Sunday, August 3, 2025
Alright, I’m going to cut to the chase with this one. There are 18 new images that I am about to introduce to you. There might be more by the time I’m finished as I have not gone back through the culled photos to see if there are anymore that I might want to process. At any rate, that is just too many photos to put in a single blog. I thought about breaking them up evenly with six in each, but that didn’t make much sense because there was a much more natural division between them that I could use instead. What I’ve decided to do is make this first part about the two barns that I started the day off wanting to photograph. They were pretty quick stops, and I was figuring that I would get one or two photos from each of the locations. The second part will be a location that I spotted on the way to the second barn and ended up spending a good deal of time there. The third and last blog will be another location that I had planned on stopping by on the way home which was going to probably be a wash because the cars were all jumbled together. Obviously, you can tell that things went pretty well if I have this many photos to talk about.
So, how did this all get started? Well, I was really wanting to get out yesterday and enjoy a nice cool day with clouds and little to no rain. That was what the forecast stated was going to happen. My plan was simple, and I had four places that I wanted to go by and work which would take advantage of the cloudy conditions quite well. First of all, I wanted to get back out to the shop near the house that I had gone to the other day trying to get permission to enter the property. There was nobody home, and I wanted to try and see if I could catch somebody during the weekend. The second place was not too far from there and it happened to be a barn that I had photographed shortly after moving to Wilkes County in 2020. I had been passing it by several times over the last few weeks and kind of wanted to give it another try. The third location was also a barn that I had photographed several years ago after finding it on one of my Miata rides. To round the day up, I wanted to swing by a shop that I pass just about every time I leave the house which has a pretty regular rotation of vehicles out front. I had been seeing a yellow MG that interested me, which was followed up by a white Fiat, and mostly recently a purple Triumph. Now, to be fair, it was the original MG that I was most interested in capturing and I remember thinking that the purple Triumph was just too much and if I did photograph it, I would have to do it in black and white. It was still interesting, and since I have really enjoyed being a part of the roadster culture with the Miata, I was really drawn to those cars even though I didn’t see that many compositions jumping out at me.
As you can see, I had a pretty good plan to get things started, I just needed the weather to cooperate. When Toni and I got up Saturday morning, the weather was showing clouds with very little rain in the forecast. I was excited and got out of bed to look out the window. Everything was soaked outside, but I wasn’t able to tell if it was raining just yet. I didn’t have my contacts in, and it looked like nothing was in the air. However, Toni told me that it looked like it was misting outside. That was fine, there was every chance that would clear up later in the morning, so I didn’t really worry about it too much.
When I got done with my morning stuff downstairs, I came back upstairs to look out the windows again. It was still looking the same way that it had been, but the driveway was dry. I went outside and found that it was still misting pretty heavily which I didn’t much care for because it was blowing enough that there would be no way to keep my lenses clear of the mist. It was still early, so I just decided to wait. Not long after that decision, it started to rain heavier.
This was the routine through the day. There would be a light mist and then heavy rain alternating about every 30 minutes. By around 3:30 or so, I decided to call it a day and not bother with trying to go out for any photos. I did look at the weather for Sunday and it was showing cloudy with no rain yet again. Time would tell if that was going to be the same kind of forecast with rain that never showed up on the hourly. I still wanted to do my same plan of action because the clouds were likely going to be rather interesting. All that was going to potentially chance would be the order in which I went depending on how the light was looking.
When Toni and I woke up this morning, the weather was again showing just clouds with no rain in the forecast. Looking outside, there was a good deal of wetness on the driveway which meant that there was rain that had come through recently. Looking hard outside there was nothing falling from the clouds and when I took the trash out, it was dry. I got done with my morning posting on social media and looked at the weather again. Things were looking pretty good, and I decided that I would go out and start working the scenes that I had in mind.
