Thursday, March 28, 2024
This trek was so not planned, and in fact, it was kind of a surprise to me. Yesterday was kind of dreary and rainy which got me thinking about going out for some photos, but the light was never right, even when the clouds started to clear in the midafternoon. There was a good chance for clouds today during the morning and that had me considering options where I could go early in the day. Top of my list was a location that I have been trying to shoot for a couple of weeks now in the area of Hays. It is one of those locations where I would want to spend a good deal of time because there are a lot of cars there, and several that I want to photograph. Having most of the morning would be about perfect, but I was going to need to get permission to get onto the property to really work the cars. That is the wildcard that I have been dealing with as I have tried twice to make contact with the owners to no avail.
As I was thinking about an alternate plan, I received a text from a friend of mine, who lives in Rhonda. I had met Charles a couple of years ago when I was photographing his family’s house from the roadway. In fact, it was on March 18, 2022, that I had first been out to this location, so almost two years ago to the day. I still remember that day quite well because it turned into a series of trips out to the area to photograph different areas that Charles thought might interest me. There is just nothing quite like getting to know an area from one of the folks that has lived there all their lives. I was back and forth in the area until the Summer working the different scenes. As is the routine, once I had photographed pretty much everything out that way, I moved onto another area and worked that one before moving onto another one.
The text came in a little after 6pm with Charles telling me that the Ford sedan that I had photographed inside of the barn that day had been pulled out. He was getting ready to get it running again which was really exciting for me to hear. I know that he has history with the car and from what I could recall, it was in pretty good shape for being in a barn for so long. That single text flooded my memories with what became one of my most significant images of 2022 and one of the most difficult to capture. Now that it was out of the barn, the possibilities were endless with what I could do with the car. Just like that, my plans for the following morning were trumped and I was on a mission. I didn’t know his timetable for getting the car running, but I figured that it was going to be outside and available for a very short time which meant that I needed to jump on this chance while it was there. The clouds in the morning should work well for the car, and I let him know that I was planning on dropping by for some photos.
I woke up early so I could get my morning stuff done down in the office before heading out. I was on the road around 9am which was what I had planned for as the clouds were going to be the best between 10-2. The only problem was there were very few clouds in the sky to start with. The sun was actually quite bright, and I was worrying about how I would be able to work the car with the light. I knew that he had moved it beside the old store on the side of the property which meant that it was more or less in the open which would help on a sunny day, but I really wanted the soft light of the clouds. It just wasn’t looking like I was going to get that today. There was no good argument for putting this off though as I didn’t want to affect his plans at all, and I have had reasonable luck in photographing old cars under a bit brighter sun than I would normally choose to work with. I was just going to have to work harder at composing images that worked with the light, and I was up to the challenge.
When I arrived at the location, I was really disappointed to see that the sun was still out in full force and the car was sitting under the shade from a large tree that was next to the house. I didn’t pull in at first as I wanted to contemplate the scenario before I committed to working the scene. Looking at the sky, the clouds were moving around overhead, and I was hoping that they would help to diffuse the light and soften it at least from time to time. The shadows of the tree made for some visually interesting lines leading to the car and going through the car. It wasn’t the combination of elements that I had hoped for, but the car was perfectly placed in a way that allowed me to be able to work several different angles with different background elements coming into play. It was worth getting started and seeing what I could come up with. Even if I just got a couple of photos, I would be more than happy if for no other reason than I had been given a great opportunity to photograph this car fresh from the inside of the barn.
The easiest composition to come up with and the one that made the most use of the shadows was to include the tree that produced the shadow, which meant working with a wider-angle lens than I have been used to doing here lately. I fitted the 16-35mm lens and started to work the compositions as I had thought them through. I was getting some decent photographs, but nothing that was feeling all that inspired to me. The tree was overpowering the car which was getting lost in the barns and the old store. I needed to figure out a better way to work the car than what I was doing.
