Saturday, May 30, 2026
Welcome back! After several weeks of radio silence, it seems like poetic justice to return with a multi-part blog. Granted, yesterday’s blog entry wasn’t labeled as a part one, but that was what it was essentially. Because it was a location that was two counties away from where I ended up, and with a very different type of subject, I chose to just make it a standalone blog entry. This entry will be the start of two chapters because I kind of took two different approaches to the location as the time ticked by. I’ll get into more of that later on, but for now, let’s get caught up.
When we last spoke, I had just gotten gas in Yadkinville and was seeing that the clouds were not looking impressive in the direction that I was wanting to go and work. The smart choice looked like I needed to head to the South and even possibly back to the East a little bit. I know that there are some really good areas to find rural and decay subjects out that way, so it was no real problem to make that change in the plans. With a full tank of gas, I was headed through Hamptonville and towards Iredell County. I didn’t have a destination in mind; I just planned on taking roads that didn’t seem familiar.
My road trip probably lasted a couple of hours as I got deeper and deeper into the back country of Yadkin and Iredell Counties. While I saw a lot of potential, nothing was showing enough promise to stop and pull the camera out. The motivation just wasn’t there for some reason. There was no pressure on me for this part of the trek as I had already spent a while working with the Honda N600 which was rather unique. I was open to working with rusted vehicles as well as barns or old houses. Just nothing was catching my eye. I mean nothing at all.
As I meandered around, I eventually found myself on a road that I knew would take me to 115 which would be the simple path home. I figured that I had a few images to work with and there was no sense in just driving aimlessly around any longer. I was done for the day, and I was OK with that.
As I came into Wilkes County, and eventually into the edge of the Wilkesboros, I decided that I would swing by a favorite restoration shop in North Wilkesboro to see what they had in the lot. I like going by there on the weekends because they are not open and I don’t get in the way. There is usually at least one interesting vehicle in the parking lot each time I come through. As I got closer, I also remembered another restoration shop that was on the edge of town that I have had good luck with each time I’ve stopped. They tend to have more old and rusty cars sitting outside, but they are very crowded and they don’t change up all that often.
Since I had to go by that one to get to the other one, I did a quick roll through to see what was in the parking lot today. Everything looked pretty much the same as the last time I was there down to the Apache pickup that I had first seen on that trek. It was looking better in the diffused light since the clouds had decided to come over Wilkes County by this point in the day. There was also a turquoise sedan that was parked next to it that I didn’t recognize. At first glance, I thought it was an Impala, but then it started to look like a Galaxy. When I got close enough to see the details, I recognized it as a Plymouth Fury. Even cooler than it being a Fury was the fact that it was obviously a rat rod which was a fact given away by the white dished wheels that really looked good with the paint color. The fact that it was a four-door started to seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
I started to take inventory of what I had to work with here. The clouds were looking good and were providing some really great light from the diffused sun. I had a closed business, with several interesting vehicles parked outside. One of those vehicles was a rat rod which I just don’t get to see out in the wild that often. It wasn’t the normal rusted finish that I get to photograph plenty of times. This time, it was a beautiful shade of turquois with some nice patina mixed in for good measure. The white wheels set it all off, and that made me interested in getting a few photos of it. I parked without having a clear plan of what I was going to do in order to get the photos though. I was going to be winging it knowing that I was going to have an uphill battle trying to get good compositions.
What I was faced with was several vehicles parked all around the Apache and the Fury which were the ones that I was particularly interested in. Opposite of the Apache was a later model full sized pickup which was parked even closer to the Fury. In front of the Apache was a Lexus under a tarp, and to the side of the Apache was another vehicle before a Dodge military truck. Of course, all of these vehicles were parked at the rear of the building which provided its own hurdles to get over for creative compositions. There was absolutely no way to get an overall composition of any of the interesting vehicles in the scene. It was going to be an exercise in isolations and abstracts more than likely.
Normally, I would have pulled out the camera with the telephoto lens on it and just started to pick out details on the interesting cars. For some reason, I went right to the standard zoom this time. The only thing that I could think of was that the perspective that my eyes were showing me seemed to work for the cars. This meant that I was going to be around 35-60mm give or take and that was the domain of the standard zoom. At this point, I didn’t care about pushing the creative envelope in terms of focal length, I just wanted to be able to capture compositions that were easy to follow.
As I was walking to the bundle of cars, I started to see something interesting between the Apache and the Fury. These were the two interesting vehicles, and they happened to be in close proximity to each other. I started to form a crazy idea of including detail shots of both of the vehicles in a single image. I wasn’t able to capture an entire car; I could take my detail photos to the next level by including two different subjects in a single frame. The parts that I found interesting about them both happened to be the parts that were close together which made this seem like a very logical choice. All I had to do was to figure out just how to put them together in a composition to where it made sense.
