Tuesday, September 9, 2025
After the tempo that I have been working here lately, I’m sure you are wondering where I’ve been. It’s been about a week since my last blog entry, and that was about a week after the one prior to it. If you are worried that I might be starting a creative slump, or possibly getting burned out, don’t even worry about that happening just yet. In fact, I’m still rolling along at a pace that hasn’t really slowed down in about a year now. The difference is that much of my creative energy is going towards several different portrait shoots that I have planned over the next few months. I’ve been getting a studio ready for a boudoir shoot coming up in a couple of weeks, while working with another client who is going to be doing some different portraits to illustrate her personal journey and several personal victories. During all of this, I’ve been selected to do a maternity session for a family that started with a simple headshot last month. There is also an ongoing creative partnership that is getting started where we are well along in planning a very creative session that includes costumes and a good deal of acting. I’ve also got another client that is wanting a session for her car.
As you can see, I am quite busy these days and just haven’t had the time to get out with the camera to get new photos for my own portfolio. While it felt strange to not be sitting in front of the computer editing photos and then blogging about the trek, I wasn’t missing it too much because my mind was very occupied with the upcoming portraiture sessions. This doesn’t mean that I’m not looking for locations to shoot though. I’ve been keeping an eye out for locations that might be interesting for both my personal projects and for the client shoots as one of them is needing a bit of abandonment to set the tone we are after.
Just yesterday, I went out with the Miata to drop a package off to the Post Office and I took the long way around to enjoy the weather. It was still quite cool when I left in the morning, and it was nice to have a little chill with the top down allowing me to use the heat for the first time in many months. As I was happily driving around and enjoying the curves I found myself going down a road not far from home where I have spent some time with the camera. It all started when I stopped out here to shoot a barn at an intersection that I had photographed once before, shortly after moving to Wilkes County.
I spotted an old car but wasn’t really able to tell the make of it because of the distance and the fact that it was partially obscured from view. This car was situated between an old house and a barn which put it in a pretty good spot to give some potential compositions. There was no way that I was going to be able to get in close enough to it for a photograph without getting permission from the property owner first. The problem was, I had no idea who the owner was. This started a sequence of events that has lasted for roughly a month now. I would go the house that was directly beside the old homestead and try to get somebody to the door. I was never able to find anyone there, so I would go to the house across the intersection to get chased away by the dogs in the front yard. I would then try the house beside the house I was pretty sure was related to the property that I was interested in. That one would yield no answer either.
That routine was repeated about a half dozen times during the course of weekdays and weekends. I never was able to speak to anyone in order to get more information about the property, or to get permission to do some photography there. Now, here I was about a month later driving my Miata around on a sunny day without much thought at all about photography. The thought did creep into my head about the house that I had visited so many times over the course of the last month, so naturally I looked over to the house as I drove by.
Wait a minute….
Did I see what I thought I saw???
I did….I DID! I saw a guy in the front yard doing some yardwork. I wasn’t prepared for this eventuality, and not only did I not have my camera, but the sun was also way too bright to do anything at all, and I didn’t have much time as Toni and I were going to head to Winston for an appointment very soon. I’ve talked many times about not wanting to waste an ask unless I was sure that I was going to be able to get a shot or two. The logic is simple, if given permission, I want to be able to act on it immediately. I don’t want to talk somebody into giving me permission and then say that I’ll take advantage of that hospitality at another time leaving them to wonder why I need to come back later to get some photos.
I can’t remember a time when I have asked for permission like this when I wasn’t ready to shoot the scene right then. However, after the difficulty that I had experienced finding somebody here, I felt that there was just no option at all. There was just no time like the present to ask, and after getting the car turned around, I pulled into the driveway. This really felt odd as I was taking the car off, no, really, this is a car that you strap on, you don’t get into it. I had to remove the driving gloves, so I didn’t look like I was there to do something bad and introduced myself. I actually fumbled through the introductions because I wasn’t in the mindset for doing photography at all, much less asking for permission to enter a property.
Fortunately, he was a very nice guy and had no problems with me photographing whatever I wanted to around the old house. I wished that I could have given him an idea as to when I would be back, but all I could say was that I would come back on the first morning with some clouds. I left him my business card and explained that I would be happy to bring a print out to him should he see one that he likes once I’m finished with the shoot that I didn’t know when I was going to start. I thanked him for working with me and strapped the Miata on once again to get to the Post Office.
