After Workshop Mulligan (Part 2)

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Welcome back for part two of this short, but productive trek.  I’m sorry for the delay, but I wasn’t able to stay up until roughly 2am to get this part finished last night and I had a mentoring session first thing this morning that took an hour.  I was also behind on getting some image critiques done for another client.  Here we are at 11:15 just starting to get this entry done.  That is the one thing that I miss from the days that I was just a photography enthusiast.  I got to spend my free time working on my photos.  These days, I get less free time to myself because I have clients to tend to which is great because that is what pays my bills now.  It does make it to where I have to work my own photography around the other aspects of the business though.

Anyway, if you missed the first part of this entry, you can find it here.  I tried to break things up as evenly as I could to take some of the stress off of reading though it all in one sitting.  I also didn’t want the photos to get lost in the mix with too many of them included in each entry.  As I indicated in part 1, I had gone back out to the location of my Decay Workshop with conditions that were very similar to what we had on Saturday.  The idea was, I wanted a second chance to get the same conditions that we had for the workshop so that I could get some new photos of some new additions to the property.  Essentially, I wanted a Mulligan because I had no time to shoot anything during the workshop itself since it went until after sunset.

Here I was, an hour and a half into my Wednesday morning.  I had shot 51 frames up to this point.  The fog was starting to go away, and the clouds were not as thick as I had hoped that they would be which meant that my time here was probably going to be short lived.  I had gotten most of what I had come out here for but wanted to try a few more things out before I got gone.  I was over on the side of the property with the Oldsmobile, an old hot rod shell, and one of my favorite rat rods called Old Rusty.  It was the rat rod that I wanted to spend some time with while I was here.  I have done overall compositions many times of this creation and I knew that the sky was not going to do me any favors, so I didn’t even consider an overall shot this time.

What I wanted to focus on was the details.  One detail that I always point out in the workshops is the fuel can on the back appropriately labeled “DEEZEL.”  This appeals to me because I am slightly dyslexic, and it looks right to me.  it is the little gems like this that stand out to me about this rig, and I’ve seen it captured in a couple of different compositions during previous workshops.  It just isn’t something that I’ve really spent a lot of time working on myself.  One of the reasons that I came out today was with this in mind.  I went over to the vehicle and started to consider my options.  I still had the long lens mounted which I thought would work well for this because I really didn’t need the background spread from a normal or wide-angle lens.  I could have just shot a photo of the can and called it day, but where was the fun in that?  It would just be a mislabeled can and would make no sense at all.  I needed to add context which I managed to do with the artwork on the tail.  I just had to figure out the crop points to make it all look right.

I reduced the image down to shapes and decided where I could crop through the shapes to make the most pleasing composition.  I chose to do a four-side crop so that every edge would cut into the scene in some way for balance.  It was the bottom edge that proved the most difficult to place.  I didn’t want to have the corner of the bumper included because that would show off too much of the ground.  I also had to be careful where I cropped it so that I didn’t cut into the support which was bolted on or cut into the fuel can.  I just had to take the edge off which gave the best balance to the image that I could come up with.  The tire was cropped just to give a slight arch of darkness to close in the scene while the top was cropped just at the top of the license tag which was used as the framing element.  From here, the scene fell into place quite well and I was pretty happy with it.  I ended up shooting four exposures here with slightly different crops and utilizing some different exposure choices to give me options when I got home.  It was the last one of the series that checked all of the boxes and turned into the keeper.

I spent some time looking around the truck to see other points of interest that I wanted to shoot.  Nothing was jumping out at me which surprised me after seeing some of the isolations that one of my clients had done with it.  It hit me as to why I wasn’t wanting to shoot those compositions after some quick thought.  Her photos worked very well from an editorial point of view which was similar to street photography where the focus was right on an element such as the Mack truck hood ornament that was missing the dog’s head.  She had framed it in such a way that included the context of what it was mounted on and that was effective.  However, from an art point of view, the background was cluttered and distracted from the overall impact of the image.  This is not a problem for editorial work as the background was blurred.  It just wasn’t my style of image, and I couldn’t make my style work with this hood ornament because I couldn’t establish context.  Without the head, I needed something else in the image, but there was nothing else to put there that would work for my vision.  As simple as that, I learned a fundamental difference in two different styles of photography and why I like some photos, but don’t like to shoot them.

