Thursday, August 27, 2026
Long time, no talk. Yes, I do realize that I just finished up a blog series yesterday that started on Monday. I should be quite tired after going through 23 new photos from less than two hours’ worth of field work. No doubt about it, I am tired from that, and I am really quite tired of typing at this point. However, as I left off yesterday, there were a couple of barns in Ashe County, near West Jefferson that I had spotted which I kind of wanted to photograph. This came to me during a drive after finishing Chapter 2 on Tuesday. I always enjoy my top-down rides in the mountains during this time of year. This one was no different and it didn’t even bother me that I had to take a detour off of the Parkway due to construction. That took me through some of the back roads that I haven’t been on for a while through Ashe County leading out to US 221.
The first barn that I spotted was on the right side of the road and was pretty much situated all alone in a field with a nice view of the mountains off to the side. It almost looked like a picture right then and there and I decided that I wanted to come back to really look at it again when I had the camera with me. A short distance further down the road and I saw another barn which looked really nice, but it was well below the roadway, and I didn’t get a really good look at it. That can be the problem with the Miata. Even though I have great visibility out of the car, my attention is usually very firmly planted on the road and the path that lies in front of me. I have to process the things that I see off to the sides of the road quickly and then think about them later on based on a quick mental snapshot. There was another one of those mental snapshots taken a couple more miles down the road with a red barn sitting against a grassy hill down below the roadway once again. The red barn really did stick out and made an impression on me, but I wasn’t able to really get a good look at the surroundings as I drove by.
In pretty quick succession, I had spotted three locations that I was interested in photographing but didn’t really have a good gameplan of how I wanted to capture them based on the quick drive-by. I thought about it later that afternoon when I got home from my ride but didn’t really put much effort into putting together any plans. When I was wrapping up the last chapter of the previous trek, I did start to think about where I was going to go next, though I had no intentions of going out again quite this quickly. I did have the time to pull out Google Maps and start retracing my steps to get a better idea of the area and how the photos might look. I was able to find the first barn quite easy because it was right after the turn that I had taken onto that road. A quick look at Street View and I was pretty sure that I had a really good subject to work with as long as I could get over the tall vegetation that was on the side of the road. That was really the only concern that I had with the scene and started to think about how I wanted to photograph it.
The next two barns were a bit harder to locate on the satellite view, but I did find the second of the three barns eventually. It was not quite as isolated as I had hoped when I started to look at the Street View. There was a very long chicken house just to the right of the barn that was kind of in a lousy spot if I was going to photograph the barn from the most flattering angle. It could possibly be done, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do it. For this one, I was going to have to check it out in person and start to play the focal length game with it and see how I could frame it successfully.
The red barn that I had spotted remained a mystery to me and I wasn’t able to locate it on the satellite images. What I was thinking was I would need clouds for some nice and diffused light, or possibly morning sunlight to light the sides that I would be shooting from. In all cases, I was expecting to photograph the barns from the East which would have the sunlight shining on the subjects quite well during the morning hours. I started to look at the weather forecasts during the evening on Wednesday to see when I might be able to try and get out there. I was fully expecting rain for the rest of the week, but according to the forecast that rain had kind of been pushed back and was looking to only be happening overnight. There were clouds expected through Wednesday and even a chance of fog showing up in the early morning hours.
I hadn’t considered fog in my plans, but I could very possibly use the fog with the second and third barns because of where they were sitting. It would help to simplify things in the image as long as I could get a clear view of the barn. As the fog burned off, I was hoping to be able to work with the first barn and maybe still have a bit of mist flowing through the background hill. It was going to all be about mood and atmosphere for these subjects and it was looking like Thursday morning might just be the time to get it done.
It was already close to 10pm when I started to make this plan and I needed to get to sleep soon since I was going to have to wake up around 6am and get rolling quickly to be out there shortly after sunrise. I worked out some creative ideas that I could fall back on before getting ready to head to bed. I woke up several times through the night and was pretty much wide awake around 5:30. I decided to check the weather then instead of waiting until that last minute to decide. The weather was showing clear skies all around the area that I was going to be working in. The clouds that were supposed to be overhead had been pushed back a few hours and were now looking like they would get there around 10am. That would have been fine if the fog was still going to happen. It wasn’t looking like there was going to be any fog in that area though as both of my forecasting apps had agreed on the potential last night and now they both were showing no fog and clear skies at sunrise.