The thought came to me that I might better switch to the telephoto lens which has really become my workhorse for this kind of photography, but when I really started to think about the environment I reconsidered. What I have found that the telephoto lens excels in is isolating the car and doing a great job at pulling details out of the car. This situation was a little different since I liked the environment that it was in and wanted to tell the full story of the car along with the structures around it. That meant that I needed something more like my standard zoom which has been feeling a little left out here lately. This lens would allow me to include more of the surroundings while keeping the perspective and visual weight of the car in good relation to the overall photo. This was the lens that I ended up using for the rest of the time here, and the only lens that produced keepers as the wide-angle shots just didn’t cut it.
Since I wasn’t really liking the light at this point, I started to work some details of the car starting off with the passenger side fender which was in the shade. This gave more even light on it and allowed me to capture the better of the two “Custom” emblems under the V8 emblem. It took me a while to find a framing that I liked with this portion of the car, and even with that, I changed the crop in post to a square which I had not done in the field. Since the fender was in the shadows, there wasn’t much color present which prompted me to make this one a black and white composition which I think worked very well for the contrast of the chrome against the paint and patina.
It was still a slow start and while I had shot three different compositions at this point, I was not feeling all that great about any of them. I still wanted to take advantage of the shadows running towards the car which was going to mean revisiting my first compositions, albeit with a slight change. Now that I had a bit more restrictive focal length, I opted to omit the tree from the composition and just use the shadows of the limbs. The idea was that the viewer could figure out what was causing the shadows and without the tree, I could make the car much more prominent in the frame to help the viewer determine what was important to me in the scene.
With that in mind, I started to frame up some similar compositions to what I had shot earlier, but this time the lack of the tree gave me some alternate options that I didn’t have before. One of the options that I enjoyed was the fact that I could include the GMC truck that was in the barn to the rear. If you read the blog about my first time here, you will know that this is something that I had tried to shoot from the road unsuccessfully on that day. It still wasn’t a strong enough element to carry a photo, but as a supporting player to the Ford, it worked perfectly. The blue tones that the truck introduced helped to balance out the overall warm tones that were present between the rust and the wood throughout the scene.
Another variation that I framed was a bit tighter of a crop that omitted the GMC and just really focused the attention on the Ford. This was the most direct and simple composition that I shot of the car, and I thought that it worked pretty well. I still had the shadows from the tree leading the eyes to the car, while the barns helped to separate the car from the woods in the background. The composition felt as though it would work in the field, but it was a little uninspired because of the central location of the car. It was worth a couple of frames just in case it worked out.
When I got the RAW files uploaded into Lightroom, this one made it through the first two rounds of culling but was cut in favor of the more complex composition that included the GMC. A bit of interest around these two photos was that the first composition was originally edited in a black and white because I felt that the overall complexity of the scene was favorably simplified with the lack of color. I liked the edit, but when it came time to go through the images one last time to see if there were any others that I wanted to edit, I pulled this simpler composition back in and duplicated the edit from the existing black and white edit. With that preliminary edit applied, I saw promise in this simple composition, and it started to really make sense without color. Not wanting to have two very similar compositions done in the same way, I tried to pick the one that was the strongest of the two. I liked them both for different reasons and couldn’t make the call as to which was better.
The more I looked at them, the more I started to wonder what the one with the GMC in the background would look like in color. I went back to the drawing board with it and went through the color profiles until I found something that I thought would work very well. From there, I worked the edit out in full color which wasn’t as busy as I thought it would be. I did like the blue of the truck which balanced out the warmer tones as I had established in the field earlier. The colors helped to make visual sense of the scene where the black and white had failed it a little bit. The more direct photo looked stunning in black and white because of how prominent the main subject was within the frame. I didn’t really want to have both of these compositions in the keeper stack, but I can’t deny that they both turned out very nice and I’m happy that they are in the collection.
By this point, I was starting to feel like I was spending too much time working the same side of the car. I needed to work my way around it and take advantage of the different lighting that was being offered by the directional sun. I didn’t see anything at the rear of the car that excited me, so I moved back to the passenger side and started to look at how things were organized from this angle. I immediately saw some distractions to the rear of the car which would prevent me being able to get a good frame around the entire car. Having already shot the fender, I wanted to get something different while still only capturing a portion of the car.