The camera was already in the truck from the day before so that it could get acclimated to the ambient temperature and humidity. Fortunately, the temperature was quite a bit lower, so I was doubting that I was going to have much issue with fogging on the gear that happens so readily when the temperature is 90+ degrees with 150% humidity. As I was driving down the road, I was looking at the clouds to determine which should be my first stop. My first thought was going to the repair shop with the roadsters, but when I saw that there was some texture in the clouds, I wanted to go and work one of the barns first. Those were going to include the sky, and I needed to have some interest to show in the sky.
For simplicity, I decided to go to the closest one first because I was able to see what the sky looked like over that one from where I was driving. The other one was about 20 miles up the mountain from where I was at. It didn’t take long at all to get to the barn and when I did, I pulled off on the same shoulder that I had all those years ago. I knew it would be out of the way for just about anything that I wanted to shoot. I grabbed the camera with the standard zoom on it because I really didn’t think that I was going to need the wide-angle lens for this. I added a polarizer and started to work my way around all the different points that I could think of to photograph the barn.
The area that I had wanted to start from was out of the question because there were cows laying in the field. While this sounds like a great addition, and it should have been, they were all positioned in a place where the fence would block the view of them. That overlap of elements was going to negatively affect the composition because there would just be no separation and too much visual weight in one place. I ended up going further up the road to get something similar to what I had shot before. I wasn’t able to get a composition that I really thought was going to work though. Everything that I was coming up with had the horizon pretty much in the middle of the frame with nothing breaking that line. That gave me nothing but sky in the top half with a road, barn, trees, and a field in the lower half. This was not balanced the way that I would have wanted.
Now for comparison’s sake, the previous composition that I had shot of this barn had been roughly that, but the sky was much more interesting which gave a better balance to the whole scene. This time, the sky was softer, though still interesting. I just needed something else in the sky. After about 10 frames I backed up near to the intersection and started to frame up a composition that included a large tree to the left. This gave me the opportunity to include more of the road, allowing it to enter further into the frame, pushing the barn over to the right. The large tree actually went beyond the top of the photo and added a nice element that crossed the horizon and linked the two halves. The balance was there finally. The soft clouds worked well with the open field that was the majority of my foreground as it was just soft texture. The road provided a visual pathway through the frame to take the eyes on a journey which I really liked. Not only did it point to the barn in the midground, but it also framed that tree to the left making it that much more of an important feature to the composition.
It was these last two frames that made the cut after three rounds of culling. There were two others that almost made the cut, but it was that tree to the left that swung the vote. There is a fair chance that I will return to one of those and do it as a black and white, but I haven’t quite decided on that just yet. We will see what happens by the time all of this is finished out.
It is worth mentioning that while shooting this barn, I spotted an old car behind a vacant house close by. I’m not sure how much of subject it could be, but it certainly checked the boxes for something that I would want a closer look at. I’ll try and find the owner at some point in the near future and give that a try. I’m not quite sure why I haven’t seen it before now, but it always pays to keep my eyes open when shooting these subjects because there is a very good chance that there will be more just around the corner.
Feeling pretty good about how the morning was starting, I decided to head up and see if the owner of the shop near the house was home, and if I could get permission to give that location a try. As luck would have it, I turned the wrong direction on the main road and ended up going in the opposite direction which was taking me West. Instead of turning around, I decided to continue that way and make my way up the mountain into the community of Idlewild. It was a short drive, but the sky was still looking good out that way and I was hopeful that I was going to be able to do something great with that barn. It is one that sticks out for me because it has several different additions on the side which has resulted in a very interesting slope of a roof.
A few miles before I got there, I spotted an orange pickup down a very long driveway. It was kind of angular and from the quick moment that I saw it, I could have sworn it was a Jeep J-10, but I wasn’t completely sure. The fender was missing and that kind of made it hard to tell for sure. I decided that I would give it a closer look after I was done with the barn. The sky was looking good, and I knew that that was going to be an important part of the composition. I also knew that it was going to be a pretty quick stop since I was going to have to work it from the road which was a good distance away from the barn.
