Saturday, October 1, 2022
The problem with epic treks is that they take forever to complete. As you will see from the heading here, this was a trek from Saturday, and I am starting to type this on the following Monday morning. Out of 133 frames, I ended up with 24 keepers from the day, and only shot two locations. To keep from rambling on and on through a single blog and making it too long to read comfortably, I have chosen to break this up into four different posts. You can see the roadmap at the bottom of this entry that will give you links to the other posts related to this one. There are just times that I am in the zone and continue to see compositions and images that excite me. I love being out at those times because the energy that I have is so unique and it is like a drug. The downside to it is after it is all done, I am completely drained and have nothing left to give. I’m about there at this point, but I still have a little bit of writing left. These blogs are first and foremost my “dear diary” entries that are designed to document what I did during the trek so I can remember years later. I guess it comes from doing reports as a police officer for so many years. I trained my brain to document mental notes about everything that I did, and those notes would stay rattling around in my head until I put them into report format. That is why these blog entries are so important to my creative process. I can’t fully let a trek go until I write about it. Once it is on paper (as it were), I can move onto the next thing. Until that point, I am stuck in the same moment as the trek. So, essentially, I am still living on the high from my last trip to Taylorsville and I’m quite literally worn out from it. With any luck, I can get the last two blogs done today, and can finally rest.
When I last left off, I had finished working the area around the house, and was ready to call it quits for the day. I was parked between that section of the property and the part that I had started with originally. While I was satisfied with the day, two things had changed since I was along the roadside. First, I had found my voice with these cars in tight quarters. I had brought in some of the techniques that I had used at the neighbor’s house the previous week which were working quite well for getting compelling images. That led to the second change that I was thinking about. Finding myself having a very hard time with my normal 24-70mm lens, I had switched over to my long lens which was working fantastically in the environment I was in. With these two things in mind when I got to the truck, I decided that I would make one last pass through the cars on the side of the road to see if I could get another image or two in the books. I didn’t have any grand plans because I had worked this area pretty well before, but wanted to see what the difference was with a different lens on the camera.
The first place that I stopped was at the rusted Ford truck that I had tried to get a composition on before. It was tucked in-between several other vehicles which made it impossible to get an overall composition on. There was also what was left of an old REO truck parked at the angle that I wanted to photograph the Ford from. The REO was interesting, but not all that photogenic. Most of it was missing and what was left was pretty much a uniform color of rust. That would have been a much easier subject to work with had it been more interesting. It was that Ford that I really wanted and figured that I would try with the long lens. I looked at the angles that I had and decided that I might be able to do something that incorporated the REO truck in the composition as well which was a fun idea.
I concentrated on the part that was the most interesting which happened to be the nose of the truck. The only bit of bling left on the truck was the hood ornament that identified what the truck was. The grill was interesting as well. I found a good organization of elements where the Ford actually framed the nose of the REO and gave a nice balanced composition. I then had to decide about depth of field. My initial thought was to blur one or the other, but the landscape photographer in me wanted everything in focus. I honestly didn’t know which would be the better choice. When I have those moments, the easiest thing to do is to shoot all possibilities to have them on hand when I got home. I could then choose based on what looked best on the 24″ monitor. I started with the obvious solution of focusing on the hood ornament and letting the Ford go blurry. Using an aperture of f/3.5 I was able to get the right depth of field for this concept and shot three frames to get the exposure right. I was dealing with a lot of dark tones but wanted to make sure that the bright hood ornament came through in sufficient detail. After that, I switched the focus to the Ford, and let the REO go very soft. Finally, I stopped the lens down and used hyperfocal distancing to get a large depth of field for the pair of trucks. I considered doing a focus stack, but the focus looked sufficiently sharp for both trucks and knowing that the telephoto lens has a large range for focus breathing, I didn’t want to risk having to change the composition up to adapt to the crop due to focus points.
When I got the images home, I looked through them all and felt that the best option was to have them both in focus. I started to do that edit and realized that this was the safe choice. It looked too expected and quite frankly, boring. I evaluated the two other images where I had used limited depth of field and found that the REO was a distraction when blurred against the Ford. It just looked like something was in the way. The first concept that I shot with the REO in focus seemed to work better, but that left the majority of the frame blurred out which felt odd. However, the more I looked at the image, the more sense it made. I had a small segment of a truck that thanks to the emblem was readily identifiable. It gave me great textures, and the rust tones matched with the green streak really worked well. The Ford, which was blurred in the background had enough visual identifiers that even significantly blurred was recognizable. In short, I had two elements here that were both identifiable in their own right, but I had the depth of field to show the depth difference and to focus the attention on the more unique subject. The story just came to life with this variation and this was the one that I chose to go with.
