Friday, April 10, 2026
My normal logic would have said that today wasn’t going to be a photography day. There were a couple of things that kind of altered that though. The first was that I was actually caught up with things that needed to be done around the house for the first time in about a week. I’ve got a brand new list of things starting off soon enough though, but I had today to breathe a bit. Second, after coming off of several chilly days, the house was kind of cold and with it being a warm day outside, I decided to wear shorts. That was a mistake because my feet were turning purple from the cold and I refused to turn the heat on when the outside temperature was going to be near 80 degrees. With the house freezing me, and having very little that needed to be done, I decided that I would go out and do some scouting for the next time that I had good weather. I was also planning on going out and asking about permission to shoot a Chevy that I’ve been looking forward to trying for a while now. Of course, that was going to be a subject for after sunset with some painting with light. I just needed to get the permission before I could do anything.
It was around lunchtime when I decided that I would head out which is usually the worst time possible for a photographer, especially on a clear day. There were no clouds at all, and the sun was very bright. Oddly enough, the quality of light felt really nice for the Spring, and I was kind of enjoying it. Because of that, I decided to take the camera just in case I was to find anything worth shooting. Also, if I ended up out past sunset, I could do the light painting. Looking back, that probably wasn’t going to work out too well because I only had two LED flashlights with me which are not all that great for light painting. I much prefer my old incandescent light that has a much warmer color of light to it. At any rate, that is not all that important because I never actually got to the Chevy. My thought was that for any daytime photos to work, I was going to need thick clouds and that was going to be where I would get the flexibility to shoot detail shots of the car and possibly the Jeep that was next to it. This is where I would get the variety. I imagined that my compositions were going to be very limited when it came to light painting which made me think that that I would rather wait until I had a cloudy day to work with. The risk I was running with that plan was what bit me in the butt last time with the one car I went out to photograph. In a matter of days from spotting it until I finally had the right weather to shoot it, it was moved and was no longer in the area. Knowing that this was going to be a difficult car to photograph and possibly very difficult to get permission, I figured that this was a good gamble and chose to focus on what I could actually shoot while I was out, or could find new ideas for.
I didn’t really have a destination in mind, and I didn’t even have any clouds to follow for the best light. I just started roaming around and headed down to the South for a bit. This took me into Iredell County near Statesville, and I turned from that path to the East which took me into Yadkin County. I spent some time driving around through that area looking and started to find some really good potential areas to work with. There was one road in particular that had a lot of really nice rural scenes that I made mental notes of in order to come back when the sky was a bit more interesting and the light was better. In each of the cases, the light was just too harsh, and the shadows were in the wrong areas of the scene. The goal here was to find the scenes for another time and not to actually shoot them today, so there was no harm and no foul for the experience.
As I was coming North through Yadkin County, I found myself on a road that I had been on before, and that brought me to an area that I was rather familiar with. Through a course of several turns, I knew exactly where I was and slowed as I passed a scene that I had photographed from the road several years ago. I was actually kind of surprised to see all of the cars still there in front of the house and I wondered if I would have better luck getting permission to photograph them. Looking at the light, today wasn’t going to be the day, but I did see signs of life at the house that was associated with the property and made a mental note of that for a day when the clouds were out. If I was really lucky, I would be able to get in close enough to work the details on the cars the next time I photographed the spot. Not wanting to spend time on a subject that I wasn’t going to be able to work with today, I proceeded on my way.
I started to have thoughts of a mentorship session that I had done around that same time with a client of mine. I remembered that there was this barn a few more miles down the road that looked really nice and had a ton of character to it. I had photographed it during that session and that was during a rainy and foggy afternoon which gave loads of atmosphere, but there was something that I never quite loved about the photos. I did recall that it was a difficult composition because of the distance that we had to shoot from and the way that the property was laid out. Since I’m trying to change how I am seeing things this year, I figured I would go and give it a look since I wasn’t too far away from it. Maybe I could figure out something different to do with it this time and come back again to give it a try.