While I was a little disappointed in the change of forecasts, I was happy that I could go back to sleep. I wasn’t going to need to get out there until sometime around the middle of the day at this point, and even that was up in the air depending on the amount of clouds that came in. The extra two and a half hours of sleep did me good and I was a bit more coherent when I got up shortly after eight. Looking at the weather, things were still looking to be on track, though I was seeing the last bits of fog around the house. We are at a completely different altitude than Ashe County so that really had nothing at all to do with the conditions that I had been expecting to show up out there. The fog wasn’t thick enough to have really made a difference anyway.
After I had some breakfast and took care of my morning routine down in the studio, I started to look at the weather once again. The clouds were seeming to get thinner and thinner while it was looking like everything was getting pushed back to early afternoon when the storms were now supposed to start up. The only thing that I could get any kind of confirmation on was that there would be partly cloudy skies overhead and they would be at a variety of altitudes above the ground. It was going to be a gamble, but I also knew that it would be easier to scout the barns in the truck as I could get off of the road by pulling onto the shoulder much easier than when I was in the Miata.
With that in mind, I grabbed my shoes and camera bag and headed Northbound. The conditions were a little bright around the house, but I could see clouds to the North which was a good sign. While I was headed this way, I decided to see if the property was opened up where the Dodge truck was sitting that I want to try and work with at some point. The lighting was generally good for that subject, though I would have wanted less clouds for it. That ended up being a moot point because the gates were still closed and I saw no signs of the owners.
When I got into Ashe County, the quality of the light was actually quite good, and I was looking forward to what was hopefully going to be a successful day with the camera. I was also hoping that I didn’t end up coming home with twenty-some photos to go through as well. Just after turning onto the road where I knew the barns were located, I spotted the first one on the right. It was just as pretty as I had remembered and the sky behind it was perfect with some nice clouds in places while there was some blue off in the distance. The light was great on the scene as well with it being diffused, yet still kind of bright. The only problem was that it was feeing time for the cows and there were probably 15 or so gathered around the barn. I’m sure that some of you will be saying that this would be perfect and would give more detail to the story of the barn. Yes, I see your point and if they had been brown or white cows, that would have worked well. These were all black cows which tend to not expose well in photos and turn into dark smudges that are ultimately distractions. There is also the issue of movement as I would need to be able to freeze the action of tails swishing and legs moving between all of the cows which would add to the difficulty of the entire photo. One more issue was that I would have to try and wait until they were in a position within the frame that made sense to the composition while hoping that they didn’t just walk over to me to investigate what the strange guy with the tripod was doing. Historically, that is what happens and then that just ruins the whole shot. In short, I wasn’t wanting to mess with the cows for this shot and decided to check out the other barns real quick.
The next one that I found was the one with the long chicken house to the side which was causing me some creative hurdles. Looking at the scene critically, there was only one way of capturing the barn from the road without including the chicken house and that was going to be zooming right into the barn and filling the frame with it. I didn’t like that idea because the barn looked good as an element in a landscape, but I really didn’t think that it had the interest to carry the entire photo which would have been the case had I framed up that image.
There was a side road just beyond the barn and I thought that maybe there was a better angle on it from that direction. Right after turning, I found that the angle was actually worse and the chicken house was even more of a problem for most angles. The one angle that would work had me including the house on the opposite side of the barn which from this angle would be nearly overlapped with the barn. It was all just too complex and cluttered for my tastes. Unless I come up with a different way of shooting this one, I’ll probably just let this one be pretty for those passing by in their vehicles.
This was where I started searching out the red barn that had made an impression on me. It wasn’t but a couple of miles down the road and I was able to find it easy enough. There it was sitting on the side of a hill just waiting for a photo to be taken. I slowed and started to look at the scene critically for the first time. That was when I saw the power lines that were stretching across the scene right above the roof of the barn. There were no elements around the barn that would improve a composition leaving just a red barn against a green background. There were no trails or paths that would be leading lines, nothing that could be in the foreground, just nothing but a barn and grass. There was no composition here at all that I could rely on to bring interest to the barn. It was boring in every way I could think of to photograph. The final straw was how many artifacts would be brought into the scene if I removed the power lines which I absolutely would have had to do. This barn wasn’t going to work either.
I decided to drive around a bit more to see if there was anything else out here that might work as a photo. So far, everything that I had planned had fallen apart pretty quickly. There wasn’t much else that grabbed my attention in the area, but I did end up circling back around to the road where I had started out. I was now driving past the first barn again and wondering if the cows had moved into a location where I could maybe work with them. That wasn’t the case at all. They were all packed in at the feeding trough right beside the barn on the side that I was needing to work from. This was even worse than what I had seen before, so I just kept on driving and ended up turning on the next side street.
