Thursday, October 28, 2021
I spent the early part of the month going out every couple of days for new images and that was a mixed blessing. It meant that I had good weather for most of that time and I was able to get a lot of new photographs added into my portfolio. The other side of that, was it was quite taxing on my creativity. Any time I go hard and heavy with my photography there comes a time when I just don’t want to create any more. I was getting to that point just before my last trek to the Blue Ridge Parkway on the 14th. I don’t like feeling like that at all when it comes to my photography, or really anything for that matter, but it is a part of it from time to time. I guess it was fortunate that the next two weeks were mostly sunny and lousy conditions for photography. I also knew that the Parkway was flooded with people from all over and I just didn’t want to be a part of that gaggle. My happy place with the camera is all alone talking only to myself and that was going to be hard to find anywhere around the Parkway.
For the two weeks that I wasn’t out photographing anything, I was starting to get prepared for two different portrait shoots which were coming up in the second half of the month. The first was a maternity shoot at a location in Winston Salem. Getting in contact with my client was not always the easiest thing and I was starting to get a bad feeling about it. When I finally got in touch with her the day before the shoot, she advised that she was going to have to reschedule. I gave her my availability and left the ball in her court. That has been over a week and a half ago and I still have heard nothing back from her. My second shoot was scheduled as a studio session which I was excited for and even purchased an additional seamless paper color and a wooden floor drop for the session based on what she was wanting. Those two items cost me what the session was going to bring in so I was already starting out breaking even. I heard from her a couple of days ago and she was reconsidering driving out to my studio for the shoot and was wondering if there was a closer location to her in Winston that we could use. Well, I don’t exactly have multiple studio locations and she was wanting a studio look. That left my options as being her house which was what we settled on. Of course, I can’t bring my studio out to her, so I am having to take my portable gear which means that the set that I purchased for her can’t be used. I’ll also be adding roughly 2.5 hours of travel time to the equation and will be charging less money since there won’t be as many photographs done. I went from breaking even, to losing money on this session.
With my exhausted creativity, sunny weather which prevented any outdoor photography, and two different portrait shoots that turned out to be less than what I was hoping for, I was feeling quite down about things. I needed to get back out and rediscover the love for photography, but I was just not able to get the drive to do so. Knowing that I had that second portrait shoot scheduled for this weekend, I knew that I needed to get back out and get my hands on the camera once again so that I could start gearing up for the session. The question was what was I going to photograph? It was looking like there was a bit of a rain event that was coming into the area starting Thursday and going through Friday which brought the potential for some clouds which could work for me. With the time of year, my first thought was to go up to the Parkway, but I wasn’t feeling like fighting the crowds and I wasn’t really wanting to do landscape work. I was wanting to concentrate on photographing specific subjects more than anything.
Having been down to the Statesville area several times recently I had been paying more and more attention to an old General Store which was right at the county line. It had been suggested that I photograph it back in the Spring. I had driven by it and checked it out, but really wasn’t all that excited about the location. It was a nice building, but it was just lacking something when I was looking back then. More recently though, I’ve been looking at it with fresh eyes and could see some potential to it. I knew that I was going to need the trees to be full of leaves as that really helped to hide some of the clutter in the background. Since I had been driving by it recently, I was seeing that the foliage was starting to change on the trees around the store and that got me more excited about the possible composition. It was that store alone that I was even remotely excited about photographing. With some cloud cover in the forecast, I knew that the lighting would be decent, although I was really hoping for an evening capture of it with the warm sunlight bathing the store while the sky was cloudy. That wasn’t going to be a possibility as the afternoon and evening was going to be quite rainy. Figuring that my best chance would be going out after the clouds started to build, but before the rain would be my best choice for the day.