Something that I spotted in the distance made me start to consider this composition. There was an arched tree which was resplendent in Spring color that I was pretty sure I could get to arch over the hood ornament. From that idea, I built on the composition adding one bit, and then another, and then another. There was a point where I felt that I had added too much to the photo, and I went back to that last composition where I thought that I had a really good collection of elements of the car. That composition you will see above. It might look like a quick and simple composition, but it started with that arched tree over the hood and grew into this. The end result is something that I think is beyond successful in both colors and tones, as well as composition. Even looking at it now, I don’t think that there is anything different I would want for this photo as every aspect works in unison with the next.
At this point, I was starting to hit my stride. I hadn’t spent much time on any one particular composition, and I was starting to feel like I was getting a few contenders for being keepers which made me feel really good. With this stage having been reached, I felt like I could go into pure creative mode and start to find the off the wall compositions which are usually the ones that really stand out from the crowd. Since I was currently around the front of the car, I wanted to work with the bumper and headlights a bit. This is something that I have been doing for a while and knew that I didn’t want to get the same old compositions that I have shot in the past. With that in mind, I started to look for new ways of capturing the different bits on the front of the car.
The more I looked, the more I realized that I liked the bullets in the grill and the bumperettes for the shapes that they offered. I looked at the different angles and found that shooting from the outside of the car towards the center offered the best balance. Between the two sides, the best option was from the passenger side because of how the shadows fell. Now, I set to work finding the right way to frame the elements. I tried vertical and horizontal compositions but wasn’t able to arrive at an image that I really liked. As I was looking between the two compositions on the image review, I saw that square was the way to go, and with that, I needed to crop into the bumperette to reduce the visual weight of it. I switched the crop of the camera over to 1:1 and worked out the composition. This worked very well as the bullet took up most of the frame which was what I wanted while the bumperette framed it. What I had was a collection of shapes, textures, and shadows. I knew without a doubt that this was going to be a black and white image as color had no part of the scene.
While I was working on the front of the car, I kept looking at the Ford crest on the hood and the hood ornament. I’ve shot these two elements many times before on other cars. The patina wasn’t all that great in terms of visual interest thanks to color contrasts, so I wasn’t really interested in shooting the hood ornament. The crest would be rather plain if I just shot it. I kind of dismissed it at first and kept looking around the front of the car without success.
As I was looking, I kept playing back the advice that I give to my mentorship clients about going to the extremes of camera height to avoid eye level photography. Going up high wasn’t going to really help the situation, but I hadn’t really thought about going low. I kneeled down and looked at the view. The first thing that I noticed was the hood ornament was just peering over the front of the hood which was kind of cool since you don’t normally see the ornament from this angle. The second thing that I noticed was that the blue sky balanced out the warm rust tones quite nicely while the bare trees offered some texture to that sky.
I wasted no time in collapsing the tripod and getting the camera into position. I was really happy that I had my standard zoom attached as that one has a bit of a macro capability which I was using considering my close-in focusing distance. A few small movements with the camera and a confirmation on the depth of field and I was ready to get the photo. It was a simple shot, so I just fired off two frames for the composition with a slightly different aperture for a variation on my depth of field. At the time, I didn’t really like the shadow going across the hood, but actually ended up really liking the effect that it gave the photo. The uniqueness of this composition still strikes me which is what I was going for after looking at something that I have shot many times over. I finally have something different that I think works quite well.
At this point, I was fully embracing the details that I was seeing on the car. Doing these isolations is a great way of picking out the details of the car that I truly love. I was pretty sure that I was finished with the front at this point, so I moved to the rear of the car where I had dismissed the view earlier. The difference was I had been looking for more of an all-inclusive composition before, and now I was looking for that intimate view. The taillights are an element that I tend to be drawn to just as much as headlights. In the case of this Ford, the rear lights were rather unique in their design with the trim that went down the quarter panel for a distance and the light itself was a three nibbed oval that was visually interesting.
I started to form up a composition that was anchored on that taillight which went up and to the right in a diagonal fashion. I had the bumper included in the composition as well because I thought it gave the photo a nice balance. However, I was having a hard time getting everything positioned right to avoid things like the exhaust and too much of the ground. The more I fiddled with the composition, the more I disliked it. I never even fired off a frame because nothing was really striking me as being a good photo.