For the rest of the drive, I was thinking about how I wanted to photograph this scene. I still hadn’t seen it up close to know what I was dealing with. All I knew was that there was a very large older car sitting close to the old house. There was a barn that was on the other side, but it was a little further away than the house. The car was positioned in a North/South orientation which put the buildings on either side blocking the sun early in the morning or late in the evening. It was looking like I was going to need some nicely diffused light which I could only get on a cloudy day. If the sun was allowed to create shadows, I felt that the car would be too dark in the frame if the sun was low enough, and if it were high enough, the light would just be too harsh. I needed some kind of clouds to either bounce the light from the low sun, or to diffuse the light from a higher sun.
That was going to be a problem because the weather for the next week was showing to be sunny every day with little to no cloud cover mentioned at any time. I knew that here soon, I was going to be getting busy with the portrait shoots and the longer I waited on this location, the more pressed for time I was going to be. I was still waiting on a few more things to come in for the nearest shoot, and knew that I wasn’t going to be able to build out the set until those last few items came in. This gave me a couple of free days to work with. My plan had been to wash the truck on Tuesday, and I had a dentist appointment during the mid-morning on Wednesday. This location wasn’t far, and I would be able to slip it in if I could get started early enough in day. Of course I was going to need weather conditions that would work for me.
Looking at the hourly forecast, there was a slight chance for some light clouds right at sunrise on both Tuesday and Wednesday. They were going to be low level clouds, so there wouldn’t be any real color, but they should help to bounce some light over the top of the scene to illuminate the car a bit better. My thought was to head out there Tuesday morning and then get the truck washed when I got done before the sun crept over the top of the house causing my shade to go away. That would leave Wednesday free to just worry about the dentist and doing a bit of running around.
It was a good plan, but as night drew near on Monday, the hourly forecast was showing less and less clouds for Tuesday morning. They were still in place for Wednesday, which was good, but I had a feeling that they would not stay around then either. Just before bed, I had resigned myself to going out there and trying to get some photos right after sunrise when the light was still very soft. If it didn’t work out, I would go back on Wednesday if the clouds were still present. It wasn’t much of a plan, and I was pretty sure that I was going to be washing the truck on Tuesday and getting the photos Wednesday before going to the dentist. I would know more when Toni was leaving to go to work because that would be when I was going to wake up to make that final plan of action.
At 6am, when Toni left for work, I reluctantly woke up and looked at the weather. It was actually showing to be cloudy at the moment which wasn’t expected. The hourly was showing 60% cloud cover until about 9 or 10am. I checked with the cloud app and found that it was in agreeance showing that the clouds were supposed to be low altitude ones which would a great job at bouncing the light into the scene if they were positioned right.
I got up and did my morning posting before getting a quick bite to eat for breakfast. When I was done with all of that, I grabbed my socks and shoes before throwing the camera in the truck. I was at the house maybe ten minutes later, just after sunrise. I pulled down the long driveway that was basically a path cut in the grass leading to the house. I got the camera bag because I had no idea what I was going to need with this scene and went around the house to meet the subject for the first time.
It turned out to be a Mercury Marquis and appeared to be possibly a 1972 model. It was a huge car and there wasn’t as much rust as I had hoped, but where the vinyl top had been, there was a noticeable amount of rust which made me feel a bit better. The car wasn’t exactly what I had been hoping for, but as I looked at the scene as a whole, I could see lots of potential here. At least the scene was better than the individual parts. It took me a minute to figure out how I wanted to photograph this scene though. The house had the faux brick fascia on it and there was a large bush right in front of the car. It seemed that the best way to photograph this scene was going to be from near the barn looking towards the car and the house. The problem with that was the fact that the sky was very bright since I was basically looking in the direction where the sun was rising. The car and the side of the house I could see were in the shadows, of course,
There was a bit of color in the sky, and that was a nice surprise. If I could get an exposure figured out, I might be able to capture that color as well as the details in the darker portions. I know it seems like I was trying to push the camera to capture something that wasn’t there, but in all honesty, I was just trying to get the camera to see what my eyes were actually able to see in reality. Once I got the composition figured out and all of that dialed in, I looked at the exposure. I could probably capture it all just like this, and I did fire off a few exposures with the hopes of getting a keeper in that bunch. As a safety image, I decided to try an HDR blend which I’ve done several times in the past without success. There is always some sort of visual anomaly which gives away what has been done. I wasn’t holding out much hope, but there was limited movement in the scene as the trees were very still. The clouds were moving slowly, so I wasn’t much worried about blending multiple exposures. I just knew that I hadn’t been overly successful at doing that lately.