After realizing that I was done with Old Rusty, I went back over to the Oldsmobile and started to look at the fender ornaments.  I ran into the same problem where they lacked context and a story.  I kept adding to the story and eventually the story changed.  What I was looking at by this time was the damage on the front of the car that showed the attitude of the old girl.  I’ve shot this snarl many times over the years and have found it to be quite photogenic.  Instead of getting the overall composition like I would normally do, I chose to get in tighter and really focus on the parts that interested me.  I used the wheel as a framing element as well as the plate holder and the hood emblem, while the headlight was the visual anchor for the shot.  There is just enough here to start the questions about what happened to this car.

I also chose to go black and white which after years of photographing this car I know to work very well on the front.  There isn’t much color to the front of this car, and it is all that chrome that really establishes the shapes.  One of the best tricks for chrome is to go with black and white because it is all about that contrast.  The bumper establishes the front end of the car as well as the identity, and the headlight also jumps off the image because of that contrast.  For me, this just feels better in black and white.

Black and white also made an appearance in this next scene.  I had shot this knowing that it was going to be black and white due to very little color in the scene.  The sky was also pretty featureless.  What interested me about this direction was that it was the only direction that still showed fog.  It was almost 8:45 and most of the fog was gone at this point.  The distance between the subject and the distant trees pulled out that last bit of atmospheric softening so that the featureless sky made sense to the image.  I knew that I would be darkening the top of the sky in post to close the image in, but it was worth it because I was going to be able to capture a very specific shape of the shell of a car along with the wooden textures of the old house.  The image was super simple to compose and the only thing I had to worry with was how much overlap between the elements was to be included.

I wanted separation, but I didn’t want the two elements to appear unrelated.  As I moved left to right, I changed how much the hot rod came into the space of the house.  I decided that the cab of the car needed to be well away from the house, but the rear of the car fit well underneath the house.  By elevating the camera, I was able to get the house separate from the tire so that they both occupied their own spaces but were still very much related.  It is a game of inches at this point to find that right balance between elements.

I think that the end result worked out very well.  The black and white conversion allowed me to really work with the tones and lift the car out of the shadows very effectively.  Even the door and window of the house seem to frame the rear of the car effectively.  The lack of an engine and the obviously closed up house all tell crucial parts of the story as well.  Everything here is quiet as indicated by the fog of morning.  However, you can look at this car and imagine that at one time it was a fire breathing hot rod.  It all just had this wonderful dichotomy that made me think of the lyrics to Blue on Black.

It was time to move onto another one of my planned shots that I wanted to get while I was here.  Many years ago, I had photographed one of Dean’s creations that he named “Stitch” because of the way he welded the extensions on.  It wasn’t the first time I had shot this truck, but it was a request from Dean to have a photo shoot specifically for the truck.  I did a lot of isolations of the details during that shoot and one that I did was what has become one of my favorite compositions with this body style where I get the culmination of the cowl, hood, and fender which come together in a pleasing way.  Stitch has aged a good bit in the last few years and the patina has changed.  I noticed that fact while helping out with some photos of it on Saturday.  There was a good deal of blue to the original paint now which helped to balance out the rust tones of the fender.  I had thought that while I was here, I would update that composition with the new tones and put a bit of a different crop on it.

The morning dew was starting to burn off at this point, but there was still a good bit of it present around the emblems and some of the details of the truck.  That moisture helped to saturate the colors and provide a bit more visual interest within the frame as well.  I kept the long lens on which was something that I normally wouldn’t do here as I like to shoot this with my standard lens.  Because the fender had been widened, I wanted to show the curve if at all possible and that was going to be something that a longer focal length would help with.  I ended up settling on 102mm which compressed the scene and didn’t enlarge the fender through distortion.  It was a subtle difference, but one that I liked.  I also cropped into the vents to reduce their visual weight so that the welding would be more dominant in the scene.  By shooting at a slight angle instead of square, I introduced more space for the stitches to progress through the frame which added depth and dimension.  I balanced the polarizer so that I had good color throughout the image and lots of contrast.  It was really amazing what a few years had done for this old truck when it came to the colors available.

