Monday, February 27, 2023
This has been an odd month for me photographically, so I’m kind of glad to see it wrapping up. I’ve spent way too much time stressing over the house and not nearly enough time being creative. I’ve only managed to get out twice so far, with the first outing being on the 1st. The second was the middle of last week. To be quite honest, I really didn’t anticipate getting out again before March got started because that is just the tempo that I have adopted here lately. As it turned out, I went out with John yesterday for a mentoring session at a location that he had found a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t recognize the house at first when I was looking at the photo that he sent me for review. I could tell that there was some potential there and I thought that there were a lot of learning opportunities to be had with the old house. I suggested that we meet out there and go through some compositional ideas at a later date.
Well, John and I worked it out that we would head out there on Sunday afternoon for a session. He sent me the location of the house and I was familiar with the area which meant that I had probably seen the house before. I headed out a bit early Sunday to have time to scope the location out so I would be a little more fluid in my suggestions. When I arrived, I did remember the house and had passed it by several times before. It hadn’t really grabbed my attention driving by though. The house had obviously been moved from its original location and was situated in a mowed yard now. It was unclear where the owners of the property were as it shared a lot with a Wilkes Communications station. I spent about 30 minutes contemplating compositional ideas for when John got there. While I found a few ideas that would help improve on what he had shot, I still wasn’t excited about the location.
When he got there, we did a walkthrough of the property as we often will do to determine what aspects he likes about the scene so that we can start building compositions around those aspects. What I found interesting was that while John had sent me an overall photo of the house, it was the details that he had found most interesting with it. He pointed out the doors and windows as areas that he really liked, and with one of the windows it was a scene inside that caught his eye. I was interested in why he had sent the overall shot when it was the details that he had found most interesting. He explained it perfectly well in that he wasn’t satisfied with any of his isolation shots, and the overall was the strongest of the bunch. That made sense and was exactly what I was wanting him to do when it came to choosing which images to send to me.
Anyway, we knocked out the overall view of the house and started to move in to get some of the points of interest that he had seen. When we got to the first window of the house, I was shocked to see the scene that he had described. There was a Coke bottle and two Coke cups sitting on top of a Kenmore freezer. John had tried to shoot this from outside with the broken window in view which had proved very difficult to do. We worked on a composition which included the aspects that he was interested and had to deal with the sun which wasn’t doing us any favors. I used this as an opportunity to demonstrate shooting an HDR scene which we would follow up with in an introduction to Lightroom at another date. While we were working on this scene, I started to fall in love with the different elements inside the house. I had no interest in capturing the window as part of the scene, but I was interested in the glassware on the ice box. What really pulled me in was the colors in the room. It just screamed the ’60’s and it just really brought my mind back to that era. The stool that was over to the left just added to the mood that I was seeing. As I was working through the elements in my mind, I demonstrated a potential composition that didn’t include the window. It wasn’t quite right, but I did see potential there for sure.
We spent the rest of the time working with another one of the windows, and then got to the back of the house. During the initial walk through of the property, John had indicated that he liked the open door on the back of the house. He had tried to photograph it several ways without success when he was out there before. When we finally worked our way back to the rear of the house, he had a change of heart. He no longer wanted to shoot that view. I asked him why and it was pretty much determined that he had seen so much success from the other compositions that we had shot that he felt that the back door was just rather boring at this point. I had already seen a composition that I thought might work, so I asked him to indulge me while I set his camera up for the composition that I had seen. In just a few minutes, I had a composition set up on his camera that truly impressed me with how well it came together. John was impressed with as well and we talked through how the composition worked.
It was a very good session, and the house offered more teaching points than I could have imagined. By the end of the session, I was feeling pretty excited about some of the compositions that he had shot and wanted to delve into them a bit further. Sadly, the sun was a little too bright at this point and I wasn’t feeling encouraged about the light leading up to sunset. It was getting late anyway and I needed to get back home. All the way home, I worked through the compositions in my mind and decided that there was enough there to justify going back and trying my hand at things. I did feel a little bad that I had dismissed this house so many times before. John picked a great subject and had the foresight to see the potential in it.