When I arrived at the location I noticed that the trees really hadn’t done much changing in the week since I had last been by here. There was enough color there to indicate the season and the sky was good enough which meant that I would go ahead and give it a try. One thing that I have learned out here with the leaves is, the trees aren’t really going into full color this year. The leaves that change will drop quickly so the tree is just always in a mild state of color, but it will continually get thinner and thinner which wouldn’t work for this subject. Having a little color was better than a lot of color, but not a lot of leaves.
I got out of the truck and loaded up my 24-70mm lens which I knew would be the best option for this shot because I wasn’t going to go any wider than 24mm because of the perspective distortion. This was also my sharpest lens. I fitted the Lee filter holder because I knew that I was going to be using an ND Grad for the sky and wanted to keep that option open and available behind my 105mm polarizer. With it all mounted to my tripod and ballhead, I walked over to the corner of the parking lot and set things up. I knew the rough area that I wanted to be in for the capture but I was just starting to build up the composition. When I got the rough composition figured out, I looked at how the posts on the porch lined up with the elements of the storefront like the doors, windows, and framing. I also looked at the background for any intersections. I managed to get the posts between a door and window, right at the edge of the building frame, and the last one at the edge of a tree in the background. That meant that the post wouldn’t obscure anything of interest along the front. I didn’t like the fact that the old refrigerator unit was blocking the door, but there was nothing that I could do about that. I just made sure that the post didn’t intersect that unit to break it up into two different elements. From here I worked on the height of the camera which I elevated to the top of the tripod travel. This allowed me to capture more of the windows above the porch cover and it also minimized the converging verticals of the building so that I wouldn’t have to do any line fixing later on in Lightroom.
With the composition figured out, I looked at the exposure and found that the sky was much too bright for how I wanted to capture this scene so I went to the truck and grabbed my Galen Rowell 2-stop soft edge ND Grad. I slid that in and the exposure improved greatly, but I was still blowing out portions of the sky to get the shadows up where I needed them. I went back to the truck and picked out a 2-stop soft ND Grad which I slid in between the polarizer and the 3-stop. I staggered the two grad filters so that the transition line would be impossible to find. That gave the sky just enough bite and I was able to expose for the shadows so that I had plenty of information to work with when editing the image.
At this point, it was just about waiting for the sky to come together. There was very little sky in the image so I was missing most of the detail that was there, but I was seeing a little bit coming into the frame. What I waited for was the darker clouds to come in at the top to close in the image naturally so I didn’t have to do much at all to darken that top edge. It was a slow process and I just kept clicking the shutter as the clouds moved hoping that I would get one that was much better than the others. That really didn’t happen unfortunately, but I did get the tonality in the clouds that I was after which was good enough for me.
I was probably there about 30 minutes waiting on the sky and light to do their thing. When I was pretty sure that I had what I wanted, I broke the camera down and loaded it back up in the truck. There were a couple of other places along the road that I was wanting to look closer at for photographic potential. Those other two areas didn’t really pan out so I just headed back to Purlear. I had to get Toni’s car serviced, hopefully before the rain hit. I had accomplished my goal for the day because I had spent some time with the camera and was getting reacquainted with it after two weeks of it being dormant. It was kind of getting my creativity back, but it wasn’t quite there yet. Photography was still feeling like a bit of a chore at this point which I definitely don’t like. It should always feel fun and exciting, but that is not very realistic when doing it full time. There are plenty of times that I am going to have to produce images when I’m not feeling particularly creative and I have to be able to work through those times in order to get myself back in the right frame of mind to want to do this.
Since I was still feeling a little blah towards photography, but was actually wanting to do a little more with it I decided to take the long way home and go through some of the areas around Mulberry that I enjoy photographing. I was seeing all of my favorite subjects, but they really weren’t speaking to me as I drove by. The more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking about an old poultry barn which I had found last year on a back road. I had photographed it a year ago and ended up doing the image as a black and white presentation which worked well, but I always wanted more from this location. I figured that if I was lucky I would be able to see a little Fall color with the structure and the sky would probably help as it was looking pretty good.