I shot a few more points of interest on Stitch, but I wasn’t really liking any of them any better than what I had done in the past.  Instead I turned my attention to the GMC that was parked in front of Stitch.  I had shot this truck originally in 2018, during my first visit to Otlawed Restorations. It was just part of the scenery in the back of the property covered in moss.  The image title was Lucky Eights, and I shot it in the pretty heavy rain which caused the patina to get super saturated.  Since that time, the truck has been bought and Dean has been getting it running and fixed up as a rat rod.  It now sits in the front part of the parking lot all cleaned up with nowhere to go.  It has been here for some time now and I even photographed it as part of a light painting shoot I did a while back.  That one was titled Ready to Cruise and is still one of my favorite light painting images.  I guess you can tell that I have a history with this GMC, and I’ve had participants in my workshops shoot it many different ways over the years.  Most recently, it was shot in the fog being back lit which turned out to be a rather dramatic image and one that I liked quite a bit.  The image that has haunted me though, came during a special workshop that I put together for a photography club last year.

What that participant did was something that I had never considered, but I found the execution of it quite interesting.  She had done an abstract image focusing on the colors of the truck with the mirror introducing the same green of the door over the rusty reds of the hood and fender.  If memory serves, she shot this as a vertical composition which worked very well, and it was my favorite client image of the day I believe.  I hadn’t been moved to try this, but one other time and I never landed on anything that I particularly liked with the scene.

While I was here, I decided to give it a try and since I was still using the telephoto lens, I decided to give that a try since my previous attempt had been with the 24-70mm glass.  I started to play with the angles and decided that I liked more of a horizontal approach to the framing and decided to use the GMC emblem as an element which I hadn’t really considered before.  I kept playing around with the composition, but only took three exposures over maybe 10 minutes of working with this scene.  Most of that 10 minutes was spent tweaking the tripod to find the right place for the camera.  The three exposures were done primarily to alter the focus point to get different effects.  I could have focus stacked this, but I chose not to because I wanted a slight blur to indicate depth.  The question was what I wanted to be sharp.  That turned out to be the mirror more than anything which worked well as the foreground.  The fender going soft was fine with me and helped to pop the mirror out of the image.  I liked that I was able to get a splotch of rust in the mirror to add a bit of detail along with the age of the glass.  The photo became less about textures and more about shapes and colors as they all intertwined through the photo.  I’m finally happy with this concept and I’m glad I stuck with it until I figured it out.

Since I was in the parking lot at this point, I decided to play a bit with some of the vehicles that were parked beside the building.  The clouds were starting to go the way of the fog and the sun was becoming a problem at this point.  Working on the side of the building offered me some shade which made for nice lighting.  One of the vehicles that was parked there was a Chevy firetruck that I’ve shot a couple of times in the past.  I love the shape of the grill and how the patina is starting to really come through.  This is normally something that I shoot with the standard lens, but I really wanted to try with the long lens to see what the compression did to the scene.  I was actually able to include more of the width of the scene because the perspective distortion didn’t allow the sides to bend in nearly as much.  Essentially, it gave a more imposing view and allowed me to frame this horizontally while including a lot more of the front end.

I tell you what, I am really starting to enjoy this long lens for this type of photography.  If you have been keeping track so far, I had fit that telephoto lens at 7am when I arrived.  It is now 9:10 and I haven’t changed that combination yet.  It really is interesting how we get used to seeing things through a certain lens and then when you change it up all of a sudden you are seeing things in a whole different light.  This is one of a number of times that I have worked almost exclusively with this lens doing this type of photography and each time it has been widely successful.  I was certainly feeling the benefits of working this lens at this point in the day.

I moved my attention from the front of the truck to the headlight on top of the driver’s side fender.  This is a composition that I started shooting probably as early as 2016 on this body style truck.  I have really liked it over the years but have kind of stopped shooting it because they were all starting to look the same.  The colors on this truck were quite interesting and had yielded some of my favorite variations on this composition, but the last time I had shot it I was using a much lower resolution camera and hadn’t redone it with the 5DS R yet.  The light was good, and I felt pretty good with how things were going, so I framed up the shot and grabbed some exposures.  The long lens maintained its usefulness through this composition, but in the end, that photo didn’t quite make the mark to keep.

Wait a minute….

It’s happening again.  I just looked at the photo to see what was wrong with it.  Honestly, the only issue that it had was I included the grill which looked good in the camera, but not so good in a full-sized view.  I appeared that simply changing the aspect ratio and cropping the side that held the grill would make for a stronger image.  A couple of selections later, and I was into the editing process on this image.  The result is one that I actually quite like.