Looking at the weather forecast for Monday, it looked like the rain was going to start about 10am which was too early in the day for me to get out there and shoot the house. I was needing the sun to be higher up in the sky, but the clouds were going to be good. Hoping that the rain forecast might be a little off, I decided to check things in the morning to see if I might be able to get out there for a bit. By the next morning, the rain chances had dropped during the day and been pushed back to around 4pm which would give me plenty of time. I had enough time to get my morning stuff done and I was on the road just before 11am.
The house was only 17 miles away and it took me no time at all to get there. When I arrived, it looked just like it had yesterday when I arrived before the clouds cleared up. I knew that the dim lighting would help me with some of the compositions that I had in mind. The first order of business was to work the scene with the bottle on the icebox. That was going to be the most difficult one to compose potentially, and if the sun were to come out, I knew there would be a really bad shadow on the scene. While I had great light, I went for the main reason I had come back.
Having worked compositions around this area, I knew that my best bet was going to be to use the telephoto lens and to skip any filters. With the subjects being inside, and in deep shadow, there was really no need in a polarizer. I went to the window and found the opening that I could shoot from. There was an area where some of the grid on the window had been broken allowing me a bit of room to move the lens around. It wasn’t much but allowed me to have a swing of about a foot and a half left and right, with about half that up and down. I knew that I wanted the different wall colors included in the frame as well as the stool. These were elements that I didn’t include in the demonstration for John out of simplicity. Since I was building this composition from scratch, I worked on the position and framing that would allow me to get all of the elements in the same frame. As I had spent so much time belaboring the point of how to move by fractions of inches to yield large differences in your composition, I really got into micro adjustments here. All that painstaking work did pay off because once I was finally ready to press the button, I had almost everything worked out within the frame. The only change I made from my original composition was to move to the right about a half inch to allow the ice chest to have a bit of separation from the doorway.
Looking at the image on the back of the camera, I was convinced that this was going to be a beautiful photograph. To say I was excited would be an understatement. It had everything that I wanted to include in the frame. The colors were spot on for what I was going for as well. I had not been able to see how the colors looked the day before because the sun was too strong and to keep the sunlight from overexposing, we had to keep the main scene a bit too dark. Now, with the heavy overcast, I was able to shoot at a 30 second exposure and really bring the colors in the scene out. There were no shadows to play with, and the entire image was very well lit with just a hint of shadows to define shapes.
With that first image in the bag, I moved around to the second window on the wall. It was here that John and I had formed a composition around a broken window with a set of blinds in the background. The lighting was better for his attempt as the sun was out pretty strong by that point in our day. The softer light gave a different feeling in my image, but I still liked what the scene said. For me, I wanted to concentrate on the drapes and the blinds because they came from two different eras and formed a dichotomy within the photograph. The torn curtains were my favorite aspect and that was what I chose to really focus on. The blinds were just there for contrast, and I even let them go very blurry in the background as the depth of field was limited to the curtains. John and I had worked this scene vertically, horizontally, and square. I think that he landed on the square crop as being his favorite of the three. For me, I liked the horizontal crop best which is what I used to frame this image up. The only battle that I went through was the depth of field. I ended up with a very small area in focus leaving even the window frame soft. It is sharp enough to establish what it is, and to give a little texture, but I wanted the main star of this photo to be the curtain and I tried to make it to where only that aspect was in focus.
I didn’t stay with that composition long because I wanted to try some different angles with the curtains. I knew that I also had a back door to play with which provided some nice light in the background of the scene. I positioned the camera in the spot where the light added to the photo, and I still had an interesting angle to the image. This was the first time that I had worked this composition with the scene so it took me a few minutes to figure out the right balance for the elements. There was a slight breeze, so I tried a variety of exposures where some showed movement and others did not. It was just the hint of moment that I liked here because you can still make out the textures of the cloth, but there is just enough blur to give it a bit of life at the same time. The one remaining shard of glass completed the composition at the lower left corner.
I wasn’t convinced that horizontal was the way to go with this view, so I decided to try it vertically as well. Both compositions focused on the drapes, but the vertical one really showed the attention to the design of the drapes. The horizontal version was more about the tearing of the drapes and the pattern left. In the end, I really liked both of the variations and decided to keep them both. There are times when it is beneficial to have both vertical and horizontal compositions of the same subject. Since there was really nothing here that dictated one over the other, they could be used equally as well depending on the space being occupied.
