Sunday, February 22, 2026
I wasn’t really expecting to go on a trek today, but kind of got inspired yesterday watching some YouTube videos on photography. There were no tutorials, or gear reviews in that list. I was watching videos on the different meanings behind photography and some more psychological aspects of photography which is what I much prefer to focus on these days. I could care less about gear and what lens is sharper. It is how photography is received and the motivations behind it that are really capturing my attention. The main takeaways from what I was watching came down to just shooting things that interested the photographer without much regard to whether or not it was going to be a fantastic image or not. The photo became more about the photographer and less about the subject. This is something that I am really wanting to concentrate on this year as I’ve started to mention. I’m looking at how I view the world and how I see things around me. I really want to get to a place where I can capture some very ordinary things in ways that make them look extraordinary.
There is no better way to find those ordinary scenes than to go out for a photo walk. It is by doing this you can take the time to really look around and explore the visual input that is all around you. Since you aren’t driving by, you have time to really look at the subject. Since you aren’t walking with a destination in mind, you are always at your destination which frees you up to look around. The place that I have had the most luck with photo walks happens to be North Wilkesboro, which is only about 15 minutes down the road from the house. It offers a lot of great opportunities and scenes that really speak to my love for decay subjects. I’m also quite familiar with it, so I can feel free to force myself to see things in different ways than I would normally.
I had some free time during the morning and felt that the weather was going to be pretty good for a quick photo walk. The temperatures were supposed to be in the mid-40’s and the skies were going to be partly cloudy. I really like doing these photo walks with the sun shining occasionally because it gives me some shadows to work with that seem to really work well with the scenes that I like to photograph. I wasn’t needing to get there too early because I wanted the sun to be up high enough that it would start to fill the alleys with some light which wouldn’t be possible during the typically preferred “golden hour.” Of course, I have never been one to follow that ideal too strictly. For the most part, I’m out during the middle of the day under clouds for my preferred shooting times. Here again, I was looking for different ways of seeing things though, so the sun was going to be welcome.
The weather was a bit cloudier than I had anticipated when I woke up, but the lighting still looked good to me. An hour or so after sunrise, I was on my way out to downtown for a bit of a walk. The temperatures were a bit colder than expected, so I had to bundle up more than I would have liked for this. There is something about being in the shade between buildings in the cold that will get into your bones really quickly. I was ready for it, and was still looking forward to my photo walk even though it was colder and cloudier than expected.
When I arrived, I made my way down to the police department because I had been thinking about ways of photographing one of the lamps that was positioned above the walkway beside of the building. I had used this lamp as an element in several other photos over the years, but I really wanted to focus on it as a main subject more than anything else. It was all about shape and luminosity for me. I was going for more of an abstract type of composition than anything. That was going to be my goal, and if I had the chance to shoot with the wide-angle lens, that would be even better. Of course, there would be no wide-angle work with the lamp as I needed to isolate it in the frame, and it was a long way from where I was standing. This was going to be the realm of my telephoto lens which I do love to work with.
My initial thought was going to be having the lamp against the sky above, but that wasn’t going to be possible from this angle, and I didn’t really see a good line to get the angle that I was thinking would be possible. I could have gone up to the walkway, but that was going to put me too close to the building, and I was not really liking that idea. However, using the building as a background was a good idea here. I had done that before but had included much more of the building and just used the lamp as a visual anchor rather than the main subject. I chose to go with a narrower depth of field to really pull the globe of the lamp out of the frame. From here, it was a matter of finding the elements on the wall that would frame and hopefully point to the globe to really pull the eyes to it.
I shot several different variations of the lamp from the parking lot. I was liking the abstract nature of the lines, though it still wasn’t quite fitting in with my ideal abstract concept. I wasn’t able to find that with the lamp like I had hoped to find. There was just something missing, and that something might have been the light and shadow to give more shape and dimension to the globe. At any rate, I was making do with what I had to work with and coming away with some very interesting photos that did focus on shapes and lines.
Most of what I shot, I had planned on doing as black and white since color wasn’t really all that important to me with this scene. However, there was one composition that I worked through that seemed to work very well in color. This was an experimental composition that was shot from the left side with the concrete walkway partially blocking the lamp. I liked the sense of depth that the scene had with the concrete foreground and the window had a strange coating on it that gave a very magenta toned reflection of the sky. The polarizer seemed to accentuate that a good deal. The composition was fine tuned and I got a few shots of it before moving on to the next angle that I wanted to work.
That next angle was something very close to what I had been thinking about before getting out here. It was of a different lamp that was a bit further from the building. This one had the text Police applied to it and was visible from the front. Since I was looking at it from the rear, that text was no longer there and all that was left was the simple globe on top of the post. I could have gone with my initial thought, but from this angle, I had a great view of the concrete wall that provided a fantastic diagonal component that I had not visualized before. I liked this better and it provided a very simple and geometrical composition.
With a bit of repositioning of the camera, I was able to get a nice clear view of the scene without the power lines ruining the composition. There was one line that crept into the frame at the top right that I had to clone out, but that was easy enough and certainly didn’t affect the overall image. I don’t mind removing small things like that when needed, but I have a problem when the removal is something that is significant in the frame.
The resulting composition was pretty solid, and I liked how this looked quite a bit. The colors seemed to work, but they also made this a bit more boring to look at. I liked the effect that black and white provided which added that extra level of visual interest. The darkening sky through the clouds helped to keep the eyes in the frame and the eyes went right where I needed them to go with the bright globe first followed by the contrast of the post and the wall which defined the composition.