The edit took me only five minutes to do since the light was so even across the image.  it was the colors that really drew me in here at the time of the capture and what made me really want to commit to the edit on it after a second chance.  As I was doing the edit, I kept hearing Toni’s voice in my head in a sing song voice saying “Just give me the light…” as she has done randomly for a few years now.  This composition seemed fitting for that title, so she gets credit for this one.  The end result is one that works quite well and breaks apart from the standard subjects that I would use it on where the surface color is all uniformly toned like the light bucket.  The addition of the cooler blues really helps to define the warmer tones here.  The moisture adds another layer of interest to the image as well.  I’m thankful that once again, I chose to go back through and look at the images that didn’t make it as I was going through the narrative of this trek.

I was starting to wind down as the sun was starting to really come out in earnest.  This was not the conditions that I liked working in but having been here only two and a half hours I wasn’t quite finished.  You can see why I like running a workshop here that lasts all day.  Moving around scene to scene knowing what I want to capture can take a half day easy.  By the time you add in teaching points, and working through the concepts of composition, you can easily run out of time after a full day as we did on Saturday.  This morning, I was just hitting the high spots and getting the images that I hadn’t done yet or hadn’t shot in a long while.  I was producing a ton of photos at this point, but it was only scratching the surface as to what was possible.  I wish that I had the time to really delve into these subjects with my participants, but each vehicle could constitute a workshop topic all its own when you start looking at them in this type of detail.

I went back to Stitch to see if the sunlight was changing anything from when I had shot it minutes before.  There was another fender view that was getting some favorable light and I tried to photograph that real quick.  Hang on, let me go check the culled images real quick.  Nope, that one still sucks and will remain on the cutting room floor.  The idea was good, but the execution was lousy and I’m not going to subject you to that view.  It was only a small diversion from the Chevy truck that I had just been working on and I saw another option for something to capture on it.

I have come to really respect the way that the fenders join in with the running boards and doors on these old trucks.  There are so many lines and shapes along with depth from the fender that it makes an interesting abstract almost any time you try it.  It even works with VW Bugs for the same reasons.  I usually shoot these with the standard lens, but I decided to just go with the flow and keep the telephoto lens on.  it worked well and kept the fender from being quite so prominent in the frame.  The various colors on this old truck really worked together for a nice visual balance and no matter what angle I shot it, the colors were working together beautifully.  Two quick images was all that it took to get what I was after here.  With that, I was satisfied that I had plenty of new images from this truck.  I wanted to move on and see what the sun was doing to the scenes that I had already shot.

I went back to the Plymouth that I had shot earlier in the day and saw that the light was looking good on it, or I guess the light was looking good on the background and saturating the colors in the woods a bit more than I had seen earlier.  I worked on roughly the same composition that I had shot during the fog and tried to get the colors in the background to help tell the story.  It was looking like this was going to be a better image from looking on the image review, but when I got home the image fell apart due to the fact that the car was in too deep a shadow for the scene.  It got lost in the image and I much preferred the more even light of the earlier version.  I wasn’t done with this car though.

I had remembered talking through the compositional options during the workshop and as I was starting to work with the participants directly asking them what they liked about it, I had one that pointed to the front of the car.  This was the area that interested me the most because of the missing grill and the shapes left behind in its absence.  As I was talking through that idea, I was thinking about how I would frame up a composition.  I decided that now was the time to do that composition because the car was in the shadows and the strong sunlight wasn’t a concern here.  I maintained the same lens combination that I had started with and framed up the shot.  I ended up shooting four variations on the theme, but never quite felt good about them.  When I got home, one of them made it to the second round of culling but was cut after that point.

Hold up…wait a minute….let me put some editing in it.

Pardon me while I go a little crazy here.  I’ve been sitting here at the desk since roughly 8am this morning.  In that time, I’ve done an hour virtual editing session and have spent another hour or so doing quick critiques on images from the workshop.  Now, here I am typing out another blog entry which has now yielded two new edits which I have done during the writing of this blog.  I’m starting to get a little tired at this point, but I want to get this entry done and all of these photos released.  I have forgotten how many of the 113 frames have turned into keepers at this point.  I’ll count them again when I get done.

Anyway, looking at this image which only scored a two-star rating, I started to see merit in it where I had dismissed it yesterday.  I guess when I am looking at editing 20 images, I start to get a little more picky there towards the end because…well, I get tired of editing.  However, upon a second look with this one, I saw what I liked about the car shining through.  It was the color that I didn’t like about it.  There just wasn’t enough there to pull the image off.  However, since I was drawn to it because of the shapes and textures introduced by the pine branch, I thought that it might work well as a black and white image.  I did a quick conversion and almost immediately fell in love with the photo.  It was all that I had wanted it to be and then some.  I don’t know why I shied away from doing the edit on it since it took less than 10 minutes to figure out and get finalized.  The hardest part of the edit was working the trim out on the hood so that the nameplate was actually visible.  It was a little faint in the capture because of the chrome it was on, but I was able to get the detail to come out so that it could be seen in the final print.  There is just something about the shape of the front of this car that captivates me.  I’m exceptionally glad that I came back to this image for a second chance.

