Saturday, June 13, 2026
After a pretty busy start to the month of June, I have kind of dropped off in activity here lately. There has been a lot on my plate, and I just haven’t really had the time or the energy to concentrate on photography. In fact, I have been doing a lot of thinking about photography and the point of it all through much of the last week or so. It hasn’t really been a creative slump as much just really wondering what the point of it all is. As you can tell from the linked Behind the Camera feature, this is something that I wrestle with from time to time. I don’t really have an answer as of yet, but I know that I have been spinning my wheels lately for very little in return. There was a time when I would look at the entirety of my business and kind of get disgusted that I was basically just a content creator for social media. I miss those days. Over the past couple of months, I have been getting fewer and fewer views on both Facebook and Instagram which has brought me to a point where I am just getting a handful of reactions and very little in the way of comments. Instagram is a source of another point of irritation for me as well since only 5.5% of my audience is in the US. Most of my followers in Instagram are from other countries which makes it a little silly to spend any time posting there because I won’t be doing print sales overseas, and I doubt very seriously that I will get any portrait gigs from through those followers.
As I’ve mentioned, the business end of the photography is pretty rough right now and I have been told that I am going to have to turn a profit this year or lose my status as an official business. At best, I am treading water right now and have gone back to financing much of the regular bills and costs associated with staying in business out of my own pocket. I’m doing everything that I can to stay in the black for the year this year, but it is harder than I had imagined. I’ve done a few TFP sessions for up-and-coming models through the first part of the year, but there is no income from those. There have been a lot of treks and many blog entries about them, but very little visibility on them. In fact, most of my blog entries are only seeing single digit views which is way far off from my normal mark. I know that part of this is because of the throttling back of viewers on Facebook which is where I am posting my new blog entries. What used to get many reactions and quite a few comments is now left dangling out in the wind with no sign of viewer response. It is rather disheartening to say the least.
I know that I have decided to do photography for the love of it and mainly for myself this year, but there is a fundamental flaw in that plan. While that concept makes perfect sense on its face, the more I have come to live with that concept the more that I have come to realize that photography, like any art has to have an audience. It is part of the process, and the part that makes it worthwhile. The audience doesn’t need to be big, it doesn’t need to be loud, but it needs to….be. That is the part where I have been really missing out on this year and it seems that I have been photographing in an echo chamber. It takes all of the fun out of it in many ways. There is always a bit of apprehension when I release the new photos for the first time for folks to see. There is an adrenaline rush of sorts and that is usually calmed down when I start to hear some feedback from the audience. Sometimes it is very positive, and other times I can tell that I have missed the mark. These days, it doesn’t matter if I hit one out of the park or it is a swing and a miss. The reactions are always the same. Crickets.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. I’m not wanting to base the success of my photos on reactions through social media. As always, I would much rather the metric be print sales, mentorship clients, and portrait session clients. These are the things that really matter, but I have come to understand that to get those clients, I have to achieve a certain level of reach through social media. This is where you come in. Share these blog entries with your friends, share my posts, send a link to my website to folks that you think might enjoy the photography, or might benefit from my constant need to teach through these entries. Spread the word, and hopefully that will help turn things around this year and allow me to continue on with photography as a business rather than packing it all up and having a going out of business sale.
As you can see, I’ve been in kind of dark place in regards to photography for a little while now. It has affected my want to go out for photos, and the desire to spend the time after the shoot to finish up the photos. I wouldn’t say that it is a creative block as I do feel creative and want to create. The hurdle that I am having to get over is actually wanting to pick up the camera and go through the motions. I’m needing something to motivate me to get the camera out of the bag and into my hands once again even if I go through all the effort for just a few people.
There has been a lot going on outside of photography which has kept me away from it for more than a week now and today was really the first day when I could actually say that I had an open day when I could possibly focus on doing some photography. I just needed to figure out where to go and what to shoot. Looking at the weather last night, I was getting two very conflicting stories with my cloud app saying solid overcast for the entire day with the clouds in the upper atmosphere. The main weather app on my phone was showing something completely different with mostly sunny skies and seeing possibly 30% cloud cover throughout the day. There was no way to plan what kind of light I would have, and I really had no idea of where I would want to start anyway.