While working out the composition between the REO and the Ford, I started to see other opportunities to capture different views of the Ford. While the Ford wasn’t as special as the REO, the patina and colors on the old rig were amazing. I realized that it was the colors that I was after on the Ford, and the actual truck was inconsequential. That allowed me to get in tight, shooting between two other vehicles to concentrate on the side of the hood and the top of the fender. I needed that section because it offered the most interesting shapes to the composition. I didn’t need the headlights as I would have normally wanted here, but instead used the marker light sitting atop the fender as my “eye” to the portrait.
I was still feeling that limiting my depth of field was a good idea here because texture wasn’t what I was after as much as color. I chose to shoot at a wider aperture and focused on the Ford emblem as a visual anchor. The marker light just became a framing element for the lines which locked the viewer into the photograph. I could tell through the image review that this was going to be a good image and I was excited to get it home to see it on the full screen.
I still wasn’t quite done with the old truck though. There was a very pronounced dent in the front of the fender that I was drawn to for some reason. I tried a few different compositions using the headlight, but I didn’t like how they were looking. It just seemed too…well, expected. I wanted to do something that was draw the attention to the dent, so I decided to flip the camera vertical and balance the marker and the dent in opposing corners of the frame. This photo would be about the shadows cast by the different panels and the sculpting that the light did to the dent. I also wanted to capture the textures and colors of the truck. Essentially, I was wanting to get it all in one photo without actually photographing the truck. The result worked perfectly I thought. There is not enough shape there to define the truck, but you get the feeling of what it is. The focus of the photo is all about the textures and colors with the interest created by one light, and a large dent. For me, this is the most engaging photo of the series with this Ford. It wasn’t possible with the lens that I started out with because I actually needed the compression afforded at 165mm.
The more I think about it, the more I am liking this 70-200mm for this type of work. For years I’ve used it occasionally, but I’ve valued the macro capability of the 24-70mm for the detail shots maybe more than I should have. I’m looking forward to teaching this next decay workshop, because I really intend to talk about the benefits of a long lens much more than I have in the past. Speaking of the workshop, don’t forget to get signed up for it. There are only a few slots left before it is sold out. It will be a full day workshop in East Bend, NC in mid-November. This has always been one of my most popular workshops and it is the one that I enjoy putting on the most. I hope to see you there!
Feeling that I was finally satisfied with the Ford truck as a subject, I moved on to the area where I had started the day by the bus. One of the vehicles that prevented me from getting an overall composition of the bus was a white Ford Fairlane. It was a pretty unspectacular car without a lot of visual excitement on its own. However, there were some interesting parts of the car which I did like. I hadn’t been moved to photograph it before, but now that I was seeing things more abstractly, the trim on the C pillar caught my eye. It was just a simple bit of chrome trim under the Fairlane nameplate. There wasn’t anything particularly exciting about it, and with the car being white, there was very little visual interest to it. For some reason I couldn’t let it go though. I started to look at the angles around the chrome trim and started to see some potential there. I had the idea for a black and white image as I had done with the Mustang about an hour earlier. I switched the camera to monochrome mode so I could accurately see how the tones were looking. That gave me great contrast and added to the visual appeal of the car immediately.
Now I had a starting point for a composition. I started to look at what was around the trim and decided that the door handle was interesting, and I liked the acute angles of how the pillar came to the body. I tried to frame that up from the side but decided that it was too static. I took what I had learned from a Chevy truck I had shot a couple of months ago and changed my angle to create more diagonal lines as well as accentuate the diagonals that were already there. Almost immediately the image came to life in the viewfinder. I worked on fine tuning the location being careful what was included and excluded in the frame. I made sure that I had a triangle at the window, that balanced with the triangle formed by the trunk, which was again balanced by the triangle of shadow beneath the body line. The door handle and Fairlane script occupied two perfect spaces within the frame and created yet another diagonal close to the Golden Mean. I was floored with the composition and loved it almost immediately. Even after getting home and editing 24 images this is still one of the better ones from the day in my opinion. It is just so elegant in its simplicity.
Of course, the experience with the Fairlane really amped up my creative energy, so even though I had worked this area quite a bit already, I wanted to do more with it. I was actually in a section of the yard that was bounded by a fence. I didn’t have access to this part of the yard because it belonged to the gentleman that I had spoken to the week before. There were some great vehicles back there as well. I hadn’t bothered to photograph any of them before because I just couldn’t get a clear shot of them. The thought crossed my mind to go back over to his house and see if I could get into the field to work with those cars as well. That thought quickly left when I started to hear something that sounded like a possessed demon coming towards me. I tried to find the source of the noise, but I couldn’t locate it immediately. I just knew that I wasn’t alone there.