Just when I was ready to abandon the concept, I stopped to think about what I really liked about the composition and what didn’t really make that much of a difference. It was that bumper that was forcing all of the compromises like including the ground and having to avoid extra elements. By eliminating the bumper, I was left with the brightest part of the photo being the trim for the taillight which was why I wanted to capture this photo. It all comes down to being absolutely sure about the “why” behind the photo. I had been including far too much which was why I was having a hard time getting the composition to work. I was now looking at the pure reason for the photo and I was able to get the composition and framing just like I wanted to convey that message to the viewer.
Initially, I had edited this one in black and white, but it seemed to be missing something and just didn’t have the visual punch that I had expected it to. I took it back to the beginning and did a color edit which brought in more colors than I had suspected. There was a nice balance in tones throughout the image and the trim still jumped out at me which was what I wanted. It was the shape of the swoosh that I was after here, and it translated just fine in color. The extra visual information gave a lot of pop, especially with the red lens of the light. Had there not been the blue tones in the paint at the top of the quarter panel, I don’t think this would have worked as well as it did. I am truly happy with this one after the color edit.
It was about this time that I started to really consider where I was. There were other subjects around me that were just as photogenic as the Ford. There were trees, a really great yellow home, a store, some barns, and that blue GMC in one of the barns. I had given the car enough attention and it was now time to work some of the other bits on the property. The first thing that I went to was a large tree in a neighboring field which looked great with the bare branches against the sky. It was going to be a fairly simple composition with the camera positioned vertically. I shot two different exposures here with the tree centered and then slightly off-center to give a little visual tension to the frame.
I was actually really excited about this while I was in the field, but when I got the pictures home, the tree just didn’t sing to me. As many bare trees as I have photographed over the years, it really takes a special one to get my attention these days. While I liked this one, there was nothing really special about it, and certainly nothing that made it stand out in the collection of trees that I already had. I ended up trashing those photos and I have no regret about it. There was still plenty more to photograph.
Next, I moved my attention to the house which I had shot the first time I was here two years ago. I could remember the rough composition that I had used before and felt that it was still a very valid one. I had a hard time recalling the exact conditions that I had shot it in but knew that there had been clouds in the sky. The clouds that were overhead were much thinner than what I would have stopped for back then, so I knew that the light quality was going to be different this time. I liked the idea of the sunlight on the house as it would help to saturate the yellows, and the blue in the sky was going to look really good with that yellow as well.
I could see in the viewfinder that I was going to have some pretty bad converging verticals due to the perspective of the wide end of the lens. It was a simple matter of overshooting the composition to give me room to correct the perspective in post. With that, I fired off a few exposures with some small adjustments to the composition as well as exposure. There wasn’t much reason to keep working this as I had done all the compositional work on it the last time I was here. The only thing that I was trying to improve on was the lighting which I was pretty sure I had done.
When I was satisfied with the house, I moved my attention to the GMC in the barn. This truck is very difficult to photograph as I had learned the last time. It is in a partially opened shelter which gives very difficult light. There is also very little room to get different angles on the truck. I knew that I had done about all that I could when it came to getting an overall composition. The reason that I was back to this truck once again was because I was much better at working the details now. I started to look around to see what I liked. Other than the front of the truck which wasn’t really in good light, I found that side of the hood that I have always enjoyed photographing. There was no way to get into my normal shooting positions which made me get creative which I appreciated.
The only angle that was accessible to me was from the front of the truck looking back towards the cab. There wasn’t much room beside the truck either which meant that I was going to be very close in on the truck. That forced the composition to include a very close fender bulge which I wasn’t sure if I was going to like or not. It took some work to get it to appear the way that I thought it would work best in the frame, but eventually I had a workable composition that was loosely based on my successful formula for this part of a GM truck. Once I had the exposure worked out in a way that maximized my depth of field, I was ready to make the exposure.
