Thursday, July 10, 2025
The last time I went out, I had a very productive outing close to home with some locations that I have been debating on for years on some cases. That was a great example of what can happen when scenes rattle around in my head for some time. I end up with some good ideas for how to photograph them. Of course, that is a luxury most of the time as I will go out and seize opportunities that I find when the light is decent and usually it is a matter of responding to what I can find when I can find it. There are also times when I spot something that looks promising and will return later on and photograph it after I’ve had a little while to ponder and research what I’ve seen. Today’s trek was supposed to be an example of that, and was very closely related to my last trek.
It all started on that same evening when Toni and I were going to dinner in Lenoir. As we were driving along the main route I was pointing out locations that I had shot, or was thinking about capturing at a later time, which we saw the results of that conversation. There was also another location that I spotted off on the side of the road behind a house that I had never seen before. There were several cars piled up in the trees behind the house which didn’t tell me much about what was there, but I did recognize a situation that usually results in some interesting photos. On the way back, we took a minute for me to try and get a better look, but they were too deep in the woods to really get an idea of what was there. I was pretty sure that there was a 50’s model car sitting there with a missing hood. I was going to need to come back at a different time and try to get permission to shoot on the property and be able to get close enough to really know what I was looking at.
It was going to be a matter of waiting for the weather to cooperate because with the cars under the trees like that, I was going to have to have a very cloudy day to avoid the dappled light that will overly complicate the scene. My plan was to go out the day after that last trek, which would have been yesterday. The forecast was looking promising when I went to bed, but by the time I got up in the morning, the clouds had all but left until the midafternoon when the strong storms were going to start up. I did keep an eye on the weather through the day, but 10 minutes after the clouds came into the area, the strong storms started up. That was all that I needed to know that I needed to just stay home. Hopefully I would be able to try again the following day.
The forecast for Thursday was looking kind of similar, but there were a few more clouds earlier in the day. I had an appointment at 8am, so I was going to be out anyway, so I figured I would bring the camera along and go where the clouds took me. On the way to my appointment there was a light fog over a lot of the area and good dense clouds. The lighting was perfect for what I was intending to photograph, but I wasn’t going to be able to take advantage of it just yet. Hopefully the light would hold, but I knew that the fog would be long gone after 9am.
When the appointment was over, I hopped in the truck and started down the road to where I wanted to be. It was about 20 minutes or so down the road, but when I got there, the sun was already trying to come out. There were still plenty of clouds in the sky so as long as I was patient, I would get that diffused light that I needed from time to time. I slowed and tried to get another look behind the house but wasn’t able to get any more clues than what I had already seen. I pulled into the driveway where there were two houses. The one on the right looked like it was being used for storage and the front door was totally blocked by debris. Looking around the house, there were no paths established that would indicate that somebody lived there. There was one vehicle parked, and it was obviously inoperable.
The house to the left had about five cars parked in and around a carport and this house looked far more livable. I walked over to it but found that the front door didn’t look used at all. It appeared that all the traffic would go to the back of the house off of the carport. That was the route that I went, but I ended up walking through some pretty thick spiderwebs which was not a good sign. There were webs on the door as well, but I knocked reasonably loud. There were no signs of life within the house and after a few minutes I started back to my truck. I did try to get a look in the back yard, but there was a building in the way which prevented me from really seeing anything at all. I looked at the cars around the carport and most looked inoperable with the ones that looked functional having flat tires indicating otherwise. All of the clues that I was seeing told me that this house was not occupied either, so I looked at the yard between this house and the neighbor’s property where there was a shop of sorts set up. It looked like the mowing patterns blended the two properties indicating that whoever mowed one, mowed the other. That was a clue that the owners might live at that property next door.
I got in the truck and headed over to that property and pulled in the driveway. The house here was much nicer than the other two and there were signs of life at the shop, but I saw nobody. When I got out of the truck I announced myself figuring that somebody was out and about with the shop opened up. There were no answers, and I heard no activity other than a radio playing in the shop. I went to the front door of the house and noticed a cat in the window. At least I knew that this house was occupied, and I spotted several cameras posted around which was a good sign as well. I knocked on the door and waited. There was no response, so I knocked again with a very similar result. The cat just continued looking at me and was wondering what I was doing. As I waited for somebody to come to the door, I was able to get a different view of the cars behind the other house which I took in real quick.
