Saturday, October 1, 2022
Congratulations! You have made it to the final installment of this rather lengthy blog entry. In case you missed it with the subscription emails not cooperating, this is the final part of a four-part series that all started about four hours before I got to this point. In all reality, this was a continuation of a trek that happened a full week before. If you want to refresh your memory about that one, you can start that two-part entry here. Essentially, I have now shot four locations that I had spotted two years ago and have added more images than I can count to my collections. As of the end of the last installment, I have finished up with all the locations that I wanted to shoot for the past two years. I was feeling pretty darn good about myself at this point because I finally possessed the skills needed to make these locations a success. I will say that three hours working a single location had made me rather tired, but it was still only 3pm when I left from that location. That was too early to head home as the light was getting better as was the sky. I didn’t have time to get to the mountains to take advantage of the sky, but I knew that there were barns in Alexander County and was hoping that I would find one that would work out for a good sky photo.
Not really having a destination in mind, I just started to drive around in areas that I was moderately familiar with while taking the occasional side road. I was still seeing a lot of potential, but nothing was really jumping out at me. I think that the issue was I had been so in tune to doing old cars that I was having a hard time seeing compositions with barns. I was hoping when I saw something that would work, it would jump out at me. The longer that I drove the less hopeful that I became. The truth was I was greatly fatigued from the previous three hours. I had stretched my creative energy to about the breaking point but felt really good about what I had accomplished thus far.
As I was driving, Toni sent me a text to ask how things were going. Doing the smart thing, I had the truck read out the text to me, and then I decided to call her to answer it. We started to chat a bit about how our days had gone, and I told her how much fun I had been having with the old cars. I said that I was kind of heading back home, or at least in that direction while still looking. It was nearing 4pm and I was still about an hour from home. The sky was also opening up in a way that wasn’t all that pleasant. There were too many highlights in the clouds at this point and the good sky was going to come in some hours later when the sun got lower. By that point, I would be totally finished with the day, so I was figuring that my day was pretty much done at this point.
While talking with her I was still looking and happened to catch a glimpse of something long, low, and rusted against the trees on the side of a large property. I wasn’t sure what I had seen, but I knew that the shape was automotive, and the color was decay. I told Toni to hold on as I got turned around to see better what had grabbed my attention. When I saw it again, I really liked what was there. It was obviously yard art, but the rusty colors fit so well with the greenery behind it. I told Toni that I was about to get out and go see if I could find a property owner, so we got off the phone. The property was directly in front of a shop of some sort, which was off to the side of a house which looked to be on another property but linked by a driveway. There were some vehicles in front of the shop, so I started there. There was a note on the door with a cell number and it looked dark inside. Figuring that nobody was inside, I knocked on the door and waited a minute. When nobody came, I started to look at the house and tried to figure out the most appropriate way to approach it. As I was contemplating that knock, the door opened, and I turned my attention back to the shop.
I spoke briefly with the property owner and informed him why I was bothering him on a Saturday afternoon. Despite the many signs saying “no trespassing”, he was happy to let me get a few photos of the old car. I figured out where I could park to be out of the way and grabbed my gear. My gut told me to go with the standard 24-70mm lens, but I had been having so much fun with the long lens that I decided to put that on the camera once again. I figured that the lines of the car worked well without any extra distortion, and I knew that I could do better detail work with this lens based on my recent experience.
I approached this subject like I would any other subject that I intend to shoot. I start out from a distance so as not to disturb anything up close. I look for the overall compositions that are available. This one was pretty simple to work out with the exception of the tiller that was on display behind the car. The way that the handle came in close to the car meant that I wasn’t going to be able to crop it out. I could possibly do some cloning work to it, but I didn’t think that would be appropriate. This car was obviously set up as yard art as it was missing a frame, wheels, and even the body parts weren’t actually attached in many cases. Embracing that as the story that needed to be told, I framed up a shot that included the car and the tiller. The idea was that they were both at different angles and complimented each other quite well. The handles of the tiller actually pointed to the car which worked perfectly reading from left to right. I just found the right height to place the camera and shot a few frames of the scene. I noticed that the framing that worked also included a light-colored branch above the car that seemed to frame the subject while complimenting the shape of the tiller handle.