The parts that I liked about the Fury were the white wheel, the color, the molding details, and the fender badge. As a bonus, the Chrysler emblem was on this fender as well. On the Apache, it was the very distinctive headlight pod with that awkwardly colored grill. I’m still not sure about how the grill became pink, but there it was. It had driven me nuts in the sun the last time I photographed it, but this time it didn’t seem nearly as obtrusive. What I found out was that the pink of the grill actually went very well with the color of the Fury. I had the basic ingredients for the composition knowing what I liked about both of the vehicles, I just needed to figure out how to get them organized in the photo.
This was a long process of moving the camera around and fine tuning things, but surprisingly, I didn’t start making exposures until I had landed on what I thought was the best option. I did away with the overlap of the cars that I started with and gave them both separation from the other. I also made sure that I had the pavement marking visible between them. I just liked the diagonal element and it filled the space between the two for more unity. That wouldn’t have worked if the stripe had gone the length of the frame, but there was ample room for the eyes to work around the stripe in this case. How I cropped the vehicles was the next consideration and I decided to accentuate the length of the Plymouth by giving it a nice horizontal framing within the photo. The Apache, on the other hand, was far more interesting vertically, so I cropped through that truck in a way that left it looking more upright.
That juxtaposition between the shapes of the two vehicles established them both as important elements in their own right. I think that is probably my favorite aspect of the composition now that I am looking back on it. I had all the important decisions made and finally made my first exposure. As I was looking at it in the image review, I thought that the Fury would look better elevated in the frame slightly. I raised the camera about two inches and shot an additional two frames as the light had changed after that first exposure. I thought I would like that second variation better, but when I got the images home, I really liked how the main focal points formed a triangle with the Fury in the original lower position. That was the one that I went with and the first frame from here turned into my first keeper for this segment.
When I was finished trying to include both vehicles, I moved my attention to the Fury with those white wheels. All of the elements that I had focused on with the previous photo were the same elements that I prioritized in this isolation shot of the car. Even the stripe on the pavement made another appearance for this composition as it helped the lower right of the frame for better balance. What I really liked about this composition was that it focused on the aspect of three. Not only was this a Fury III, but there were also three horizontal segments of molding trim above the badge that held with that theme. I just kept thinking that the third time was a charm.
I didn’t need three exposures to land on the keeper though. This is the second of only two frames that I shot of this composition. Everything just came together so nicely, and I only shot the second frame because I felt that I might have pushed the exposure a bit too far to the right in the first attempt. I think I could have made it work just fine, but since I had more solidly exposed second image, I processed that one instead.
I was obviously having a good time with the front corner of this car, and I wasn’t done yet. There was an aspect that I liked but didn’t really show up from the distances that I had been working thus far. There was a V8 badge on the front of the fender, and it was framed by a scallop molded into the fender with the molding lining the upper portion of the scallop. I really liked how this looked, but I needed to get in much closer to really make it work the way that I wanted it to.
The white wheel was still something that I wanted to include in the composition if for no other reason than to ground the image and keep the fender from floating in the air. I also saw this as a good time to include the headlights which were stacked similarly to how Pontiac did them during the same time period. This meant getting positioned in the front corner of the car which put me right up against the Apache that I had just finished photographing. Fortunately, I had enough distance that I was able to get a perspective on the corner of the car that I liked. The next big trick was getting the angle where I wouldn’t show up in the shining chrome bumper.
This is something that I am always on the watch for when working with cars. If there is anything that is reflective, I have to make sure that I don’t show up in the frame. If I do, I need to make sure that I’m in a place that is easy enough to remove in post. Chrome is the worst and one of the reasons that I like working with decaying cars the most. I felt that this bumper was going to be problematic, but when I started to really look through the camera, I found that I was positioned in the bend of the bumper and distorted to where I didn’t really show up at all. This was a stroke of luck to be sure.
One of the things that I really had to work through was how I was going to frame the image. There was a red pickup on the other side of the Fury that I wasn’t able to get low enough to mask with the car. It was very visible over the hood and the red really stuck out. I wasn’t able to get the full length of the car because of all the clutter that was in the background from the rear of the commercial Property on the other side of the road. I was going to need to crop into the car very close to the headlight on the right, and at a point on the left side before the roofline dropped. The only way that this was going to look good is if I did a vertical orientation and gave the image room to breathe at the top.
Fortunately, the sky was filled with enough texture an interest that I was able to do just that. I positioned things in a way that allowed the tree in the background to come in and frame the image to the right and offset the antenna. I cropped in close to the headlights before the bezel dropped down to the hood level which would show the red truck to the side. I kept the bumper low in the frame while making sure that I still wasn’t showing up in the reflection. It all seemed to be good and after probably five minutes of messing around with the composition I finally made an exposure. It looked good, but just in case I needed more room, I opened up the zoom a bit and included more space on the sides. This forced the inclusion of the red truck, but I figured that if worse came to worse, I could make this a black and white which would eliminate that as a distraction.