In addition to that one car that I was thinking I had identified, there was something very rusted at the end of the line that had large fins on the rear of the car. It looked like a Cadillac from the ’60’s if I had to guess. I saw no chrome on it, so I wasn’t sure if I would be able to do anything with it, but again, I was going to have to get much closer to really figure out what I was looking at and if there was any potential there. With no answer at this property, I was kind of at a loss as to what to do next. I was out of options and the only thing really left for me to do was to leave and come back at another time. That was what I did.
Now I was driving on towards Lenoir because I had told Toni I would drop off an Amazon return for her at the UPS Store. Sadly, this is the closest one to us, and it all the way past Lenoir in Hudson. It was going to give me an excuse to drive through some areas that I wasn’t familiar with, so I embraced it as I went that way. The only bad thing was that the sun was coming out more and more which wasn’t exactly what the weather had been saying. With nothing in mind of what to shoot, I just rolled with it and figured I would find something that looked good in the existing light when I got somewhere good.
I made it to the UPS Store, or as I called it, the Amazon return counter, without finding anything to shoot, but I was in an area that I had never been before. This gave me the opportunity to go exploring and I did just that going down the main roads looking for clues that would get me into some good areas. There were several shops along the way that had some promise, but nothing that I was going to be able to photograph. It did tell me that there would be subjects to work with, in the area; I just had to find them.
The exploring took longer than I had anticipated, and I wasn’t finding anything that really tripped my trigger. I went through all kinds of small towns and eventually exited Caldwell County and entered Burke County. The town names were ones that I had only heard in passing occasionally in my life, and there were a few that I hadn’t even heard mentioned before. This was truly how I enjoy finding my subjects. I was lost and wasn’t keeping track of where I was at in the least. I was just making turns here and there only looking ahead and trying to find things that have been hidden by time. The sky was making me think that barns would be a good option, but I wasn’t finding anything along those lines out in this area. It was really looking like old cars would be the flavor of the day out here unless the scenery changed. There just weren’t many farms at all, and the ones that were there, were basically just fields with no barns to speak of.
I lost count of how long I had been out driving, but it had been a while. I was a bit over 50 miles into the trip at this point and still hadn’t found anything. There were a few scenes that caught my eye, but looking at them critically changed my mind quickly. I wasn’t getting frustrated, but I was feeling like I had let a good cloudy day go to waste because there was a barn in Kernersville in the very opposite direction that I was wanting to photograph again. It was much too late in the day to change directions, so I was just better off committing to this direction and wanted to continue searching.
There was a point when I was on a small road and found myself in a very rural area which felt like something promising. I was looking, but still not finding anything. That is, until I spotted something from the 50’s possibly sitting under a large tree. I could tell that it was rusted and that there were white flames painted on the side. That was pretty much all the detail that I saw, but I could tell that there was really nothing else around it and it looked good with the colors. There was a driveway immediately to my left which I took at a speed slightly greater than I should have considering I removed my sway bars a while ago on the truck. There was no flipping, and the truck stayed planted on all four tires as I turned in. I also happened to notice another driveway some 70 feet further along that would have gotten me to the same spot. Oh well, I was here and uninjured which gave me the chance to drive down the long driveway to what I hoped was going to be a house.
I did find a house at the end of the driveway mixed in with several other cars in various states of repair. There was a side by side parked in the carport that had the lights on. That was a great indication that somebody was home. I got out of the truck and went to knock on the door by the carport. I was greeted by a man who came out to see what I wanted. I explained why I was there, feeling very awkward as hidden as the house was to even be there to start with. He was very nice about it and had no problem with me photographing the cars. I thanked him and went to get my gear out of the truck. Not knowing what I was going to need, I felt that it was much better to just have it all with me.
I decided to start off with the car he had identified as a Mercury which was what I had spotted to begin with. When I got over there, I started to look at it critically and found that it was not going to be as easy to photograph as I had potentially thought. It wasn’t that it was a hard subject, there just wasn’t anything other than the tree that I could add in to the composition to make it work. It was going to be kind of a static photo in terms of getting the overall establishing shot. Since the light was good, I decided to go ahead and knock that one out, so I grabbed the camera with the standard zoom and started to work the angles. The only real issues that I had were the bumperettes on the front bumper that I had to pay attention to with how they were placed in relation to the rest of the body. There were also some holes in the trees that were letting the bright clouds be seen that I knew would blow out in the photo.