The composition was so simple that I ended up spending a few minutes trying slightly different positions just so I had options when I got home. There wasn’t much that changed between the images though. This got me thinking that I wanted to do more with this car. What I had shot was just too expected, and while nice, didn’t really capture the soul of the car. I started to look for isolations that I could shoot of the car at this point.
When it comes to isolations, I usually look for shapes of body panels and chrome trim as contrast to the rust. This car had a few pieces of chrome trim, but none of them were all that interesting to me. The curves were so drawn out that they wouldn’t photograph all that well in this particular setting. There would have been much more that could have been done had there been headlights attached, but I only had what was there to work with. I needed to find a way to show depth in a photo, and best way to do that was to find a way to work the front fender, hood, and grill into a composition. That fender was just so broad that it was hard to factor into a composition. The other concern that I had was the overall uniformity of the colors and texture. There wasn’t much that I could use as contrast to keep the interest, so that concerned me.
Since I was going to be dealing with shapes more than anything else, I decided to take the color out of the equation by switching the camera over to black and white to see how the different tonal values would work. I started off at the join between the grill, hood, and fender in attempts to find something compelling. I had the chrome edging of the grill at least, and the hard lines of the grill worked with the curves of the rest of the scene. It was just a matter of getting the framing right to keep the relative proportions balanced in the composition. This was not all that easy to figure out because everything was so spread out that I wasn’t really able to get as much of the fender curve as I wanted.
Eventually, I did end up with a well-balanced composition that I liked. It had an abstract feel to it that kind of worked with the big gaps since none of the pieces were actually secured together. The holes that were in the metal also added to the visual interest for this one forcing some questions to come to mind about what used to be in those holes. The processing that I did with the image brought about a good bit of texture as well which helped to overpower the fact that there wasn’t that much going on with the metal in this particular area. This is one of those images that certainly would not work as a color image. It is the monochrome appearance and the ability to handle a sizeable amount of contrast adjustments that makes this composition work. I still didn’t think that I had the right image to capture the soul of this old car though so I kept looking.
No matter where I went around the car, I wasn’t finding anything that interested me more than the grill. The issue that I had with the grill was the fact that there were some obvious gaps showing that the car wasn’t assembled. The driver’s side fender was also a purple color that was in relatively good shape which didn’t flow well with the rest of the car when captured up close. I did like the debris that was sitting on top of the fender, so I tried to get a shot that focused on that, but lost interest pretty quickly. I kept coming back to the grill, so I decided that I would do something with it before I left.
With that personal challenge in mind, I started to really look at the front of the car. I reduced it down to shapes and lines. I started to see something like a knight’s helmet which might be a side effect of watching the full Game of Thrones series for a second time recently. Regardless, it was the shapes and the relationship between those shapes that started to form a composition for me. I tried both horizontal and vertical compositions and realized that neither felt right for the car. I split the difference and changed my aspect ratio to a square at the end of the process and found that to be the right answer. With the square ratio, I was able to put all the elements into place within the frame in a very logical arrangement that was easy to look at. The fact that none of the parts were actually attached didn’t even bother me with this composition and with the use of black and white. On the off chance that I totally changed up my mind when I got home, I was shooting in RAW so I had all the color information still there as well as the full 3:2 crop on all photos. Nothing like having a safety net, but I was pretty sure that I was going to decide on the black and white, which I did.
This last image which I fought against for most of the time that I shot the car turned out to be my favorite one from this location. It told the full story of the car, while bringing a bit of fantasy to the scene. It was kind of like a choose your own ending book, and I liked that for this image. The processing was carefully put together to bring out as much patina as I could in the metal and give more of a sense of age to the subject. The cattywampus arrangement of panels… Excuse me for my country words, I meant to say woppy-jawed panels added to the story of the image which was amplified because you could easily see the fallen leaves coating the ground inside the car. It all just worked together because nothing here actually fit.