It was about this time during the shoot that I started realizing that I was really approaching this house differently than I had ever approached a subject. I owe a lot of that to forcing myself to see the subject through John’s eyes. He has a very good instinct about what will make a good photo, and listening to how he sees a subject has opened my own eyes to different ways of seeing things. Typically, I would have started off with an overall composition here and moved around for different variations on that. I might shoot a window in relation to the siding, or maybe a door, but rarely will I concentrate on interior shots, or focusing on torn drapes. It was actually a very fun diversion from my normal routine in photographing this type of subject.
When I finally worked my way to the rear of the house, I knew right off what composition I wanted to photograph. Remember when I recounted how John had gone through a change of heart by this point in the session? Well, the composition that I came up with was one that was based on his observation of the open door. I also knew that he was going to be interested in the textures without him even needing to mention it. For me, I was drawn to the shapes at the bottom of the door which included just enough of the door so that you could recognize it, but not so much that you only saw a door. It only took a second to get the composition figured out because I had already worked through it with John’s camera the day before. I shot it knowing that I was going to be presenting it as a black and white, but this is one of those scenes that would work equally as well in full color. I just felt that it deserved that timeless quality that only black and white could provide.
Now, you might think that since the door to the house was open, I might have been tempted to enter it. That is just not me, and not something that I would ever feel comfortable doing without permission. The reason that I mention this is the next scene that I chose to photograph was one which surprised Toni. She got all excited when she saw this next one because she thought that I had gone into the house for it. She was a little disappointed to learn that it was another one that I shot through the window to the left of the door that I had just photographed.
The window next to the door had some more curtains in tatters, but I wasn’t really interested in photographing those curtains. In fact, it was the curtains that I had previously photographed that caught my eye once again. There was a large sink sitting next to the window which had the faucet removed. This old sink, tattered curtains, and mint green paint just summed up the era that I had been trying to capture here. I wasn’t sure how I was going to photograph this, but I knew I had to give it a try.
As with the bottle and glasses from earlier, I had very little space to work with unless I wanted to include the window that I was shooting through. I ended up using a small stick to prop the curtains out of the way by about an inch which allowed me to get a clear shot to the sink and the window. Even though it was very dim outside with the heavy cloud cover, the exposure latitude of the scene was quite high. I didn’t want to try for an HDR blend because the curtains were moving too much for that. Looking at the histogram, I was going to either blow out some of the highlights or block up the shadows. I made the choice to overexpose it a little bit knowing that the window was going to lose some detail. Since it was going to be blurred anyway, I didn’t need all the detail in the window, just enough to give an indication of what was outside. It was the basin that I needed to protect more than anything else. I dialed in the exposure that clipped the highlights by about 2/3 of a stop but left the left side of the histogram showing detail.
I tweaked the composition several times before calling it a day. I had only shot about 53 frames at this point which I was feeling pretty good about. I was thinking that I had between five and seven keepers out of this. I knew at least one was going to be a pretty great image as well. I also realized that I had not shot an overall of the house, and even knowing that had no intention of doing so. The house itself still didn’t really appeal to me, but all these little gems that I had been working were very much worth the stop.
I happily packed things up and started back on my way down the road. There were a couple of scenes nearby here that I wanted to consider. One of them was just a couple of miles up the road. It was a small building with a Chevy Blazer parked beside of it. There had been a tree which had fallen across the roof which added a great deal of interest for me. It could be that I feel somehow connected to this building after all that our house has been through this year.
At any rate, I slowed to look at the scene as I drove by. There was definitely potential here and I wanted to give it a try. I could see “No Trespassing” signs along the edges of the property which didn’t really bother me too much because I was figuring I would be at the road anyway getting the shot that I was after. However, I wanted to see if I could get permission just to be safe and to potentially get in closer if possible. The next house was one that was obviously not lived in, and it had barns on the side of it. The next house was a good quarter of a mile or more from the building. There were plenty of cars here indicating that more than likely this was occupied.