I ended up working a few variations on the composition until I started to get some that I thought would work well enough. I still wasn’t all that happy with the overall shot, but I had something in the can to get started with the day. After all this time driving around, I was finally getting some photos and that was a good thing. When I was happy with the overall, I started to look for some isolations. Since this car was missing the hood, I was kind of thinking that I wasn’t going to be able to do much in terms of isolations, but I started to look the car over anyway.
I did like the patina on the driver’s side fender, but I didn’t want to do the expected shot with the headlight and the bumper below it. That felt forced here, and because the car was sitting quite elevated in the front, I didn’t like how the spacing was going to work out in the photo. I did want something with the fender though, so I worked through what I liked about the scene and what I didn’t. That allowed me to come about a composition that really captured the essence of what I liked about the scene. It was also a composition that I don’t believe that I have ever captured before. I had the headlight very dominant in the lower right corner with the tree limb balancing it out to the upper left. In the upper right, I chose to include the windshield, or the center post which was all that remained. The angle created the visual tension, and the color all worked together nicely here. It was a complete experiment in terms of composition, but it is one that after I have looked at it for a while on the monitor, I really like. It was not the only experiment that I chose to do with this car though.
The next wild idea came when I started to really pay attention to the fact that the engine was missing along with the radiator support. This gave me a view into the engine bat that I normally don’t get. There wasn’t much too it, but the inner fenders were still there, as was the firewall. I felt that there was a composition here, but it wasn’t coming to me as quickly as I would like to say. It did dawn on me eventually that I liked the way that the frame was rusting and the little details around the motor mount. I started to look at that area to see what I liked about it and could capture in a photograph. I kept getting more and more specific about what I wanted in the frame until there was really nothing left but a couple of sections of the frame. The composition that I was starting to see form was very abstract and would require a different lens from what I currently was using, so I went back to the bag and swapped it out for the 70-200mm and started to fine tune the composition from there.
What I ended up with was very direct and just a little abstract. I knew that I would want the shadows to be really deep with this one, so I exposed more for the highlight detail than I normally would have. I would increase the contrast in post and darken the shadows quite a bit with how I expected this one to go. It was another experiment and something that I had not tried before, but I really felt like it had merit to the idea. That was cemented when I got the images home and started to process it. It turned out better than I had hoped and really surprised me. Here I was with two experiments, and both had turned out fantastic.
Not to sound too cocky, but the next composition that I shot was another experiment. This time I was dealing with the vent window that had a nice crack and delamination to it. I didn’t like the composition that I would have normally done here, so I tried for something new and different. Well, I thought I had it figured out in the field, but when I got that one back home, it was an automatic failure. Neither version worked like what I had wanted, and it was just an oddly composed photo of a piece of damaged glass. Oh well, they can’t all work out, and I was still very happy that two out of three experiments turned out really nicely.
I did go back to the headlights, which is something that I consider myself quite good at photographing. This time, I was looking at the passenger side light which was up against the greenery. I still had the long lens on, so I decided to use that and really pick out a small portion. Since I had the opportunity to capture the leaves on top of the fender, I went with that concept and just used the fender as a portion of the frame as opposed to the main portion. The light was still the visual anchor to the whole thing. When I shot the image, I was really thinking that it was going to be in color because the greens and the reds of the rust went so well together. However, when I got the image home, I looked at it and the balance was off because of the color. My eyes just looked at the light and nothing else. By converting it to black and white, I changed how my eyes pursued the frame, and I started to spend a lot more time looking at the fender and the leaves. The light was just that anchor that I needed, but not the main subject. It worked much better in black and white which was how I ended up processing it.
Not wanting to overstay my welcome, I decided to move on to the ’40’s Ford that was beside the house. As I was starting to walk that way, I stopped by the Ford truck that was parked near the Mercury. It was black and didn’t have a lot of photographic interest for me, but I did like the hood ornament and the way that it was aged. The hood was in pretty good shape and wasn’t going to allow my typical patina shot of the ornament. However, I was seeing the directional light and how it was playing with the shapes on the hood. I felt that it was worth a try, so I started to form up a pretty standard composition. It didn’t take but a minute because I have done this same composition many times over. My plan for this one was going to be to do it in black and white to capitalize on the shadows around the different shapes in the sheet metal.