When I arrived, I slowed as I passed the barn and looked at it. It was still in the same shape as it had been before, but I could see that the Spring colors were really coming into their own in the background. The sky was largely clear but there were some thin whisps of clouds stretching across the blue that I kind of liked. I noticed that the sun was shining on two of the sides of the barn which happened to be the more interesting sides. I thought about it for about a half mile and turned back around to give it a more critical look from across the street where there was a church parking lot.
When I got parked, I started to look at the barn from roughly the angle that I wanted to shoot it from. I had a flood of memories coming back to me about some of the difficulties that I had when photographing it before. There were power lines that came through the right side of the property that I remembered limiting how much of the sky I could really include. That was when I remembered that when I was doing the mentoring, we talked a lot about shooting from low and through the fence slats rather than from above the fence. This gave a better angle to undercut the power lines.
I could also see that there were several cows camped out under a grove of trees that I had avoided before because they didn’t have a pleasing shape in the fog. Now that there was no fog present, the shape of the trees wasn’t as important, so there was a chance that I would be able to include that aspect in a composition where it wasn’t possible last time. The biggest difference was the colors of the scene between the sun and the Spring colors. It gave a completely different feeling to the scene, and I thought that it fit the barn better than the foggy evening that I had shot it previously. It was enough of a difference that made me want to give it a try while I was there seeing the light for what it was.
I went ahead and parked the truck and grabbed the camera. I really wanted to include more of the scene than I had before, so I went for the 24-70mm lens initially. Just to make sure before I committed to things like the filters and a tripod, I took the camera over to the side of the street where the barn was and did some looking through the lens. I found that I was happiest at the 70mm mark and anything much wider than that would start to create a boring composition because of how the hill was behind the barn. It seemed that the magic was happening at 70mm which meant that I was using the wrong lens for this situation. It was a simple fix, as all I had to do was return to the truck and swap out my lens for the telephoto lens to which I added a polarizer. Once it was all mounted to the tripod I went back across the street and started to work on the angles and compositions.
The first composition that I tried was a pretty basic on that just included the barn along with the cows under the tree to the right. It was similar to what I had done before, but the hill was a much more interesting part of the composition this time and the cows added another point of interest. The power lines were horrible though and while I could position them away from the barn, they were proceeding too deep into the trees for my liking. I needed to get the lines higher in the frame so that I could remove them easier in post. I did what I had instructed before and dropped the camera down to allow me to shoot between the slats of the fence. This did what I wanted well enough and that was my first composition of the day.
I was pretty happy with it, but it did seem kind of static, so I continued on with finding other compositions. What I hadn’t considered at the time was making this a 16:9 aspect ratio since the composition featured the clump of trees and the cows taking advantage of the shade. This took a good bit of the sky out of the frame, and I also shaved a bit of the grass from the foreground which placed the important elements in a much more dominant position in the frame. With that simple change, the photo went from static to a pretty dynamic view of the scene and what might just be my favorite photo of the day. It is worth remembering that aspect ratio plays such an important role in a composition.
I still wanted to do something different from what I had done before, so I started to look at things from a closer perspective. Since I wasn’t able to physically move closer, I zoomed in a bit tighter and started to pick out the portion of the barn that spoke to me the most. It was also a chance to pull in more of the textures from the fresh greenery in the background. This seemed to work rather well and allowed me to eliminate the sky from the photo since it wasn’t really adding that much interest. I liked the perspective of the barn being beneath a very tall hill which could go on well out of the frame. In actuality, the top of the hill was just out of frame.
This composition was a much more direct composition and really focused in on the barn face which was what I was after. I really liked this direct view but also wanted to capture more of the surroundings than I had up to this point. Something that I knew I had not tried before was capturing the fence as a part of the composition. It just hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but after photographing several barns recently with portions of fences in close to the camera, I’ve started to see the benefit in doing this at times.