I considered a few old cars that had been suggested recently, but that just didn’t excite me. Yeah, I was surprised at that as well. Rust was just not giving me enough motivation to pick up the camera. I have quite literally thousands of rusty images in my portfolios and I just didn’t see the need in adding to that just because. I could go out in the country and look for some old barns which were looking good under whatever kind of light that was present at the time. I’ve done a lot of that here lately as well and all the barns are starting to run together in my mind. Landscapes….yeah, landscape photos is what I wanted to do. But where would I go? There was a potential for a good sunrise, but it was already too late at night for me to decide to do a sunrise shoot. I would need to be heading to bed around 9pm, which was over an hour earlier than when I was having the thought. Sunrise was just too early in the day for an unplanned trek. I could go out later in the morning, but if the clouds didn’t show up, the light would be terrible for landscapes. Plus, the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to do that kind of photography.
It wasn’t until I was in the shower at nearly 11pm when I remembered about a sculpture that I had photographed at Appalachian State University a number of years ago. That had been a very memorable trek because of the images that I came home with. In fact, two of my top 12 for the year came from that trek. Even more impressive was that both of those images were in the top three for the year. Because it had gone so well, I hadn’t been overly motivated to return because I really didn’t think that I could do any better. Even five years later, I am not sure that I can improve on that experience.
But…
It was that thought that started to make me want to pick up the camera again. That was a start; and was a stronger start than anything else that I had come up with so far. It just so happened that school was out, and the Summer sessions hadn’t started up yet. It would be a good time to go out there with easy parking and not too many people walking around. I didn’t really research the area again because it was late at night and I figured that I would just go up there and work with whatever sky conditions that I might find. Of course, I would like to have gotten up there at the first of the day, but there was no way I was going to get up that early at this point. I was just going to get up whenever I did and throw caution to the wind and see what happened.
The day started a little before 8am when I was waking up. I went through my morning routine before I even looked at the weather. Boone was showing to be mostly cloudy, but those clouds were supposed to be clearing off soon according to the main weather app. In order to get the best light, I wanted to get out there while the sun was still low, so I skipped doing the business stuff downstairs and got my shoes and camera before heading West.
The sky was mostly clear as I was heading up the mountain, and I didn’t really see any clouds until I got to the continental divide. I wasn’t sure what it was going to look like over campus, but I was going to find out soon enough. The biggest concern that I faced as I was driving through campus was the construction that I had forgotten about. Actually, I had never really looked to see what the scope of the work was but knew that parts of the road were blocked off. I found out that the construction was for one of the buildings and it so happened to be right where one of the spots was that I wanted to photograph. It was also making it difficult to get to the other spot that I was looking to work with.
The sculpture was in the Sanford Mall area, and I had to work around some other buildings to get there thanks to the construction. I did find the sculpture still in place all these years later. I think that I neglected to mention it the last time I photographed this piece that it is the work of Jon Hair and is called “Aspire.” It is a huge sculpture that stands proudly on the edge of the mall. Fortunately, it is so tall because without that size, I would be very hard pressed to photograph it without the neighboring buildings in the frame.
It was looking much different than the last time I had visited this spot. It was still quite dark when I got there last time because I was there for sunrise which turned out really well with the colors in the sky. This time, the sun had been up for a few hours and things were pretty bright. The clouds were thin and mostly further to the West. I had a plan to photograph this with a clear blue sky anyway, so I wasn’t worried about it at all. I did notice that the weathering was a little more pronounced this year which spoke to my decay centered eye. The colors were still vibrant which was the main thing that I was after for this. I just needed to find a composition that I liked.
I went for the obvious one and it turned out to be pretty much exactly what I had shot the last time I was out here. The difference was that this time, I went with the standard zoom because I planned on getting some more intimate captures of the sculpture rather than only getting full and inclusive compositions. It took a minute or two to get the camera put together with the polarizer fitted to the lens. Then I started to fine tune the composition to get it just right. I hadn’t looked at the previous shot for a very long time, so it was kind of surprising that I pretty much repeated it exactly as I had done before.
By the time I got things set up, the clouds had come in behind the sculpture, and I started to wonder about how best to deal with them. They added a texture that took away from the smooth nature of the materials in the sculpture, so I really wanted to smooth them out. The best way to do that was to use a long exposure. I took a look at the exposure that I was shooting at currently and went to one of my apps to see what the different ND filters might do. I found that the 10-Stop filter would give me a few ticks over four minutes of exposure time. With the rate that clouds were moving, I figured that would be good enough, so I fished out that filter and slid it into the holder.
With the exposure time of four minutes locked in, I fired off the next frame and waited. When it came up on the back of the camera there was some clipping in the highlights because the sun came out stronger during the exposure. I did some quick math and reduced the exposure time by 45 seconds and went one more time. That exposure did the trick with some nice blurring of the clouds, with no highlights clipped. Since these exposures were now taking more than three minutes each, I didn’t linger with the composition and decided to move onto something else.