Even with the lens stopped way down, I noticed upon review that the fender and the vent on the cowl were both soft. The emblems were sharp which was my main concern. Short of focus stacking, this was as good as it would get. I could have focus stacked it, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of giving depth. The soft focus was working and even though I had intended on getting it all in focus, I liked the attention falling right on the emblems.
When I got the image home and started to look at it on the computer, I wasn’t wild about the composition. The emblems were fairly much centered in the frame and since they were the only thing really in focus, it seemed a bit static as a composition. I played with the crops for a bit, and finally found that the 1:1 square crop really worked well for this one. By chopping off the right portion of the frame which just included the hood and more of the blurred fender, I was able to get a much better visual balance between all of the elements and I was able to push the emblems into a more pleasing portion of the frame. Some quick movements of some sliders and I was really liking how this was looking.
I was enjoying the challenge of this truck and I wanted more. The hood ornament was another point of interest on this truck, but I was faced with some of the same issues that I had with the Ford. Shooting the hood ornament as I would usually, seemed just too predictable and expected. There was nothing particularly exciting about it from a normal viewing height, so I started to look at it from beneath as I had with the Ford. What I found was that when I shot into the barn, I had a great way of making the chrome really stand out against the dark of the wood. There were also rafters which were getting just enough light to be interesting. I’ve learned that these open ceilings make for some very interesting patterns and textures for photos. I just had to figure out how to best include the hood ornament.
I needed something for it to be grounded on and felt that the leading edge of the hood would work the best. It would bring in textures and some cooler tones to balance out the warmer wood tones. I got down really low and framed up a shot that I thought would work, but it didn’t. There was something missing that really needed to be in the photo. I looked around to see what else was available to add into the frame. The only thing that I could see that would add to the story was the top of the cab with the windshield. By elevating the camera a bit, I was able to get just enough of the cat in the shot to really identify what the blue bulge actually was. Now the composition was complete, and I was able to start making exposures.
I knew that the exposure was going to be tricky because the hood was in the sunlight and the ceiling was in the shadow. I thought about using an ND Grad positioned upside down but didn’t like that I would have to use a flat line for the gradation. I could have used a series of bracketed images for an HDR photo but felt that wasn’t really needed. I ended up exposing to the right as far as I could without blowing out the details. That brought the shadows up to where I could punch a little more contrast into them. The image review looked like I was probably successful in my attempt as I didn’t have any highlights blown out and it appeared that the shadows had enough detail to work with. Since I wasn’t sold on this image, I didn’t spend too much time with it.
I kind of wish I had worked it a bit more, but I am actually quite happy with the results. Thanks to some work with the highlights and shadows, I was able to capture details in both the brights and darks of the photo. The end result is much more successful than I had thought it would be which was a happy surprise. It is definitely different which was what I was going for. I still don’t know if it will be a successful composition, but I’m excited to send it out in the world to see how it makes out. Let me know if you think that it works or not.
One of the last bits of the property that I wanted to capture was the old store which was at the corner of the property. I seem to recall that Charles was a little disappointed that I hadn’t captured it the last time I was here. He had asked why I didn’t photograph it, and the answer was pretty simple. It just didn’t have that photographic interest that I needed. There wasn’t enough story there to make an image work. Of course, knowing more about the store after talking to him, I knew that it was a very interesting building. The task was conveying that through a photograph which I wasn’t able to do. This visit was a bit different though in that the Ford was now parked near the store.
I had already tried photographing the two elements with the wide-angle lens but hadn’t liked how it turned out. Now that I had a different focal length on the camera, I decided to give it another go. Actually, I gave it three more goes with three very different compositions including the two subjects. The first two compositions had a good bit of overlap between the two so that I didn’t have the other barns in the background to contend with. Those all felt very busy, and the subjects were competing with each other too much. It was the third variation on the composition where I found the right recipe. By separating the car and the store, I had a much more pleasing arrangement of main subjects. The barns in the background were minimized by moving a bit further in and using a wider-angle focal length. Once again, the barns in the background helped to separate the car from the trees which was important since the shadows were running along the side and top of the Ford.