Now that my attention was on the vehicles beyond the fence, I started to consider if there were any ways that I could photograph them. I had the right lens attached for sure which would give me the reach beyond the fence. There was a cluster of vehicles that included a sedan and two trucks that caught my eye first. They were all overlapping and there was no way to get a better angle on them which would allow better separation. The sedan was also parked broadside to me which was not the most pleasing angle for it. What I decided to do was to shoot this with a creative crop to add visual tension to the image. I chose to focus on the truck that was in mostly full view while using the other two vehicles to frame it. that meant that I was going to crop through those other two vehicles to reduce their visual importance to the scene forcing the eye to the truck that I wanted to highlight. The resulting compositional concept left the sedan as an effective foreground that pointed to the truck, and the second truck was just kind of there to keep the eyes from leaving the frame by following the sedan to the right. This is not a smashing composition by any stretch, but I think it works well considering what I had to work with. The eyes pursue as I want them to in the scene and there is enough visual tension to keep the interest within the frame. It was definitely a scene that I would like to get closer to at some point to try some other compositions.
Still trying to work out some atypical compositions that would hopefully make me a better photographer, I turned my attention to another sedan that was parked broadside to me. This car wasn’t tremendously interesting at this angle, but just beyond it were a couple of interesting vehicles. On the left was a Rambler, and to the right was an old Ford pickup best I could tell. Both of these subjects caught my attention and I felt would be good subjects for photographs. The only problem was that the sedan was blocking my vision of them both. I tried to figure out a way to get a photo of the sedan as a strong foreground with the two interesting vehicles in the background, but that created a very stagnant composition where the interesting subjects got lost in the frame. I wasn’t able to get a strong enough composition of the Rambler on its own, and the Ford truck was constantly going be blocked by the sedan.
I decided to use the sedan as a partial element that formed the foreground as I had done with the truck hidden behind the sedan. This time, the sedan was too dominant in the foreground and its scale made the textures too important to the overall composition and it distracted from the truck in the background. I started to really evaluate the scene in an attempt to figure out what was my reason behind wanting to capture the image. Yes, I liked the truck, but I wasn’t able to photograph the truck as a whole, and I was fighting against a much larger object that dominated the scene. The answer to my question was I liked the broken window of the truck, and that was my main reason for wanting to photograph it. With that in mind, I knew the answer to my problem. I opened the lens up and through the sedan into total blur but kept enough detail so that the viewer would know what they were looking at. My focus point was right on the broken window which allowed the focus to spill onto the patina of the truck which was also interesting. The resulting image isn’t really a photograph of the truck, but it is a photo of the broken window where everything around it gives context and a supporting story for the image.
It was a stretch for sure, but I felt that it could work. I shot two variations on that theme but didn’t spend a lot of time on it because I really didn’t think it would work out when I got it home. Surprisingly, I really loved how it turned out. This variation hit all the boxes for me when it came to storytelling. The composition works, and the way that I included the sedan was perfect. The only gripe that I have with this image is a limitation of the lens I was using. The 70-200mm has always been a little soft when zoomed to 200mm and focused at infinity. I’ve run into it shooting landscapes as well as this type of subject. I’ve tried all different apertures, and the ones that work the best are when the lens is stopped down to around f/22 or so. That wouldn’t work creatively here, so I had to deal with a bit of softness on the glass, but I don’t think it will be a problem unless this is printed at like 36 inches wide. That one little technical imperfection wasn’t enough to keep me from adding this to my collection because the image as a whole is better than I anticipated which makes me very proud of it.
After seeing how things worked with the truck in the background, I decided to come back to the Rambler that was peeking through the trees. I had a clear view of this car, but the composition was boring as there just wasn’t enough of the car visible to carry the image. However, when paired with a section of the sedan, there was a lot more interest and more story to be told. I positioned the camera in a way that allowed the trunk and the C pillar of the car to frame the front of the Rambler. I used the same concept of a shallow depth of field for this one but stopped the lens down from f/4.5 to f/6.3 for a little more definition on the chrome trim. Since the Rambler wasn’t fully visible, I just went ahead and cropped in tight on the car forcing the focus on the front clip only. This seemed to work out quite well and I liked how it all lined up. Feeling that I had a better composition here than the previous truck, I shot five frames with slight variations in depth of field and composition before I was satisfied with it.
While I was here, I also spent some time working on a composition with an old tow truck that was parked right along the fence. I was able to get a clean composition of the truck that included only a stump as a foreground, but the angle on the truck was straight on which I didn’t feel was overly compelling. Even though I shot a couple of frames of that truck, none of them made it past the final culling of the images. It was just too static and boring for my tastes.