One of the things that I was wanting to try with this set of images was getting in closer with a tighter crop. This would allow me to really change up the composition from where I had tried to include all three arms and the sphere. The simplest way that I could think of was to flip the camera from portrait to landscape orientation. This allowed me to crop through the tall upper arm and really concentrate on the orb. I still had the camera set up for long exposures and that was what I continued with for this composition.
The beauty of long exposures really comes out when you have a perfectly static subject with a background that is in motion. I prefer to do this with a sky when there are no trees or grass involved because trees in motion are a distraction to me in most situations. This was the perfect situation for a long exposure, and I was happy to stick with the program as long as the clouds were doing what I needed them to do.
As it turned out, the first of four exposures was the best one with the best motion in the clouds. Looking at the image review, I wasn’t really sure that I liked the fact that the clouds were moving in two different directions. It wasn’t until I looked on the computer monitor that it really kind of made sense with the shape of the sculpture. There was an implied motion there and the clouds actually supported it. The part that was less than ideal here was the way that the image read though. The sculpture itself was blocking the path of the eyes through the frame, so I did what seemed to be the obvious choice here and flipped the image left to right. Now the composition reads much more effectively, and the orb is now the star of the image while before it kind of got lost in the overall scene.
I was liking the close in approach that I was doing with the sculpture and wanted to go in even tighter. This was where the standard zoom really worked out well for me. With two filters on it and a long exposure established, it was much more efficient to zoom rather than to switch lenses which would have had to happen with the wide-angle. Now, I just twisted the zoom ring and recomposed the shot.
Once that was done, I fired off a few long exposures now that I had the particulars all figured out. The part that I didn’t have figured out was the fact that with the smaller frame, the clouds were covering much more distance in the time, so I was ending up with just a wash of white and light blue in the background which didn’t really work for me. I wanted to have more blue in the frame for some color balance, and I wanted the texture back in the sky for the more intimate capture. It was just a matter of removing one of the filters and getting out of Bulb mode. Now things were quite a bit simpler, and I was able to work quicker once again.
It was quicker to get the composition set up without having that light robbing filter, and I started to figure out just how I wanted to frame this now that I was using the clouds in the background. I actually cropped in so close that I cropped through the orb which seemed to work reasonably well in the image review. It was a very dramatic view of the sculpture, that was for sure. I liked it so much that I ended up shooting a total of 15 frames with this basic compositional idea between the long exposures and the quicker ones. There was just the slight change in composition when I pulled the ND filter out of the holder. This was actually the composition that I spent the most time on during the entire day which kind of surprised me considering how simple it was.
The reason that I was locked on this one for so long was that the clouds were changing a lot in the background and I was trying to find the frame where everything worked together the best. It took eleven frames to get it right and that was the one that had the best light on the sculpture as well as the best clouds in the background. However, the last of the series was also really solid and I saw some other potential for that one. I had already processed the one in color and was now looking for a black and white photo to work with.
I know that black and white seems like an odd choice for a subject that is this colorful. It was something that I didn’t really entertain the last time I shot it, but I was really wanting to delve more into the abstract with this. Since I already had one fully processed, I allowed myself to play with this second, very similar composition. The first thing that I did was go through the black and white profiles to see if I could find one that worked well for it. After a few selections, I landed on one that really worked nicely and it set a tone for the image that I really enjoyed. Because the colors in the orb were not visible now, I didn’t have that last link to what was up and what was down, so I decided to rotate and flip the image to make a completely different composition. Now that I had this photo as a vertical frame, I needed to change the aspect ratio so that it felt a little better proportioned. That just strengthened the image, and I finished the processing from there.
When I was done, I showed Toni how it turned out and she let me know that it was her favorite so far and she liked it better than the color images that I had shown her. I’ll admit that it turned out much better than I had expected and I’m glad that I decided to try the experiments on it. With how well the vertical composition looked, I went back and rotated and flipped the color image. It didn’t work nearly as well vertically because of how the orb was reflecting the surroundings. It was just too big of a clue as to how the image was supposed to be positioned. It was all for the best though because I was now able to have two very different photos from the exact same composition.
By this point in the day, I had pretty much done what I set out to accomplish with this sculpture but wanted to try some very different angles on it while the sun was pretty much out of the way in most directions. I walked around the base and looked at the different angles that presented themselves and tried to figure out where my next composition was going to come from. Oddly enough, the side that spoke to me was the rear of the sculpture. There was something more powerful here and I wanted to capture what I was seeing.