Those shadows added some visual interest to the scene and helped bring everything together. I had a couple of frames with varying degrees of shadows, and I chose this one which had them showing a bit more pronounced than the others. I honestly hadn’t thought that I would like the shadows going over the car as much as I did, but they really worked well to add a bit of interest to the otherwise uniform patina of the car. Even though most of the frames that I had shot during the day were overall image of the car, I think that this one is my favorite one because of the wat that the store was included in the frame. I think that Charles will like this one as well when he sees it.
It was at this point that I was pretty sure that I was done. I had shot 61 frames and felt like I had about five or so keepers which was many more than I had speculated when I had arrived. Just in case I had missed something, I took one last walk around the property and the Ford. I happened to notice that the passenger door was slightly ajar, and I assumed that it was going to be unlocked. The windows were much too clouded to shoot through, but I could tell that the interior was looking really good which kind of pulled at my creativity. If you have been following my blogs for a while, you will probably know that I have a weakness when it comes to interiors. I don’t get that many chances to shoot them, so I’m just not as good at them as I would like to be. I saw an opportunity to get a really nice interior shot, but I was going to have to get the door open.
Figuring that Charles probably wouldn’t mind, I pulled out my phone and sent him a text describing how the door looked and asked if I could open it if it was unlocked. I waited for a minute or so before he texted back. He didn’t mind if I opened the door and that made my day. I carefully pushed the button on the handle hoping that it would click, and the door would open. Sure enough, the car was unlocked, and the door came right open. I was greeted by a very musty odor that I had been expecting, but the interior was just as good as it had appeared through the dirty glass. I now had to figure out a composition that would work.
One of the first things that I noticed was that the dash had a wonderful curve to it on the passenger side where the “Custom” script was placed. Everything was in place on the dash and there was a very monochrome look to the whole thing. I was thinking that this was going to be a black and white photo and that was how I shot it. There were a lot of little camera position adjustments to get the composition dialed in and I shot a frame with every movement just to make sure that I had a photo with each composition attempt. When I finally got to where I thought that things looked the best, I started to play with the exposure values and focus points to really dial in how the photo was going to look. There was also the matter of the spider web which was between the seat and the dash. The breeze was making it move, so I had to work the shutter speed and time the exposures to when the breeze would settle down. When it was all said and done, I had shot an additional ten frames on this interior. Each of the frames were very similar so I knew that I would only get a single photo if I was lucky.
When the culling started, these were the first frames that I looked at since I work backwards to cull. I was instantly shocked at how good they all looked, but when I started looking at the details, there was one frame that rose above the rest which you see above. I looked at the different black and white color profiles but decided that none of them really held any interest for me. I did love it in color and knew that I could get a bit more separation out of the colors by working the different modules in Lightroom. That was the route that I took, and I never looked back. The edit was surprisingly easy and quick as I brought the attention to the details that I wanted while working the dynamic range of the scene to my advantage. The end result is one of my favorite interior shots to date. I think that it all comes down to the curve on the dash at the right side. It just made the composition rather elegant to look at.
With that, I had 71 photos shot for the hour and a half that I was on the property. If you compare today’s shoot with the first time that I was out here, you can see how far I have come as a photographer. I love seeing this kind of personal and creative growth, especially over a relatively short period of time. If you see anything here that speaks to you and you would like a print, don’t forget that I do offer prints on various media and sizes. Just contact me, or you can order standard sizes from my gallery store.
Thank you for joining me on this last minute trek. I do hope that you have enjoyed the account of the day as well as the photographs. In just a little over a week from now, I will be conducting my first workshop of 2024 dealing with the Art of Decay and we will be looking at how to come up with compositions similar to what I have done here today. If you would like to join in, there is still room and time to get signed up, but only for a few more days. This promises to be the best workshop yet as I have reworked a lot of what I cover to really get into the meat and potatoes of this kind of photography. I hope to see you there!
If you can’t make the workshop, or would rather cover something more specific, I also offer mentorships in various flavors. The most simple is an image critique, or a portfolio review. You can also opt for a full advanced mentorship which includes 25 hours of structured time and plenty of other perks along the way. Of course, I can also tailor a mentorship for what you want and need. Just give me a call, or schedule your free, no obligation consultation. We will find out what works best for you and if I can provide it.
Until the next time….