When I got the image home, I didn’t like it in black and white because there just wasn’t enough texture to really sell the image. I started looking at different color profiles and they were not really jumping out at me either. The black hood was just doing me no favors especially because it was starting to reflect the blue that was showing in the sky. Wait a minute….maybe I could use that to my advantage. I picked a color profile that accentuated the blue and then pushed it even further in post. I was liking what I was seeing, but there wasn’t a color balance to the scene. I decided to introduce some warm tones into the hood ornament which would serve two purposes. First, it would balance out the palette, which it did. Second, warmer tones tend to appear closer than cooler colors, so that helped the hood ornament to pop out of the frame for the viewer. For a bit more contrast and visual interest, I kept the center part of the ornament pretty neutral in color. This was in no way supposed to be an accurate representation of the scene, but more an artistic interpretation of what I was seeing. In the end, I really like it, and to my surprise, Toni really liked it as well. Since she doesn’t normally care for my decay work as much as my landscapes, this was a pretty strong win for this image.
While I was looking at the truck, I spotted the only area that seemed to have some interesting patina on it which was the front driver’s side quarter. I could have done my standard headlight corner shot looking down, but again, that seemed kind of expected here and wouldn’t really serve the purpose that I was wanting. Instead, I wanted to get down low and get a new perspective on the fender. This time, I wanted to get a cat’s eye view of things which meant dropping the tripod pretty low to the ground. When I did that, I was still unable to get the whole scene in the frame as I wanted. I was needing the standard lens back on for this shot.
After swapping out glass, I set the shot up again and this time could get everything in the places that I was wanting them to be. I was even able to get in closer for a bit more perspective distortion which I really liked. Once I dialed in the composition, I only needed to shoot two variations to make sure that I had what I wanted from here and it was time to move on. After making a quick check of the rest of the truck for compositions, I grabbed my bag and went back to the other side of the house where the other Ford was parked. As I was getting to the driveway, there were cars moving around and I realized that the owner was leaving. I guess he trusted me after watching what I was doing for a while. He had no problems with me sticking around and continuing with my shoot which was very nice of him.
I got back over to the Ford and started to work out a composition. There was a metal shed behind it and another building off to the left. To the right was a box trailer and I was wondering if there was going to be any way to get the overall establishing shot of this car. The only way that I could figure was to get in close and use a wide-angle focal length to hide the distractions behind the car. At 24mm I wasn’t quite able to do that and wanted to go a bit wider. I went back to the bag and swapped out glass one more time, but this time, I went with the 16-35mm that I thought might just work here.
I started to work that composition out and found that if I blocked the two buildings, I would then introduce the trailer to the right. The only way to omit that trailer was to include a small section of the metal building behind the car. Since there was an American flag rolled up in the window, I figured that was permissible. The other building would still be completely covered by the car and there were no other distractions entering in on the left, but I was cutting that side right at another vehicle in order to keep the edge clean.
I ended up trying four different variations on that idea with both horizontal and vertical captures. It was one of the first ones that turned into the keeper from this concept because it was the most direct and simple out of the four. Because of the pale color on the car, I chose to make this a black and white since all of the saturation in the frame came from the areas around the main subject, I didn’t want to that subject lost in the frame. By getting rid of the color, I was left with the bright areas, and areas of sharpness and contrast to dictate what the viewer spent time looking at. It also gives is a pretty timeless look that I think fits the scene.
Once I had the overall establishing shot done of the car, I started to look at some isolations. I kept the wide-angle lens attached for the moment just in case I could do something really interesting with the front of the car. As much as I tried, I wasn’t able to get a view that I liked with that lens, so I went back to the bag and swapped lenses again for the telephoto. With that I came back to the front of the car and started looking for points of interest. Obviously, I liked the hood emblem, or more specifically the two emblems that identified this car’s make and model. I worked a few variations of this point of interest and tried them with and without the headlights.