I was coming to the end of my creative rope at this point, and I was getting tired of working the location. I still had more photos in me, but I was feeling that I had done all I could do here. I thought about going back to the neighbor to see if I could get into that field to get some closer compositions of the subjects that I had been working on. I was still a little hesitant because I was still hearing that demonic grunting in the woods and didn’t know if I wanted to meet whatever it belonged to. I was in a position that I could see the sky and I saw that the clouds were starting to break up which made me look forward to doing some photographs that included the sky. I was going to have to go out and find a barn or something to put under the sky which meant that I was going to have get rolling very soon. I probably didn’t have the time to get to the mountains to do landscapes, so I was going to have to find something close by.
Of course, it then dawned on me that I was looking at the sky through a break in the trees and I could see a potential photograph right there. I started to get the camera in position and realized that I had the wrong lens attached because I was backed right up to the fence and still couldn’t get the composition right. I pulled by bag off and started to get the lens swapped out to my 24-70mm and heard that grunting once again. It was close and getting closer. I turned around, and sure enough, there was a pig that was about the size of a Volkswagon Bug trotting toward me at a quick pace. It slammed into the fence as it turned and leaned into me. It wasn’t a violent motion, but it did tell me that this pig was probably quite friendly and would want to come and play with me if I was on that side of the fence. Of course, that made me very nervous for the camera, so I decided that I wasn’t going to try and get access on that side of the fence in the future. There is no doubt that the pig would easily be able to knock the tripod over with the camera should I try to get over there.
Anyway, lesson learned about the other side of the fence, and I was still getting the lenses swapped. With the standard lens now on, I was able to get a composition framed up that made sense. I started off with including the Fairlane, the bus, and the Dodge sedan because I thought I could get away with it for a shot that was going to be this wide including the sky. I quickly realized that the composition was very much off balance, and by including all three vehicles, they were all overlapping each other which made for a messy side to the image. I dropped down lower and was able to block the Dodge with the Fairlane, while still including much of the bus. Again, that was too complicated and too heavy on the side. I really wanted to get some of the decay in the shot to establish a story to go along with the awesome sky, but it was looking like there was no way to do it. No matter how I cropped the left side, I was either including the bus, or creating a sloppy edge with the Fairlane.
The solution came to mind when I started thinking about the Maverick, I had shot a while back. I decided to crop the Fairlane in the middle of the rear panel so that I still had the shape of the car but eliminated the distractions to the side of it. I had to keep the angle pretty shallow on the car to keep from including the roof of the bus which was just below the roof of the shelter. With the camera very close to the ground I knew that I was going to have a sliver of the roof behind the car, but it wasn’t much of a distraction in my opinion. The way that the composition flowed, the focus was off in the distance to the sky. I made sure to include the trunk of the tree to the right to establish the arch of the branches that framed the cloud in the distance. It all came together surprisingly well, and it allowed me to get a mostly overall image of the Fairlane which I had wanted to do but felt that it was too boring of a subject to carry an image all on its own. This way, it was just a supporting player in a larger composition which worked very well for the image.
At this point, I was feeling pretty well drained. I had been at this same location for a bit over three hours and had shot 119 frames in that time. It had been truly epic and something that I had never thought would happen all the times that I had seen the cars from the road. I knew that there were some good opportunities there, but I never would have imagined the luck that I had just seen. It is easy to look back and think about all the times that I convinced myself that I shouldn’t stop and try to get permission. It should make me sad for all those missed opportunities when I was driving around looking for subjects to photograph. The reality of it is this. I wasn’t prepared for the challenge two years ago, or even a year ago. The success that I have achieved at this location as well as next door is all due to where I am in my photographic journey. The techniques that I have used at these two properties are largely newer ideas, and I even came up with completely new ways of seeing a scene between the two different days. I have a lot more bad images under by belt now and I know better what works and what doesn’t. I am very happy with the outcome of this trek and I’m glad that I decided to visit now rather than two years ago. The images that I have from this location are all better than anything I would have come up with way back then.
Speaking of the level of images that I have achieved during this trek; I would love to discuss matching you up with a print of your favorite one. You can order stock sizes and media directly through the website store, or you discuss size and media options with me at any point. There is just no better way to enjoy a photograph than in a printed form which will show you exactly what the photographer intended without taking into account the brightness of a computer monitor, or the colors that are shown on your portable device. When a photograph is made into a print, everything is just as it was intended by the photographer, and it is the only true way of seeing their work.
While I was getting tired, I had an interesting sky at this point to work with which made me want to go explore a bit more. I got everything packed back up in the truck and bid farewell to this awesome location. I didn’t have a direction to go in, so I just started to drive. I would be driving around for about an hour before I found my next subject, and there wasn’t a bit of sky included in the scene. Look for the final part to this blog to be published pretty soon with the final three images from the day included.
Part 3 … You are here
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