I made the turns to get to it and arrived with the light very harsh on the scene. The clouds were really nice, and the Fall colors were there in patches. It wasn’t ideal conditions, but thinking back to the lack of sky that we had seen for the last two weeks, I figured that I might not get another opportunity for this before the leaves were gone. I was feeling a little creative and wanted the challenge so I parked on the shoulder of the road and grabbed the camera. I knew that I was going to be shooting this wide so I just loaded on the 16-35mm lens along with filter holder and polarizer. I was thinking that the sky was going to need a little filter help before it was all said and done.
I worked on finding my composition which meant starting at the same location that I had shot it before. I found that same composition and set it up the way that I wanted it. I found that the sky was very much overexposed so I went to the truck and grabbed the 3-stop soft filter and slid that in. As with the first subject of the day, that got me close, but not quite there. I went back and grabbed the 2-stop soft filter and added it to the mix staggering it as I had the other time. That brought the sky down to a reasonable level for the exposure and I made a few images there. The composition was lacking though and I found that I wanted to have more of the sky present. that meant that I was going to have to really widen the image which started to introduce other problems like the roadway.
I considered all of my options and decided that I really liked the idea of making the structure much smaller in the image and giving it more depth and dimension. I went back across the street and set the tripod up in front of my truck. I zoomed the lens until I had the barn in the lower left third, with the roadway snaking around the right side of the frame taking your eyes to the clouds above. The clouds had great texture to them and I was really liking how this was looking. My gut told me that it was going to be a 16:9 or 16:10 crop so I just framed it in the camera as a 16:9 so that I could properly visualize how the elements would all fit together.
The more I fine tuned this composition, the more that I liked it. This ended up being the composition that I committed to and waited for the clouds to come in the best that they could. The sun was also in and out so that there was a little bit of light on the landscape from time to time which I liked. Once I had everything set with the composition, I don’t think that it took more than 15 minutes to get the shots that I wanted from this scene. When I was done with that, I decided it was time to get home because I could feel that the rain wasn’t too far off at this point. I needed to get that service done, so I headed back home.
The next hurdle for the day actually happened the following morning. I had to actually put the images through Lightroom which is normally just a routine part of the process. This time things were a little bit different. Lightroom had just received a major update with the inclusion of masks which has always been the domain of Photoshop up until now. There were a couple of AI masks that were now in play which promised to reduce the time editing images and I was looking forward to really trying them out. I just knew that wasn’t something to mess with at the end of the day so I opted to go for a fresh start the following day.
It took me several hours to get the edits done on these two images which is longer than normal. I did really work through the masks and did quite a few multiple layer masks and that learning curve took some time. However, I am pleased to say that I think I have a good working understanding of them now and I should be able to build on that rather quickly at this point. My first impressions of the new update are that doing local adjustments are a bit more tedious now compared to the old way. There are a lot of potential benefits to the new methods, but for right now I like the old way much better. My mind doesn’t really work in mask format which is why I shy away from Photoshop for the most part. It was the biggest benefit to Lightroom in my opinion and I got very good with doing local adjustments with the old program. This is going to take some getting used to, but I do think that I will see a higher level of edits once I get a handle on it. The fact that I have started to use layers and masks in Photoshop recently is helping this transition and I think that as I get better on the Lightroom end, I will see improvements on the Photoshop end as well. All of this is to say that I hope to see a slight improvement in the final presentations of my images.
I’m still not out of my creative slump, but this trek did help out quite a bit. It was nice to work a subject that I had been considering for a while and I’m actually quite happy with how it turned out. That is a good sign, because normally when I am in this mode, once I get an edit done I still don’t like the photograph even though I know it turned out good. To be happy with a photograph when I am not really motivated to create is a good sign. What do you think about these two images? Would you like to hang either of them in your home or office? If so, I would love to help you out with that. Always remember that when you buy work from an artist, you are helping to support not only them, but their art as well. Help me to continue making photographs for years to come and have a wonderful piece of wall art to call your own in the process.
Until next time…
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