I pulled into the driveway and went to the front door. There was a dog in the yard that acted as my doorbell which I always appreciate. Tim came out and confirmed that all of the properties I had just driven by belonged to him and his wife. I asked permission to shoot the building which I came to find out was a general store that had been in operation not too many years ago. He seemed a bit hesitant to give permission, so I shared that my goal was to stay close to the road in order to get the shots that I was after. That seemed to put him at ease. As we talked more, I learned that there had been a guy that had been snooping around the Blazer but had not been interested in buying it. The assumption was he was looking to come back for parts later on. This, of course, made Tim and his wife a bit apprehensive about letting folks on the property. The more we talked, the more comfortable they became with me and I was given permission to be on the property for photos.
I thanked them and offered my standard print for the property owners. I went back out to the old store and pulled off the road. I grabbed my camera and loaded it up with the standard lens as I started to work the scene. I still didn’t get close because there really wasn’t any need to get any closer than I was. I did see some interesting vehicles behind the old store which would make some decent photos as well. Since I had not asked to go that far in, I decided to leave those for another time. I was content focusing on the store and the Blazer. I tried a lot of different angles with varying amounts of success. One of the strongest compositions came from walking down the side driveway a bit and getting a shot from under the trees. This was a bit harder than it might look. I had to get the camera down very low to the ground in order to capture the sign at the top of the building that I thought was quite important. This forced me to include the barbed wire fence at the edge of the property. It was a single strand fence which I figured would be easy enough to clone out, which it was. There was a lot going on with this composition that also included the RV to the left of the store. This was my least favorite composition to start with, but Toni liked it much better than the one that I edited first. This one was the last image that I edited and after a crop to a more panoramic view, I liked it a lot better. When the edit was done, I was glad that I had listened to Toni and edited it because I think I like this one better out of the two.
The other composition that I was referring to was this one which I shot after changing lenses. I wanted to get the sign in the open, and really wanted to concentrate on the building itself. This composition is much simpler and doesn’t include elements that aren’t specific to the story. I do like a simple composition, but in retrospect, it might be a little too simplistic. I do like the cooler colors that are better shown here at the top of the store. With all that warmth in the scene, the cool colors are needed for proper balance. As with several other photos I’ve shot over the last little bit, the change in angle changed the story behind the photo. In this second version, the story is primarily about the store whereas the first composition showed the tree and the Blazer to a much higher degree. Since they both tell different stories, I’ve decided to include them both.
It didn’t take long to get about a dozen or so photos from this location. Once I had those in the bag, I was pretty content to head home. It had been a short day, but the rain was starting to fall now. It actually started drizzling about the time I picked the camera up to go back to the truck. Once I got back on the road, I decided to take a quick left turn to see what was down that road. The rain had actually stopped by this point, and I was actively looking once again for another scene to photograph.
I saw a lot of potential, but nothing really jumped out at me as a photograph. It took a few miles of driving before I passed a partially obscured driveway next to house that was pretty well overgrown. I could see the tail end of a 300ZX in the driveway which immediately caught my attention. I’ve always loved the Z line of cars and I don’t get to photograph them all that often. I looked for a place to get turned around and headed back to the house. I passed by very slowly and looked. The car was overgrown and didn’t appear to be too rusty. There were some yellow flowers to the rear of it that I kind of liked. It was a good enough scene to try for a photo. I didn’t see any signs indicating that I wasn’t wanted there. I had seen that there were no occupied houses anywhere near this location, so I figured that I would be safe enough dipping in there for a quick moment for a photo or two.
I got turned around again and pulled off on the shoulder of the road. I grabbed the camera with the telephoto lens because I didn’t want to get too close to the car forcing me to get too far into the property. Since it was the rear that had gotten my attention, that was what I set up to photograph. I started from a good way away, but there was too much brush in the way, and I wasn’t liking the composition with the yellow flowers. I moved in closer and closer until I had no brush between me and the car. At this point, I was at 70mm which was a lot closer than I had planned on getting. The composition was looking good though and I was happy to stick with where I was. I had started at eye level, but found that the lower I went, the more interesting the composition became. By the time I was about 16inches off the ground, I had the right perspective for the shot.