As I was working on the front of this car, I moved over to the headlight that was all rusted out.  This was a detail that really spoke to one of my participants and we talked about how to capture it.  He had done a straight on shot that showed the half bucket in all its glory.  It was an effective shot, but I wanted to do something a little different with it.  My idea was a shot from above so that the missing portion might not be quite as obvious.  It was the pine needles below that would cause you to see what was going on here.  The transition was so gradual with the rust tones that upon first look, you won’t even see that the bucket is rusted out, but as you see the details of the image, you start to wonder what is going on there and you search for where the bucket ends, and the rest of the car begins.  Thanks to that splash of color on the fender, our eyes gravitate to that point making it the most important element to the scene.  to make sure that eyes don’t just stall out there, I have utilized the implied direction of the bucket pointing towards the brightest part of the scene and pulled the detail out of the nameplate.  The hood handle helps to keep the eyes in the scene and brings them back down to the needles to start the cycle over again.

I love scenes like this because they offer a chance to see the different ways that we each see a scene.  This is what makes us unique as photographers I believe.  I realized at this point that I had been here for three hours and had shot 97 frames.  It was no longer cold, and the sun was doing horrible things to me..well, my photos.  Lighting is all a personal preference, and some photographers love the bright sunlight, but that isn’t how I like to see my subjects in most cases.  I was feeling like it was about time pack it up and head home because the usable light was pretty much gone in my opinion.  I did want to take one last look around to see if there was another option or two that I might want to photograph.

I went over to the other Plymouth and saw that the sun was much too harsh on it to do anything more on it.  As I was looking around, I saw one of the cars that I have absolutely hated for years still sitting there. It was a bright red Pontiac Firebird Formula.  This car has caused me more heartache in trying to form compositions than I can remember.  There was an old Chevy truck with a stump attached to the rear bumper that used to be parked right next to it.  I have shot around this car, and even had my tripod on the trunk of the car in order to photograph the truck.  It has just never appealed to me as a photographic subject before.

Here I was in the bright sun looking at this red car and hating it just as much as ever, but I also loved it because this was the car that I wanted in high school.  I loved the design, and I loved the sound of the engine.  I even almost bought one during my senior year, but the car had too many issues for as new as it was.  In that moment, I realized that this car was not a monstrosity sitting amongst all of the rusted vehicles that Dean has in his collection.  Nope, this car was my youth, and it captured a large part of what excited me about cars when I was 17 or so years old.  Because of that I decided to…I can’t believe I’m going to say this….photograph the old bird.

It is just not often that I will capture the newer vehicles, and it usually means that I am getting done with the day of photography.  The more you think about it though, the more you realize that this car is now about 30 years old.  It is starting to succumb to age just as much as the old Plymouth that I had been shooting.  I could see the paint peeling, the years of built-up grime, and the debris from the trees on top of the car.  There was a story here, I just needed to find the right angle to shoot it.  Of course, I had to pick the parts with the most interest which meant the driver’s side where the headlight had the Pontiac name, and there was a decal of “Formula” on the bumper.  The wheel was even the factory wheel that had Pontiac in the right position for a photo.  This was also the side where the iconic bulge was in the hood.  This was the area that I was wanting to capture.  I decided on doing an isolation so that the main focus of the image was the age and not just the fact that it was a red car.  I used the leaves at the rear of the hood to frame the image because I didn’t need the windshield to tell the story, but had the leaves not been there, I would have had to use the windshield in some way.  This was just a much cleaner way of defining the edge.  I kept the rest of the crops very tight but thought out.  This intimate quarter view was enough to identify the car for just about anyone.  I was actually quite excited about this and couldn’t help but think about the car posters that circulated of this car when it was new.  How things have changed over the years for this body style.

As you can tell, the shadows were getting pretty bad due to the sun, and I was seriously thinking about calling it a day.  I was getting tired, and I was sure that I was going to have about ten images to edit when I got home.  I wanted to get started so I wasn’t on them all night.  Haha, the joke is on me.  I’m still working through this trek over 24 hours later.  I also wasn’t done with this one as I started to think about using shadows creatively.  There was one thing that really jumped out at me which I wanted to see in the sunlight.  That was the hood ornament on the Plymouth just a few yards away.