I fired off a single three-shot series with the frames spread by a single stop of light. It was there if I needed it, but I was expecting to work with one of the earlier single exposures. As luck would have it, I found the series as I started to cull the images and went ahead and merged them together. It actually came out quite clean and I was hopeful. After getting the culling down to a manageable amount, I looked at the HDR once again and started to process it. There were none of the clues that would show what I had done with the blending and the photo looked quite good as I was doing the tweaks to it. By the time I was done, I was happy with this one and felt that it was the one to offer the cleanest photo out of the photos I shot of this composition. There was no reason to go to the single shot to try anything different there, so this HDR blend became my first keeper of the day.
Now that I was finished with the overall and establishing shot, I felt that the best photos from the day were going to be with isolations. That was what I started to work with at this point. I went to the front of the car and did my standard corner composition. Even when I was shooting the one frame, I told myself to let that one go. There wasn’t anything overly special about the corner of this car and it was just an expected composition at this point. I had one exposure but decided to move on to something different.
The next composition that I tried was a bit further down on the car and was another expected composition of mine. This one centered around the rear pillar with the crest as a focal point along with the door handle on the rear door. Once again, this was another composition that was getting to be expected from me, but I did like the emblem which was different as well as the nameplate of “Brougham” which was kind of unique. The rust from the vinyl top added to the interest and the moldings gave some pretty good lines. It was worth a couple of frames before I moved on and found something a bit more unique.
It had only been a few minutes since I had told myself that the best photos of the day were going to be isolations, yet I was just not feeling that this car offered many unique perspectives when it came to these isolations. I was getting more and more interested in the barn that was on the other side of the car from where my attention had been. It had a nice Ferguson tractor under the side that was closest to the Mercury, but there was also a pickup bed and a smaller yard tractor behind the large tractor. I felt that this kind of ruined the shot for me, but something was happening in the background that trumped what I was seeing in the barn.
There was a good deal of color in the sky which I really hadn’t expected since the clouds were so low. Normally, these won’t pick up the light, but here I was looking at some beautiful golden hues in the clouds. It was more subtle than what I had seen behind the house in the direction of the rising sun, but there was still color to be had in the sky. I quickly worked out a position to set the camera where I could eliminate a power pole behind the limbs of the tree that was just to the right of the barn. This left me with just a couple of power lines to remove in post which would be easy enough to do. I started working out the exposure and depth of field that I thought that the scene needed. There were also several frames as the light changed with the passing clouds. There was a total of six frames that I shot of the barn before I decided to include the car into the composition.
I backed up a bit and got into a position where I could include the car into the composition as a foreground element in front of the barn. I liked this one in the camera, but it somehow put more emphasis on the stuff in the barn rather than the barn itself. At least that was the way that it appeared when I went through the culling. The result was that composition found itself getting discarded after the second round. However, as I was typing the blog out, I wanted to go and look at it once more. My initial thoughts were correct that the emphasis was on the wrong things within the frame, but now that I was thinking about how I put that composition together, I started to reconsider a few aspects of it. First of all, I thought that this would actually make a good black and white image. This would pull the emphasis away from the objects inside of the barn and allow more drama to be placed in the sky. The car which I wasn’t all that happy with facing away would now make more sense with the deep contrasts along the rear of vehicle playing off of the shadows in the barn.