The clouds were looking good as they were and I didn’t want to blur them as I had done earlier, so I left the ND filter off and started to frame up a pretty simple image. As I had done before, I got in very close and angled the camera up pretty dramatically. This got the perspective on the sculpture that I was after, but more importantly, it allowed me to omit the trees that were just out of the frame to the bottom.
The lighting wasn’t the best from this angle, but I liked the composition quite a bit. With an interesting subject and a strong composition, I was confident that I was going to have a decent photo even if the light wasn’t ideal. I had no idea that I would end up working this one as a black and white because the colors just didn’t matter to me at all in the light that was present. By doing this as a black and white image, I found that the lighting was nearly perfect for that kind of presentation and it started to come together just beautifully the more I worked the scene.
Because it had worked so well the last time, I went from a portrait orientation to a landscape one for the next composition. The camera was moved in small increments to get the relationship of the elements right, but I had another solid composition on my hands at this point. It was a bit more intimate than what I had started out with and only included the two arms that were holding the orb. The curve worked very well in this horizontal capture, and I really liked how the composition was coming together.
It wasn’t until I got the images home that I found that this composition didn’t read very well left to right because all the main interest was situated at the left side of the frame. It was kind of like starting the book off with the climax and there just wasn’t enough reason to finish the book after that. I was able to fix that by flipping the image left to right so that the viewer got to experience the sky first and then have the eyes pulled to the right by the warm core of the orb and the more vivid color of the furthest arm. It was a bit of visual trickery as Toni would say, but I think that it worked much better this way.
I was also torn between color and black and white here. The lighting was starting to get better, but it wasn’t quite there. It was still a bit on the moody side which didn’t really work for the vibrant colors, but the black and white seemed to lack the punch that I was after. This is the usual setup for one of my favorite color profiles which leans the image into the cooler tones while desaturating most of the colors. I was able to work the saturation back very specifically until I arrived at this final image which I think works very well and certainly better than choosing either color or black and white. I think that it captures what worked about both of those presentations and does it without any negatives attached.
As I mentioned, the lighting was getting better at this point, and I decided that I wanted to revisit the full vertical composition that I had shot previously. With the sun now a bit brighter, the light was bouncing up from the ground and giving some extra lighting to the underneath of the sculpture. This was showing the colors, and I knew that it was going to work better than the previous one.
For whatever reason, I remember seeing this composition and thinking that it read awkwardly and I would probably need to flip it in post. This was the first time I had thought that thought with this basic composition. As you can see, I have three images from basically that same point, but the first one isn’t flipped. The second was flipped only after looking at it on the computer, and the third one I did flip as expected. Each image was treated differently in terms of color profiles as well which shows just how different they each appeared to me based on lighting and framing.
The really funny thing is that each of these images hold up very well as individual photos as well as in a group. They each say very different things and have a very different aesthetic based on the choices that I made during the capture and the processing. Which one is your favorite of these three? I don’t really have a favorite one, but I am kind of leaning towards the first one in black and white, but by the slimmest of margins at this point.
Speaking of black and white, I wanted to get one more full composition of the sculpture with each of the arms present. The sky was looking really dramatic at this point and that meant that I was going to be able to have a bit of fun with it. I was really thinking that this was going to be done in color while I was shooting it because from this angle all the colors really pop nicely. The light was helping that aspect along as well. However, when I got home, I really thought that it was one of the weaker photos of the entire sculpture. The sky almost overshadowed the colors, and one became a distraction to the other.
When the colors become a distraction, the easiest thing to do is to remove the colors which is what I did. This allowed the clouds to shine through as a major part of the image while the shape of the sculpture became more important than its colors. This brought the balance back to the scene that I was hoping to have, and I went through with the processing in black and white.
One of the things that I liked about this photo was the simplicity and the fact that both the subject and the background have a unity that they didn’t have when I looked at it in color. They don’t necessarily blend together because that would be bad. Each holds their own in the frame, but there is an air of mystery that is added as you explore the shape of the sculpture. I wanted to like this one better than I do, but I still think that it is worthy of being included in the list of keepers from the day.
With that composition completed, I had shot a total of 35 frames on this sculpture. I was thinking that I probably had four keepers from the set and was happy with that. I knew that I wanted to continue my walk through campus and look for other interesting scenes to photograph. The one building that I had been looking forward to working with again was no accessible and from the looks of it, the part that I was wanting to photograph was covered by new construction. That didn’t keep me from walking around and looking though.