I was firmly into the experimentation portion of the day by this point and was looking around for something else that was a bit out of the ordinary and something that I typically wouldn’t bother photographing. The next subject was on the other side of the parking lot and was centered around a bare tree that I had photographed before. The difference this time was in how I was seeing it. I wasn’t interested in the base of the tree that was in a brick planter next to the building. This was how I had shot it before. This time, I was more interested in the way that the bare limbs were moving across the brick wall. They really looked like capillaries or neurons in the nervous system. The lighting was interesting on the tree giving a bit of highlight to the branches. The structure was organized enough to make the scene interesting, but not so organized as to make it boring to look at.
Today was all about experimentation, so I felt that it was very much worthwhile to try and photograph this tree before I left. I moved around in the parking lot until I could get the angle that I was after while avoiding the windows and other bits of distraction on the wall. I just wanted a clean and simple composition that would focus on the tree more than anything else. The brick wall was just going to be a background for the image and would provide color more than anything to help with the visual separation for the limbs.
The problem that I wasn’t expecting to run into was the bird that was sitting in the tree. At first, I wanted to capture it in the composition, but looking at the scaling of the image, the bird would have been lost in the frame with the existing composition. If I got closer to the bird, that would make this image a wildlife shot which then would start to look funny with the brick wall behind it. The bird just didn’t quite work for my vision on this scene. In order to communicate what I was seeing, the bird was going to have to be out of frame. That didn’t take too long, and once it was just out of the frame, I fired off a quick shot which worked just fine for what I was after.
With that, I made one last look around and packed up the camera as I saw nothing else that I was interested in shooting right here. I was starting to get cold and needed to move around and hopefully find some sunlight to warm me a bit. I continued walking around all around the business district but wasn’t finding anything else that spoke to me. I just wasn’t really feeling this setting as much as I had hoped I would. Fortunately, I had come away with some decent photos from the police department, but it was seeming that was going to be it. The sky was really great though, and I wasn’t quite done with photography. I just was done with the photo walk.
There was a barn not too far from home that I have been contemplating capturing for a few weeks now and I thought that the sky would be perfect for it. That was where I headed after I got back to the truck. I was kind of getting excited about the prospect of getting that barn in this light, but then I started to think about an old home that I had discovered last year on a very atmospheric day. I ended up not shooting it that day, though I really wished that I had. There were some visual issues with the location of the house that had kept me from really trying too hard with it. The power lines and the distance from the road were a lot of hurdles to overcome which caused me to talk myself out of shooting it. The next time I went by hoping to get something, the sky wasn’t right for the shot, and I passed it by once again.
Looking at the sky now, I had a feeling that it was going to look pretty good over that old house and I started to really consider stopping here rather than going out to the barn. If I played my cards right, I would be able to do both locations which appealed to me as well. The house wasn’t far from the business district, and I drove by it slowly to see how things looked. The conditions were great, but I was still not quite sure how I was going to get into position to photograph it.
The issues that I was going to run into was the power lines that were visible from the street. I could get under them easy enough, but that would make the metal building behind the house visible which was a distraction in my book. To avoid the lines at the road, I would have to shoot from the left side of the house which would introduce the newer house into the frame which I didn’t want. The best angle on this house was going to be from the front and slightly to the right. If I kept the camera low, I would be able to avoid the metal building, and if I could get into the yard a bit further than the shoulder, I could avoid the power lines. It was looking like this was the time to shoot it before the trees started to fill out again.
I got turned around and pulled into an old parking lot close by the house. I grabbed the camera with the standard lens on it because the scaling of everything looked perfect to my eyes which meant that I was going to need to shoot this around 50mm. I would have needed permission to get close enough to use the wide-angle lens, and then I would have had to deal with the metal building behind the house. I needed to have a little distance from the house so that I could be lower than the house, and for that, a normal lens was going to be the best bet.
I started to walk up the driveway just past the mailbox before entering the yard slightly. I started to build out the framing of the composition and found that I was still getting some of the power lines. I moved in a bit closer and reframed the shot. This worked out very nicely and I found that I was dead on 50mm with the zoom lens. I guess, I still do see comfortably at that 50mm mark and can spot it from the street.
The trees were looking great around the old home, and I was able to eliminate the buildings around it by either having them behind the hill, or just out of frame to the left. The sky had the right textures and moods to work for the feeling I was going for as well. This would not have worked after the trees had filled out with leaves. Even the browning grass helped to set the mood in the photo. Everything just looked great! I fired off several shots as traffic was going by so that I was sure to not get reflections in the windows of the passing traffic.
After only a few minutes, I was happy with what I had captured and figured that this was going to be my favorite image of the day. It was time to head over to the barn to get that shot before going home to get the images processed. As I was driving though, I was starting to see drops on my windshield. There was a very low chance of precipitation today, but just up the mountain, they were getting hammered with snow. The more the spots showed up, the more I realized that it wasn’t rain, but snow that was falling. It started to get pretty heavy and I could see it blowing sideways. I decided after seeing the snow coming down that the better option would be to head on home and forget the barn. The snow would have been flying directly into my lens which would mean constant wiping of it for any photos which is a pain to do. I was happy with the old home and was glad that I got it rather than the barn which I had shot a couple of times before.
I had captured 22 frames from my quick time out with the camera. Of those, I ended up with these five keepers. This was a huge surprise for me as everything that I shot was pretty much an experiment with the exception of the house which was something that I was pretty comfortable in capturing. I still didn’t get the abstracts that I was really after, but I kind of like the lamp photos better the way that they turned out. I’ll have plenty of time to work on abstracts as the year progresses. In fact, I am planning on going out on Tuesday or possibly Wednesday to the area of Lomax once again to work with a junk yard. That is always a great opportunity for abstracts and I’m really looking forward to giving that a try.
Until that next time…