I made the conversion and started to play with the tonal values through the image as well as removing the power pole and power lines which I thought were overly distracting. The photo was coming together quite nicely, but the balance seemed off just a tad. The barn wasn’t falling where I wanted it to, and there was a bit too much headroom to the entire photo. The answer was clear. I needed to change the aspect ratio to a 16:9. When I did that, things started to come together quite nicely for the photo. I was liking the flow of the composition once again, and the change in aspect ratio put more of the attention on the car rather than the objects in the barn. I finished up the processing and took another look at it. I actually wanted to see more of the sky, so I opened up the frame to a 16:10 which was kind of the best of both worlds. It allowed for more of the sky, while the shape of the frame supported the car. With the extra breathing room, the barn came into its own once again and my eyes tracked exactly where I wanted them to go.
One of the most important things that I can do after a trek is to go back through the day in this fashion. By typing out the blog and putting myself right back in the moment of getting the photographs, I start to see them differently after the culling has passed. I’ve had numerous occasions here lately where I’ve pulled another image into the mix after having discarded it initially. Some of these have been favorite images of mine, and this one is much stronger than I had given it credit for being. I really think that many of these late additions owe their rescue to the fact that I’ve seen how the other images came out after the processing and know better what to expect based on the lighting and the colors in the scene. I love the moodiness of this one with the deep blacks and just the right amount of highlights in the scene to direct the eyes. I’m really glad I went back to give this one another look before I deleted the unused images from the import.
The next several minutes were spent experimenting with some ideas. After having worked the barn for a while from the angle of the car, I decided to go into the field for a bit of a different look at the barn. I liked the shape of the barn from this angle just as well, and there was a cow skull on the wall which added some interest. However, this side of the barn put the newer yard tractor in full view which I didn’t really care for. I looked around for ways to deal with this and found that the tall grasses would potentially block some of the view of that aspect and keep the barn shape as the main subject.
I found the right place to put the camera and dropped it down below the grass for a few frames. It looked decent in the camera, and I had the right depth of field to blur the grass while keeping the barn nice and sharp. I just wasn’t sure if this was going to work out or not. This was one that got eliminated kind of early on in the culling process because there was just no clear composition and the details that I didn’t want to be visible were still quite visible. The barn just looked like an afterthought in the photo, so it didn’t work out at all.
My next idea was to move in close to the Mercury and go very wide on the lens to amplify the front end of the car. This would allow me to eliminate the large bush from the composition and would also let me shrink the background clutter which was a house, a shop, and several vehicles. I further reduced their importance by limiting the depth of field along with the focal length that I was working with. I pretty much used the whole range of the 24-70mm lens during this series of photos. I shot from right above the ground to about two and a half feet above the ground looking for something exciting and unique featuring the front of the car. I wanted to have a lot of perspective distortion in the frame to show off just how big this car was.
I would pick a spot and a focal length and then change up the height of the camera for a couple of different frames. I would then move back and pick a different angle and then do the height thing with that location as well. The hope was that I would have one or two really great images of the car all by itself. This was the angle that I hadn’t really thought about when I was getting started, but now that the sun was up, the background was full of light and contrasts that helped to bring attention to the car which was still in the shadows. It seems counterproductive to shoot a main subject in the shadows when the background is getting good light, but it is the contrast in lighting that establishes the depth of the scene, and I was happy to have it, even if the car was in flatter light than I would have wished for.
This series lasted for a total of 16 frames as I moved the camera around. When the culling was all finished up, I had two that I really liked with different lighting and different perspectives. They were both done with wide angles which I liked, and they were from slightly different heights, and different angles. I liked them both, but I wasn’t quite sure which one to go with for processing. I picked the one where the front of the car was the main subject and started to work though the editing process.
The first thing that I realized was that the colors were too muted in the scene even though I liked the composition best of all. It all appeared too green, and there was just no excitement to it. That brought me the idea to make this one a black and white which I did. That simple change gave me a lot of hope for this composition, and I worked through several different profiles to find the one that set the tone like I was wanting. Once I found the right profile, the edit went very smooth and quick. I loved the contrast of the scene, and the lack of color put the emphasis on the front of the car which is exactly what I was wanting from the photo.
One of the last photos that I processed was my other option on that same compositional concept. This one was from a little further away, not quite as wide of an angle, and shot at more of an angle to the car to show the length of the side. There were more trees in the shot, and the image suffered from many of the same issues that the previous one had. The color palette was just not exciting to me, and I wasn’t going to do this one as a black and white because I was very happy with the other one. I needed another take on this scene, something to bring in more drama and excitement.