After a short while, I ended up around the library and found a view that I liked from a lower level. It was from behind a retaining wall and I was shooting between two buildings to get the curved face of the building. I liked the idea, but there was no way that I could get the shot put together from as low as I was without the perspective looking all wonky. I was far enough away that I needed the verticals to be vertical, but they weren’t working out that way. After about ten minutes of moving the camera around and trying to make it work, I realized that nothing was going to help me at this position. With that, I found the stairs and continued closer to the building to see if there was anything that I could do to help those verticals
As it turned out, the key wasn’t fixing the verticals, the key was getting closer to the building and really leaning into the perspective distortion. I found that the other side of the curved wall had a really nice shadow falling on it from the neighboring wall which created a triangle through the windows. I really liked that aspect, and it made the sun easier to work with because it was now out of frame to the right with me in the shade.
It took me a little while to decide on a composition, but this was much easier than what I had been dealing with from the lower level. I started out with a nice horizontal composition that had the two flat walls framing the curved one for a bit of drama. There was a nice cloud moving across the sky as I grabbed a test shot. The exposure was good, and I knew that the moving cloud would make for a great long exposure here. I had to work quickly though because the clouds were not all that plentiful in the sky by this point.
I grabbed the 10-Stop filter and slid it in and adjusted the exposure based on an estimate considering the exposure I was shooting at was close to what I had been doing with the sculpture earlier. It still wasn’t fast enough, and my first test shot with the long exposure caught the tail end of the cloud passing out of frame. The exposure was a little dark, so I made an adjustment and waited for the next group of clouds to come over.
Something that I have often found very frustrating is the sky seems to know exactly where the frame of a photo starts and finishes. I watched no fewer than three large clouds coming into frame which I started a three-minute exposure for just to see them evaporate as they actually got into the frame of the photo. I had several long exposure photos with not a single cloud in the frame after waiting for a good one to get right to the edge. This really got to me and eventually, I just removed the ND filter and embraced the blue sky that I had been wanting with the sculpture from earlier.
Now, the funny thing was, the only one of the long exposures that worked out was the first test shot that had gotten the tail end of the clouds leaving the frame. There was just enough of the white in the frame to make the photo work and the underexposure was only about a half-stop, so I was able to address that easy enough in Lightroom to make the image work out nicely. Sometimes it is planning and waiting that will yield the keepers, other times it is just pure luck. That was what this photo was and I’m glad that I pressed the button when I did because I was close to missing the only clouds that I was able to see over that building.
When I did decide to embrace the blue sky, I knew that this was going to be black and white so that the sky would go nearly black. For that to work, I needed to change the composition from horizontal to vertical so that the weight of the black sky wouldn’t be overbearing to the image as a whole. It took me a little while to figure out how I wanted to frame this one and where I wanted the main elements placed with that frame. Once I found it, I made a couple of different exposures with a few of them showing some faint clouds passing over, but each of them was fading quickly as they had done during the long exposures.
I feel like I spent more time with this building than I had with the sculpture but only fired off a total of ten frames between the two compositions. These didn’t turn out nearly as good as the other building possibly would have, but it was something. My frame count was now at 45 for the day, and I was still on the hunt for something else to shoot. I walked all the way out to King Street and looked at more sculptures but the ones that I had wanted to shoot were not in a position that really made it workable. I had to be very careful about backgrounds and didn’t want the buildings or the increasing crowds in the photos. There was nothing that I could do to make the photos work out, so I just went back into campus continuing to look.
Before I knew it, I was back at the truck and with the pedestrian traffic increasing around the area, I decided to call it a day. I had a handful of photos that were going to work out, and I had actually gotten out with the camera for a nice day of photography. No matter how many keepers I ended up with, the big win was that I was motivated to pick the camera up and go out and use it. I’m still not quite sure if there really is a point to all of this, but I’m willing to give it another try as I sit here and crank out another blog that maybe six people will read. If you have gotten this far, pat yourself on the back and know that you are one of the few that is showing support of my work just by reading the blog. If you would like to take that extra step, copy the link and send it to someone that you think might enjoy it as much as you have. I think that the key to any level of success at this point is just getting in front of folks which is becoming really difficult to do.
I appreciate you for being with me during this trek and hope that you have enjoyed the photos. Feel free to drop me a line ([email protected]) and let me know that you what you think about the photos. If you really loved one of them, don’t forget that I do offer prints which are custom made to order by you, the client. That print sale might just be the one that keeps me in business for another year. We never know.
Until next time…