When I arrived, I pulled off the road around the area that I planned on working from. I remembered from last time; I had shot this with the telephoto to get the reach on the barn. That had worked out well, but I really wanted to try something different this time. I grabbed the camera and fit the standard zoom on it along with the polarizer. I knew that this was going to make the barn kind of small in the frame, but I felt that was the right choice today with the lighting. Everything was very calm and having plenty of breathing room just made sense to me.
I started to frame up the scene and decided that I really wanted to include the fence as a foreground. From where I was standing, that fence was going to be at a gentle diagonal in the foreground, but there was a problem with that. In order to get the entire fence, I was going to have to go so wide that the barn would become insignificant in the frame. Maybe I should rethink this composition a little bit. I needed to change the relationship between the fence and the barn, so I backed away and went with a slightly longer focal length. That still didn’t work out too well, so I had to further reduce the size of the fence. The best way to do it was to crop the posts on the left side of the frame while I included the full length of just a few of them to the right. This gave the scale of them and created a nice curve to the bottom of the frame. Even though the fence didn’t connect to the right, the curve was evident, and the fence led right back to the barn which I loved. More importantly, the scaling between them was much more pleasant with the change in focal length and camera placement.
I shot a couple of frames like this and decided that I still wasn’t sure that was going to work out because the barn still looked small in the image review. I started to play around with the composition and eventually abandoned the fence in the foreground for a more postcard shot of the barn which took me to 70mm pretty quickly. Realizing that was happening, I went back to the camera bag and grabbed the telephoto lens and started to work some tighter compositions. I was liking these better in the image review because I was getting more detail out of the barn, but they were starting to look like what I had shot before.
Even though it has been a while since I have really looked at the photo of this barn that I had shot years ago, the basic composition was pretty well burned into my head because I have used it as a teaching photo several times now. On the day that I shot it, the light was totally different, and the trees looked different which called for a much tighter composition to really focus on the elements. That was the composition that I was finding myself returning to, but the scene didn’t really support that kind of a tight composition. It was still a great composition, but it lacked something with the trees being a bit more filled out and the lack of sunlight providing structure to the elements.
I ended up shooting 16 frames of this barn and really didn’t feel all that happy about any of them. They seemed to be kind of bland. Part of that was the light because it was very soft and even thanks to the clouds, but part of it was the fact that the trees were much thicker than last time and were partially obscuring the barn. The tight composition wasn’t making any sense, and the broad composition made me think that the barn got lost in the frame. I did feel like I had something out of those 16 frames, I just didn’t know what I had. I did know that I had exhausted my options out here and felt that it was time to go and check out that orange truck while the light was still good.
For the sake of conversation, when I got the images home, it was that first composition with the standard zoom that won out without a question. Even though the barn was smaller in the frame than what I had shot before, it was the flow of the frame that really stood out to me. The large field created some wonderful negative space that allowed the fence to really play an active part in the whole frame. The clearing that was to the left of the barn that went up the hill took on a life of its own to direct the viewer’s eyes up to the sky. Everything fell into place with this composition and something that I was really surprised with was the depth of field. Since I had not been sure that the composition was working, I hadn’t done my normal checking of focus after the exposure. I had just roughly focused a third of the way in and stopped the lens down to f/16 which should have given me sufficient depth of field. Now that I was convinced that this was the image to process, I was looking at it in detail. I had been OK with the idea that the fence might go a little soft, but it was just about tack sharp as was the barn in the distance. Sometimes I am really happy that these skills are second nature to me, and I don’t have to really think about them, or double check that often in the field. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world had the fence gone a little soft, but I actually nailed focus on this one. It really had been just a test image and the second frame that I had shot at this location. It is easily my favorite of the day so far, and Toni even loves it which is always a good sign.
I’m going to cut this one off here because the next part to this blog will be dealing with the orange truck. Since it is getting its own blog entry, I think you can already surmise that the location turned out to be very interesting for me. I’ll be back here again at some point tomorrow with the follow-up blog entry which I will link here. There will be another one after that as well as I have already mentioned, so grab some popcorn and enjoy the journey.
I’ll see you soon….