I was lucky that the first frame worked out so well because the second one was all about compromises that I didn’t want to make. Other than cropping a bit off of the top of the frame to make the proportions of the aspect ratio a bit more pleasing, there was no additional cropping in post done to this, and everything is as it was shot which is the way I like it. This is where spending so much time getting the composition right pays off. There isn’t a need to shoot multiple frames when you just take your time to get it right the first time.
Now that I had spent so much time with the front of the car, I wanted to take some time to work on the rear of the car which had been the part that had caught my attention to begin with. After walking to the rear of the car, I didn’t see any isolations that I particularly liked, and those that I might have tried would have put me square in the chrome reflection. I knew I was missing something though and decided to stick with the idea for a while longer to see if anything would come to me.
The badge on the trunk lid was an obvious starting point for a composition as it told a lot about the car as well as being surrounded by rusty spots. I started looking at this in terms of what I would spend the time drawing if I were that kind of artist. If you read through my last Behind the Camera, you will know just what I’m talking about, but I put a creative twist on it this time. Instead of looking at a grand scene and trying to pair it down through that technique, I mentally drew the badge and then started to add to my drawing. I needed to find the story and a way to make that badge interesting in a photo. There was a lot of erasing and starting over as I went through the different compositional options that I had. Everything that I came up with resulted in a very messy photo with no real story. If I just concentrated on the badge, I would need to get in close and shoot from above. The taillights would need to be included, but that brought a huge reflection of yours truly which I wanted to avoid at all costs. I just couldn’t make it work no matter what I did mentally to work through the options.
After a few minutes of dead ends, I started to look at things very differently. This wasn’t a matter of seeing things through a wide-angle lens or finding that abstract version of the scene. It was something very different and was very much like how I had started this segment out. The Apache was off to the right and in front of the Fury. I still liked the headlights on that truck. The building behind the truck happened to have a metal staircase that framed the Apache very nicely. There was a very real possibility that I was going to be able to capture both of these vehicles once again, but in a very different manner.
I was able to concentrate on just the back corner of the Fury which was all that I wanted. It included the badge, taillights, and the bits of rust that I liked. That part of the car framed the Apache in the distance. The stumbling block that I was running into here was the Lexus that was parked in front of the Apache. There was no way to get all of the Apache in the photo, but that might have been too much for the overall balance of the image anyway. In order to avoid the Lexus, I had to crop through the front of the truck which I didn’t like doing because it left a confusing portion of the Chevrolet letters on the grill. I ended up countering that problem by limiting the depth of field in the image which forced more of the attention on the Fury which was ideal. I still had the framing from the stairs in the background and the overall color palette of the background elements worked very well together while the Fury really stood out in the foreground with the brighter tones.
Surprisingly, this turned into one of my favorite images from the day because of all the problem solving that it represented. I think that it is a solid image without that knowledge as well which makes it even more satisfying. I’ll have to see how it looks after I’ve had some time to live with it, but for now, I’m going to say that this might be in the running for a significant image for the year. What do you think? Is it worthy?
Now that I had that rear shot all figured out, and I only made two exposures there, I moved to the driver’s side front fender where I hadn’t really spent that much time. Of course, it was laid out the same as the passenger side with the exception of the Chrysler emblem that appeared on the passenger side. The difference was that the scene would read very differently from this direction. I already knew how things would really come together after shooting this composition on a number of other vehicles. I wanted to get this one because of the unique wheels and the fact that the Fury emblem and associated molding details would be more pronounced looking from this side since they would appear on the right side of the frame. I would also use a bit closer of a crop to make that element even larger in the frame for some added punch.
two more exposures and I was satisfied that I had what I wanted from this corner of the car. This left me with the C pillars on both sides which I took some time to look at and compose images around. I shot both sides, but in the end felt that they were just a bit too boring without rust, patina, or something to break up the lack of texture. All I had to work with was the door handle and the trim that said Plymouth at the base of the pillar. To be fair though, one of those images did make it through the culling stage and to the point where I would start to process it. It just never made it to completion because I didn’t see enough interest in that photo to go forward with it.
For those keeping track, I have shot a total of 14 new frames at this location which have yielded way more keepers than they should have. I was shooting mindfully and trying to only capture images that I really thought would work and not doing repeats of them over and over. It helped that the light was pretty steady and there wasn’t much that was moving in the images which really reduced the need for repeat images.
I’m still not finished though. There were more vehicles out here than the two that you have seen so far. They are ones that I have shot before, but usually when I am here, the sun is out and causing me issues. This time, I actually had really good light and decided to work some of those old favorites that I’ve spent time on in the past. Keep an eye out for the next installment of this blog series. Also, watch for the latest Behind the Camera which will be published tomorrow morning.
Until we meet again…