This was the last image that I shot for the day. At this point, regardless of what the weather was doing, I was completely spent. I had no more creative energy left inside. I got things packed up and headed home. I was starving at this point, so I picked Toni up and we went to Qdoba for dinner. It was around 7pm when we got home and I had a passing thought to get the images edited, but I was just too tired. I did need to go down and at least get the images imported into the computer though. Yeah, I could do that before resting. that was when I realized that I had shot 133 images for the day. That was going to take a while to cull through, so while I was sitting at the computer I might as well make an initial pass through the images.
Well, several hours later, I had culled the images down to 28 frames that I wanted to look at further and had done preliminary edits on 24 of them. I guess I had more energy than I thought I did. The edits on these went so much faster than normal, and I really can’t explain why that was. The lighting had been fantastic all day long which helped, and I had been spending a great deal of time getting things right in camera. I had also shot with the edits completely in mind, but that is not really all that different from my norm. I just sailed through the edits with the same creative drive that I had during the capture, and I kept feeding off of the previous image and wanting to see the next one. Before long, I was done.
At this point, I was exhausted and ready to go to bed. I was going to go through the 24 images again the following morning to get the final edits done and make any slight changes that were needed. That took about another hour on Monday morning. Then I did an hour mentorship session before moving the images into Photoshop to get them prepared for online viewing. Then it was time to start doing the blogs. At the end of the second part, I had a request to do another hour session which I did before sitting down for dinner. That was the end of the day for me. This morning I woke up and started to get rolling again on the blogs and here we are about four hours later in the day finally finishing up a trek that started around 11am on Saturday morning. I don’t think I’ve had as much work from a trek that didn’t involve a week away at the beach or two weeks in Alaska.
As I alluded to earlier, this is part of the creative process and I’m so happy to finally be at this point because I can file this trek away and concentrate on the next one. This is good timing because I really have to start getting my head wrapped around a storytelling portrait shoot that is coming up this Sunday. I’m excited about this opportunity to photograph an Equine Physical Therapist doing what they do. It is going to be a portrait shoot unlike any that I have done before and I’m so ready for the challenge. I do need to get my head wrapped around the things that I will have to be considering during the shoot though.
There is also that other thing that I need to be paying attention to. It is Fall, and the leaves are starting to change. For some reason, this year I’m just not excited about the changing leaves. I love the weather and am happy to be without the heat, but I’m actually looking forward to the bare trees more than I am the colorful leaves. I’ve been doing some thinking about that recently and I think that I am getting to that point in my photographic career where I just don’t like photographing what everyone else is. Think about it, there will be gobs of photographers all over the mountains while the leaves are changing. They will all be shooting the same scenes with the same colors. All of these images will be seen online for the next couple of months, and they will just start to blend into one large group of images. That is not fun for me. I want to create images that stand out from the rest and that is hard to do when I am one of a million shooting the same subject. When it comes to a trek like what I have just finished, there are so few photographers out there that focus on this type of subject and create images the way that I do, I have no choice but to stand out. These are the images that define me, not the Fall Foliage shots.
That is a discussion for another day though. Don’t forget that if any of these images speak to you, I would love to create a print specifically for you. You can either discuss particular media and sizes with me, or you can order directly through this website. No matter which option you choose, you will have a very high-quality art piece to display. There is absolutely no comparison between seeing an image on your computer or device screen and seeing it done in a physical print. It is something to hold, and to behold. Not only do you get a unique piece of art to display, but you also help me continue to go on these treks and create more photographs. It is a win win for everyone.
I do hope that you have enjoyed this rather lengthy account. If you have made it to this point, I congratulate you. That accomplishment is right up there with watching eight seasons of Game of Thrones. I appreciate your dedication to understanding my photography. Thank you, and until next time…..
Part 4 … You are here…finally!
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