It was back to the color profiles once again, but this time, I was looking for one that featured color instead of black and white. I landed on one that I use occasionally for a rusty scene because it really emphasizes the oranges and will shift more of the other colors into orange. It is one that I end up using in the early Fall to bring out more of the colors of the season, and we are getting close to that time of year. I applied the profile and then dialed it back just a little bit. It was picking up on the yellows from the low sun which was lighting the background. These yellows were pushed more to orange in this profile and all of a sudden, things started to look like mid-October.
This profile doesn’t always work, and sometimes it looks quite bad, but for this image and the mood I was after, it seemed to be the winning ticket. I pushed on with the edit and worked the colors even more as I started to establish the photo that I had in my mind. What I ended up with was an image with tons of color contrasts which made for a visually exciting photo in my mind. It captured the look that I was after, and I was quite impressed with how it turned out. It wasn’t necessarily my favorite of the day, but I think it was probably the most impactful one that I created out of all of the frames that I shot.
At this point, I swapped out my lens for the telephoto so I could go back to work on the isolations of the car. I had started out thinking that I was going to be shooting intimate compositions as a rule but had only ended up with one keeper showing off a detail of the car. The real surprise was how many different compositions that I could find where the entire car or other element was included in the frame. I was having a really lucky day when it came to figuring out establishing compositions for the car, house, and barn. The isolations were still kind of problematic to come up with for some reason, but the long lens did help.
I ended up shooting an additional five compositions all based on isolations and details of the Mercury. They turned out well, but most of them were no different than other isolations that I had shot many times over. Because of that, I discarded all of them with the exception of one. I had keyed into the emblem on the trunk lid of this Mercury a while back but wasn’t sure how to shoot it. I started out with the camera straight onto the car with the taillight providing the lower framework for the image. It was all symmetrical and worked well, but at the same time was quite boring. I wanted to do something different with this one, so I started to look at the angles that I could use.
I liked moving over to the driver’s side the best because that would put the emblem in the top left and make it the first thing that the viewer saw as they entered the image. I could then place the taillights below it and have them at an angle going up to the right. To keep the eyes from leaving the frame, I brought the camera in close to the car, so that the division points in the taillight pointed back into the frame. Just in case that wasn’t enough, I framed the right side at the reverse lamp so that the red stopped prior to hitting the edge of the frame. The composition worked very well both in camera and on the computer screen. It was the only one out of the later isolations that I chose to keep, and the only one that earned its spot as a keeper out of that series of 21 images shot with the telephoto lens.
By this point, I had been out here for an hour and ten minutes. I had shot a total of 57 frames in that time which wasn’t bad at all. I told myself that I wanted to keep it around 10% as keepers this time to avoid going overboard with photos as I have had a tendency to do recently. My first round of edits had me at six keepers which was pretty much right at that 10% mark. I then added just one more because I decided that it had earned its place on that list once the black and white conversion was done. I’m really happy with all of these photos and feel very fortunate that I had run into the owner when I did. I have a feeling that I would have kept missing him when I was out with the camera and looking. Eventually, I would have written the location off because I wasn’t really sure what it looked like anyway. Now that I’ve been here, it is certainly worth the visit.
Hopefully, you have enjoyed this trek as much as I have. In case you were wondering, I was able to get the truck washed while there was still enough shade on the side of the house. That is why I’m getting this blog published so late in the evening considering how early I finished the trek. Tomorrow, I’ll be back to getting ready for the portrait shoots and hopefully will be starting to build out the set that I’m working on primarily at this point.
Remember, if any of these photos speak to you, I would love to match you up with a print so that you can hang it on your wall and enjoy it every time you walk into a room. These photos are not just for man caves either. I’ve had them displayed on living room walls, office walls, and even a conference room at a hospital. Wherever you might want to hang it, you are sure to have a conversation starter and a unique piece of wall art to enjoy.
Thank you for joining me on this one. I’m now sure when I will be back, or what I will have captured, but know that even though I am being more quiet than normal here, I am still very much at work and still creating. I’ll share what I can with you, but I don’t want this blog to become about portraits and such. I want to keep it true to my landscape and decay roots because that is what you all came here to see, am I right?
Until next time….