When I got the images home, I ended up liking two of the compositions equally that were set up the same with the only difference being the inclusion of the headlight. They both felt very different and had different points of interest within the frame. Both of them worked very well in black and white considering where I wanted the attention to be. There was also very little color contrast to work with which negated any real reason to include the color. That isn’t to say that the color on this car wasn’t worth showing off as you will see in the final image of the day.
I was still working with the front of the car and eventually moved away from working around the emblems and started to focus more on the headlight which is part of my normal routine. I would have happily foregone this concept had it not been for the rust that was coming into view beneath the headlight on the driver’s side. This was the splash of color that the car really needed to make a color image pop. I tried for a slightly different composition that included the light and the grill but shot at such an angle that the grill became a dramatic series of diagonal lines leading to the lights and the rust between them. Because the rust took up such a small portion of the area, I really had to crop in tight to the scene. Compositions like this are all about visual balance, and part of that is the color balance. I needed enough of that rusty color present to make a difference to the entire photo. It was completely lost in the overall composition of the car which was why color wouldn’t work for that one. Cropping in close like this was another story as the rust became a very important player in the entire frame.
To really bring that rust out, I used one of the color profiles that I will usually use at the end of Sumer as the Fall colors are starting to come into the green areas. It tends to add some warmth to certain colors in the scene which happens to usually affect rusty tones. It would not really affect the paint color on the car which made it a pretty safe bet to try. Once I started to tweak the colors within that profile things really started to come together for the photo. I kept taking it one step further and added a ton of contrast to the scene as well as some very heavy vignettes which added to the drama of the entire frame while bringing more and more attention to the rust.
When it was all said and done, this photo was probably one of my most favorites from the day. I’ll admit that I took it a little further in post than I would normally, but with the concept that I had when I shot it, the edit was true to that vision. The end result nailed what I was hoping the photo would look like without appearing overboard. There were a lot of tricks that were used here that I have learned in the past couple of years that really helped out. First of all, I like the aspect ratio here and knew that I was going to use a 4:3 aspect ratio for the vertical photo at the time of capture. Because of that, I selected that in-camera to make framing the image much easier. I also did some significant dodging and burning using luminance masks which has turned into a real time saver for me. Even the angle that I shot the photo from was due to some things that I have learned recently about turning horizontal lines into diagonal ones which I think makes the composition. It all just came together very nicely, and I am very proud of this photo.
After a little over an hour, I had shot 41 frames of the three vehicles that were on the property. It honestly felt like many more, but I had been very selective at what I had shot rather than doing a lot of captures with every movement during my tweaking of the compositions. Out of those 41 frames, I ended up with ten keepers, which was rather amazing. There might have been more had I spent some more time with one of the experiments and had I done a couple of changes to some other compositions that I tried earlier on. Regardless, I am very happy with the day considering I was just driving around and getting lost rather than shooting something that I had planned to shoot.
Thank you for joining me on this trek and I do hope that you have enjoyed the photos. If any of them speak to you and you would like to have them hanging on your wall, I would love to match you up with a print. You can either order directly from the gallery store which has some new prices in place to save you money, or we can do some special orders for larger prints or prints on different media like metal or canvass. No matter what you choose, you will own a unique piece of art which has been crafted by photographing an actual scene in the way that it appeared rather than something doctored by AI or created using prompts on a computer. Every photo that I share with you in this blog and through the entire website is all real photography of scenes that actually exist. Those claims are getting to be rather unique these days with everyone jumping on the AI bandwagon it seems. By purchasing prints from me, you are supporting this artist and providing motivation and funding for me to continue with more treks.
For those who are wanting to learn aspects of photography from me, keep an eye out for some Fall workshops that I have started planning. They are not quite ready for release yet as I am still making sure that we will have access. I do hope to have them posted in the next month or so in order to allow everyone the chance to plan for them. In the meantime, I do offer photography mentorship programs where we will conduct one-on-one learning which is probably the most efficient and effective way of learning photography. My clients are always treated with much more than they bargained for in terms of knowledge that I share. I don’t hold anything back and will share any and all of my secrets when it comes to photography. It is just a matter of what information you are ready for in your own journey. Get in touch with me for a free, no obligation consultation to make sure that I am a good fit for you. We can design that perfect program for your needs.
Until next time…