The ornament with the sailboat inside offered a unique opportunity for a shadow to happen.  It was just a matter of whether the sun was in the right position or not.  A quick walk over and I saw that the sun was coming in from the passenger’s side of the car and casting a perfect shadow from the hood ornament.  As I considered my options here, I swapped out my lens for the 24-70mm because I was going to want to get closer than I could with the long lens in order to amplify the shape.  Since I had a wider lens on, I thought back to the composition that used the Plymouth as a strong foreground with the two trucks in the background as supporting characters.  It was similar to what I had shot earlier in the day, but the different lens would make the car stand out more.  Since the sun was in that direction, I gave it a quick try.

The light wasn’t flattering, and I didn’t like the proportions of the vehicles like this.  Just to be sure, I went back and checked the RAW file.  Nope, not good at all, which was why I only shot a single frame of it.  After I had that out of my system, I went in close to the hood of the Plymouth and started to play with the angles and framing.  This was one of those times when the shadow is actually the image.  I paid particular care to the positioning of everything so that the ornament and the shadow worked within the composition.  The light falloff on the right of the image due to the curve of the hood gave a natural vignette to the lower right corner that worked very well.  The fender on the passenger side was still wearing some of its paint on the inside which provided a nice dark section before going back into rust.  That dark section matched the shadow of the ornament and gave a checkerboard appearance.  On the painted fender, there was a seed which I could have moved, but it broke up the sea of darkness just like the light shining through the holes in the ornament broke up the shadow.  I chose to leave it just like it was for the symmetry of it all.

The resulting image was one that would not have been possible with the clouds.  The light became the image, and the strong contrast of shadows defined the shape.  This experiment turned into possibly my favorite image of the day, although it is much too early to really tell if that will hold through time.  It is the first time I’ve shot an image like this, and I really like how the methods worked out. Had I packed it in when the sun came out, I would have missed this one so I’m glad I wasn’t quite ready to call it quits.  It was now 10:15 and I had been her for three and a quarter hours.  My frame count was now 108 after trying another quarter view shot of the Plymouth that didn’t work out because the light was too bright.  I was really thinking that my day was done at this point.

That is, until I remembered something.

The Chevy truck that sits right next to the Plymouth wears the Clemmons Fire Department’s freshly restored truck’s original front end.  The bright colors are still evident there and I know from a previous workshop that they come to life in direct sunlight.  Seeing that they were bathed in that sunlight, I decided to walk over there for a last photo opportunity for the day.  I know how the composition works out here and it was just a matter of figuring out if I wanted to capture it straight on, or if I liked it better from an angle.  I shot several different variations of the composition amounting to five final frames for the day.  This one was situated in the middle, and I felt that it had the best balance of colors, textures, and shapes along with the best placement of the emblem.  The sunlight really made the colors pop, and it was a very dramatic photo because of it.

I had shot a total of 113 frames in three and a half hours.  It had been a whirlwind experience and the most fun that I have had here since the first few times I had been out here.  It was all so new to me with the addition of new subjects, and I had matured a lot as a photographer and knew better how to deal with what I wanted to capture.  Those 113 images turned into 22 keepers which saw an additional three added as I wrote this blog entry for a total of 25 new images.   While the workshop is over, I can still do mentorships at this location, so if this is your kind of location let’s put something together.  I hope to offer another decay workshop next year and am contemplating doing a hybrid one that will go into the night to incorporate some light painting as well.

If you just love the photos and would like a print or two, I can certainly help you there as well.  In fact, everything that I shoot I shoot with the intention of making a large print for the wall.  Of course, my walls have no more room, so I am looking for other walls to house my creations.  Whether you want a photographic print, fine art print, metal, or canvas, I can produce a mind-blowing print of any of these images.  There is just no better way to enjoy photography than in a physical form.

With all that being said, I’m going wrap this up.  I’m tired and my hands hurt from typing this much.  I do hope that you enjoyed this trek and the newest images to be added.  It was just too much fun for me, and I’m thrilled at how many new images there are from it.  The next cloudy day that come up I will likely be doing a mentorship at Widow’s Creek Falls and I doubt that I will be getting any new images there.  It might be December before I get out again for my own photography, but I will say that this trek has satiated my appetite for creativity for a while.

Until next time….