That was the next composition that I tried, and it was done with the same telephoto lens because I needed to keep the barn larger in the frame than the standard lens would have allowed. I had to position myself right at the road to get the perspective that I was after. From there, it was all about figuring out the organization of the scene. I had to look at this from a balance point of view, and I had to really pay attention to where the visual weight of the image was. The interesting point of the barn was the face of it with the doorway. This was going to be to the right of the scene which added visual tension but also pulled a lot of the weight to the right of the frame. By moving the fence post to the left of the frame and diagonally lower, I managed to offset the weight a little bit. The second part of this was to angle myself so that the hill was descending in that left side of the frame. This kept the horizon from being straight like the fence and giving a sandwich look to the composition. With the hill dropping above the post there was a dramatic shift in the left portion of the frame that I really liked. this pulled some more of the weight from the right side. The last element that I found was the clouds which were very faintly wisping across the sky at that apex of the hill. The balance to the composition was all there.
The one thing that caused me problems was one of the cows had meandered over to the left side of the frame and was in the shot. It was not big enough to be important in the composition, and it was facing away from me which was arguably not its best side. I could remove it in post, but I chose to use the fence post to do it for me. I just had to lower the camera slightly to get the top of the post above the lower horizon line. This worked out much better anyway because having the post break that line linked the two parts of the frame together better than if the post was below that line.
This worked out quite nicely and all I had to do was to get the depth of field right. I was fine with the fence going soft, but there was some great texture that I didn’t want to waste in that fence. The answer was to have it just a little out of focus, but not enough to blur the details. It was a fine line with what I was after, but thanks to using the depth of field preview button, I was able to get a pretty good idea what things were looking like before I pressed the shutter button. I just kept the focus right on the barn and let the aperture do its thing with the foreground.
In the field, this last composition was my favorite, but it was the one that gave me the most trouble in post which I really don’t know why. The light was really quite stable during the time I was out there, so it should have been roughly the same process to get it polished, but it required many more steps over the first composition. In the end, I liked these three compositions equally as well because they each told a very different story to the viewer. I hadn’t expected to have this many keepers since I had only shot a total of 13 frames in total, but I couldn’t see getting rid of any of these photos. I don’t hide my keepers from you, which means that you get to see them all even though they are all very closely related.
That was all that I could see working for this barn because the other angle on it would have included a blank side that was in the shade as well as potentially the house that was associated with it to the right. This was enough for me, and I decided to head home and see how it all came together. I was very excited to see a quick processing session and hopefully fast blog after the three-parter that I had stumbled onto last time. This one only took me about three hours to edit and blog about, and I just can’t argue with that.
Thank you for joining me on this trek which was only supposed to be a scouting trip. I hope that you have enjoyed the photos and remember, if any of these speak to you and you would like a print, I do sell prints that make for fantastic wall art. According to my tax professionals, I need to make more sales during the year, so you would be greatly helping out the business by purchasing a print. I know I’ve said that I am not going to focus on the business aspects this year and will work on the artistic side more, and that is the case still. The harsh reality of it is I need to show a profit this year, or I will end up losing the business. I’m cutting out a lot of my expenses, and I’ll be eating the cost of gas while I have claimed mileage in the previous years which equates to several thousand dollars. I guess I am just going to concentrate on keeping my business afloat this year and hope that I can continue it going forward. You can help with that by choosing to bring one of my photos home with you to put up on the wall. If not, I do understand but would ask you to share my website with anyone who you think might be interested in the photographs that I create. It would be much appreciated.
I feel like that was a bit of groveling and I am sorry about that. I’m still kind of fresh from seeing the actual business numbers in black and white for the first time from last year. It stung more than I thought it would and I already knew that I was taking a loss for the year. I just didn’t realize how big a loss it was going to be. At any rate, I’m still moving forward this year and hopefully will be able to squeeze a little bit of a profit out of my work by the end of 2026. Stick around to see how it all unfolds.
Until next time…
