs while the camera was still glued to my eye. This makes things very simple when it comes to getting the starting composition right to begin with.
Once I had the basic composition figured out, I did a little fine tuning and then started to work with the depth of field. I knew that I wanted the glass to go soft, but I also wanted the cracked bits to still show up. This meant that I still needed a good bit of depth of field, and I couldn’t just shoot the lens wide open as you would expect when wanting to blur out the foreground. As it turned out, f/11 happened to be the right aperture to get the right amount of blur in the scene. This is usually an aperture that I would use to get everything in focus when shooting a landscape but working this close to the subject changes a lot of those dynamics.
The end result is one that I am very happy with. That is saying something because I am never really happy with my interior shots and dash shots. I do like doing them through broken windows though because they help to simplify the scene a bit more.
By this time in the afternoon, I had been out here for 30 minutes and had shot 29 frames. I was moving quickly, but I wasn’t sure how long the light was going to last which pushed me to get the shot and move on. Once I had a good selection of images, I would slow down and be a little more picky with the compositions, but the last thing that I wanted to happen was to only get a composition or two and then the sun come out without remorse, or the rain would start falling. Either way, my day could get shut down quickly and I wanted to have a few photos to show for the day since I had finally gotten permission to work the cars. I was comfortably at that spot now and could start to slow down a bit and really look for some interesting compositions and things that I might not have tried before.
You will have to stick around and wait for part 2 of this blog which should be ready sometime tomorrow. For now, I’m going to call it a night and get ready for bed. There is another cloudy day tomorrow and if I can come up with a location to go, I’ll probably have another trek under my belt by this time tomorrow evening. While you are waiting on the next blog, if any of these photos resonate with you, please consider supporting my art by purchasing a print. There is just no better way to enjoy photography than in the intended tangible form which in my case is a print. Everything that I shoot is done with the intention of becoming a piece of wall art not just a digital photo that gets tossed around on social media for likes and comments. The comments that I want out of my photos are conversations that start because somebody comes into your house and sees an interesting photo on the wall and asks about it. That is my dream for my photos, and it is a dream that I am rarely a direct part of which is fine by me.
Stay tuned, there are more photos from these two on the way.
Until then….