After I drove down there for a bit, I got turned around and started driving back out to the main road. My intention was to head home or at least back in that direction. As I approached the main road, I saw a lot of movement in the direction of the barn which I could see from this side street. It was at least a dozen cows running down the hill like they were chasing rolling haybale. I didn’t see any other cows up at the barn so I decided to go and see if I could get a photo real quick while they were otherwise occupied.
I pulled over on the shoulder of the road that was just wide enough for the truck. The grass was really tall which made me very glad that I had skid plates on the bottom covering the exhaust where it was the hottest. I went ahead and grabbed the camera and decided on the standard zoom for simplicity. I didn’t think I would need anything wider than 24mm and I was likely going to want something tighter than 35mm so that was just the best option to go with. I added the polarizer because there were enough clouds in the sky to break up the banding caused by a polarizer. With that, I started walking along the side of the road to see where the best angle was going to be.
The problem that I was running into was the tall brush on the side of the road which was grown up around the fence. I wasn’t able to get the camera high enough to shoot over it while leaving enough room around the barn that I could show off the great scenery. To avoid the tall brush, I would have to zoom into the barn quite close which changed the setting around it tremendously. I did see some nice orange flowers growing in a section of the vegetation that I thought would be a nice element to include and would make the vegetation an important part of the composition rather than just a foreground that I wasn’t able to avoid capturing.
I started to figure out where I needed to place the tripod in order to capture the orange flowers, the barn, and the distant view of the mountain. This was a pretty wide scope of an image, and I found myself working between 28-35mm for this concept. I liked that I was able to get a large view of the sky with the wide-angle while the barn was still fairly dominant in the scene. The vegetation was a great element for framing the barn and introducing the scene thanks to that splash of orange that gave it a purpose. You would never know that the road was just out of frame to the left.
What I spent the most time working with was covering the solar panel for the electric fence which was visible in the left part of the composition. I could have removed it in post, but I was not able to get a clear view of it through the brush while still keeping a good angle on the barn. If I had left it partially visible, I would have had a rougher time removing it without lots of artifacts. What I decided to do instead was position the panel behind a thicker patch of vegetation so that it was mostly masked from view. This way I didn’t have to worry about removing it at all. This worked out well and I found a great spot to get the image from fairly early on.
I tried some other views of the barn from closer and further away. I also found an angle where I could get a frame filling view of the barn as it was framed within the hill behind it. I wanted to get this view because I thought that it would make a very impactful black and white composition to serve as a creative alternative for the scene. For that composition, I found that the lens was zoomed into 67mm. I had picked the right lens for the job, and it allowed me to keep the same lens on during the entire time I was working with this barn.
In the end, I had shot a total of 15 frames from various angles and there were a few duplicate exposures mixed in as I was trying to avoid the movement in the foreground thanks to a breeze that showed up towards the end of the session. I had already told myself that I was going to do a color and a black and white of this barn, so I was figuring that I had two images that were going to become keepers. There were actually three that made it through the culling, but the third one was too much like the first keeper with the biggest difference being the absence of the orange flowers. I had thought that the slightly stronger composition would have worked out better than the one where I had the orange flowers, but those needed to be there to make the foreground work for the image. That was the deciding factor, and I have no doubt that I made the right choice by including the flowers and then choosing that one as the keeper.
The day had been looking like a fumble, but once the cows ran away from the barn, I had my chance to capture the image that I wanted. I actually did capture just what I was hoping to get from this barn when I had seen it from the Miata. It only took 15 frames to work out the compositional details, and I was able to get two very different images from those exposures. It was a far cry from my recent treks where I need two or three different entries to share all of the photos. While I love fruitful treks like those, I really enjoy the chance to do a full trek in a matter of hours and have the blog and photos all done the same day. I think I am just about five hours later from when I left the house at this point in the blog. That is a nice change after measuring the time by the days which have passed.
There was the chance that I might have had a good many more photos to add here, but I wasn’t able to get anyone to come to the door of another spot that I found while on the way home. It was still in the same area, but a bit closer to US 221. I had spotted what I think was a ’60’s Plymouth, or possibly a Lincoln sitting beside a metal building surrounded by other vehicles. It was a bodystyle that I am not familiar with, but there were a few details that I could see from the road that I would be able to get some photos of. I’ll try to get back out there again in the future and hopefully be able to get permission and grab a few new photos from there.
Thank you for joining me on this trek, and I’m glad that I was able to get it all done in a single entry. This entry has been pretty quick as well with about half of the words of what I would normally be writing to share about a trek. See, I did promise that this would be a quick one, and it was.
Until next time…
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