In the time that it had taken me to get this shot composed and figured out, there had only been one car to pass by. I had heard nothing at all indicating that I was about to have company. I was feeling a little brave at this point, but not quite brave enough to go deeper into the property where I saw an old Mustang, a rusted 50’s pickup, and a couple of newer derelicts sitting in the woods. I didn’t seen any good compositions on those anyway. However, I did go to the front of the Z to see if there was an angle that I could get the house included with the car.
Sure enough, from the front corner of the car, there was enough structure visible to the house to make the shot work. What wasn’t going to work was the long lens that I had attached. I decided to go back to the truck and swap lenses. I knew that the safest bet would be my standard lens, but I also knew that I was going to want the perspective distortion that the wide-angle lens would provide. That was the one that I went with. In just a minute or so, I was back at the car and framing up a shot from the front.
It still strikes me as odd to photograph a car that I remember being brand new on the showroom floors in a scene like this. Not too many years ago, I would have summarily dismissed a car from the ’80’s as a decay subject. They tend to have too much plastic on them, and they don’t rust like my normal subjects do. The designs aren’t as classic as a ’55 Chevy, but here we are in 2023 and I have to realize that these cars that I grew up with are now around 40 years old. Time has not been all that kind to many of them, and I’m getting more and more comfortable with viewing these vehicles as decay subjects. While this Nissan didn’t have the rust that I usually like to find, there is no doubt that it has been neglected for quite some time. The house and condition of the driveway go right along with that story and form a fantastic photograph in my opinion.
For years, I have found it very hard to find rusted vehicles to photograph largely because of the “Cash for Clunkers” program that took place decades ago. The rise in popularity of the classics has meant that many potential subjects have been restored or turned into parts cars. Logic dictates that the cars that I love to shoot will eventually disappear and become even harder to find in the future. I’m slowly getting used to the fact that what I consider modern cars are now going to have to become my photographic subjects. They may not have quite the character as their forebearers, but the modern classics will speak to a completely different audience. I know looking at these photos of the 300ZX, I am thrown right back into that mindset when I was a teenager. My response is what I always hope to achieve with my photos of older cars, but that I don’t have any direct personal memories with. This era of car, I have very vivid memories of sitting in them while they were in the showroom or washing them to be sold as a low mileage used car. I’ve read magazine articles reviewing them when they were brand new and wishing that I could afford one. I have a personal connection with this generation of car, and that will make having them as a photographic subject quite a bit more interesting for me. Whatever generation of car I end up photographing, as long as there is a good decay story to it, I will fall in love with the subject. I just think that we are about ready to see a whole new generation of decay showing up in my photos.
I do hope that you have enjoyed this trek and the new photos that I have captured. I ended up shooting 73 frames for the day. Of those, there are 10 keepers which is kind of amazing considering I was doing more experimenting than anything. As always, if there is a photograph here that speaks to you, I would love to match you up with a print of your very own. You can order direct from the gallery here, or you will find more options if you discuss your choices with me directly. I can fine art photographic prints, metal prints, or canvas prints to suit your needs. Size is generally not a problem as I have made prints nearly four feet tall with astounding results. No matter what you choose, rest assured that there is no better way to enjoy photography than in a physical form. This is really the only way that the photographer can ensure that the colors that they intended are the ones that are being seen because monitor calibration is no longer an issue. Let me know what I can create for your space!
Also, be sure to join me on the 1st as we take an in-depth look into my portrait studio. I’ve talked a lot about my entry into portraiture, but I have not really showed the space where I do so much of it. I’ll be taking you through all the phases from an empty finished basement to where it sits as of right now. Seriously, I just had Toni come down to film a quick video where I do a walkthrough of the space. It was a nice break from typing and I needed to get it done so I could finish up the Behind the Camera entry tomorrow.
If you would like the opportunity to learn more about photography and think that I can help you with that, don’t forget that I do offer mentorships. I currently have an opening for an Advanced Mentorship but can always fit in an hourly client. This is your opportunity to learn at a very advanced rate from somebody who has made a ton of mistakes and learned from them along the way. I don’t teach you to shoot like me, I teach you to figure out how to shoot like you. That is the beauty of a mentorship program. I custom tailor the materials to you, based on how you view the world. We will shoot the subjects that you want to shoot, and we will do it in a style that fits your vision. Give me a call today to determine if we are a good fit and to see what I can offer you.
Until next time….
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