Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Today is the day that I have been waiting for. You know what day that is, I’ve been talking about it in the last few blogs that I have written. I’ve been building up to it since I failed at capturing a red barn in Lomax that I finally got photographed a few days ago. On one of the roads that I went down to get turned around during some scouting, I spotted some old cars out behind of a shop. The weather was nice enough that I was able to stop and hopefully get the permission to access the property. I knocked on the door, and a guy answered the door. He confirmed that the property that I was interested in was his. After I told him why I was asking him about it, he let me know that he was going to lunch and that I should come back later. While he didn’t give me permission, I took that as a very positive sign that I would get the permission needed, so I left my card with him and invited him to check out my website to see what I did and how I photographed old cars. I went on to find a barn that I had photographed before which I ended up shooting that day.
Since that day, I’ve been watching the weather and biding my time until I could go back out there and get to work with the old cars. Looking at the property from the road, it will take me every bit of two hours, if not four to fully work it. This means that I am going to need a fair amount of time and knowing that he goes out for lunch around the middle of the day, I figured that I either needed to get there no later than 9am or wait until about 1pm to get started. It seemed like last week I kept waiting for the clouds to come in during the afternoons so that I could get out there and do some photography. The clouds never showed up, and I ended up not doing much of anything last week. The first day that would have worked, I was with Toni at a doctor’s appointment so I didn’t get the chance to go then. I knew that there would be other cloudy days, so that wasn’t a problem at all, and I needed to be with her anyway.
The weather this week was looking much better with clouds through the first half of the week. There was rain mixed in with the clouds for Monday, so I decided to stick close to home after getting a print shipped off. I considered going back out to Lomax to talk to the guy, but I wasn’t sure that I would have that many dry hours to work. Tuesday was going to be even better with thick clouds through most of the morning and then partly cloudy during the afternoon. I could get out there early and work until around lunchtime which would give me time to get started on the processing of the photos when I got home. I could finish them up and start the several blogs that I was anticipating. That would fill my Wednesday up quite nicely and by Thursday, I would be ready for a bit of a break.
I started waking up when Toni left for work which was around 6am. I got my morning routine taken care of and made sure that yesterday’s blog posted as planned before heading out. It was cold, so I dressed in layers prepared for a long time outside working. The trip was about 45 minutes to get to the spot, and the clouds were wonderful all the way there. The thick overcast reduced the contrasts over the landscape and gave a perfect quality of light that I enjoy working with when it comes to my old cars. This was going to be epic, and I was actually a little nervous that I wasn’t going to have as much success as I had convinced myself over the last couple of weeks.
When I arrived, I saw both cars in the driveway, so I knew that he was there. I got out of the truck and went to the front door to knock. As he did last time, he opened the door and waited for me to talk. I reminded him that I had been by a couple of weeks ago and had been told to come back to ask about photographing the cars. He remembered me and asked what I was going to do with the photos. Just as I teach folks in my decay workshops, I was very honest and upfront with him about what I was going to do with the photos including possibly selling prints. I also assured him that I wouldn’t mess with any of the cars and would not share the location that I had been. I figured that this was just a final vetting before letting me loose with the camera.
“I don’t think I’m comfortable with that.”
Wait….what did he say?
We had a quick back and forth over what I was wanting to do and how he had told me to come back again when he was leaving for lunch. I even told him that I had driven for 45 minutes to get there based on his willingness to discuss it. He said that he needed time to think about it. While that is his prerogative, I reminded him that I had left a business card and invited him to check out my website to see what it is that I do. He had not looked at it as of yet.
I’m not usually one to get aggravated with a property owner because I am at their mercy when it comes to gaining access to get photos. However, this kind of grated my gears because he had two full weeks to “think about it” and I wasn’t springing anything on him this time. He still wasn’t telling me no, but there was just no reason for turning me away again and telling me he would think about it. Before I left, I pulled out my phone and showed him some of my recent work so that he could see that I was legit, but that didn’t sway him. He said that he would call me if he decided it was ok for me to come back. At least I wouldn’t be wasting my time driving back out there again.
The wind had fully left my sails at this point and the day that I had planned on for a while now was suddenly a bomb. I could see many cars from the road that would have made excellent subjects, but here I was yet again failing to get access to the property. I can only hope that at some point he calls me and gives me the OK to come back out again. This is the hard part about being a decay photographer, and I run into these issues more often than I would like. Fortunately, the majority of folks will let me get some photos which is the only way that I can really keep doing this type of photography.
I was now looking at a full day with great light, but no idea what to shoot. I didn’t have a plan B because I was certain if he was going to say no, it would have been a “no” on the first meeting. I was a little frustrated to be sure, but I was out in a great rural area, and I was sure to find something to photograph. I drove all through Lomax again and tried to hit roads that I didn’t recognize as having driven on before. I saw a lot of potential, but nothing that was ready for a photograph just yet. I didn’t let it get to me and just continued searching around.
It wasn’t long before I saw a red barn on the top of a slight hill that caught my eye. The siding was missing from the roadside showing the bones of the barn. The roofing was also partially missing, but the front of it was still there. It was quite interesting, but it was surrounded by fences. If I was going to photograph it, I would have to get closer and have permission to enter the property. That is easy enough, I knew that I would only need a few minutes to get the barn photographed and that should be an easy sell.
I knocked on the door and was greeted by a nice enough fellow. I let him know what I was wanting and he didn’t miss a breath before responding that he wasn’t interested in helping me out. That was the second denial that I had gotten in a very short amount of time. I’m not used to this at all. I took it stride and thanked him for his time and apologized for bothering him. I was back out on the road looking for something that might actually work out.
My next stop was down several back roads on the dead-end section. I had spotted a blue pickup as I was coming around the corner. It was sitting in front of a barn which was nearly perfect. I pulled into the driveway and saw that the door to the house was open with the storm door remaining closed. This tells me that somebody is home and I was confident that I would get permission here. I got out and knocked on the door. I could hear motion inside, but it didn’t sound like it was coming to the door. I knocked again only louder this time. There was no change to the tempo of the motion that I was hearing. I looked behind the house since that was where the noise was coming from. I saw nothing and heard nothing. I knocked one final time and waited. There was no response. My only other option was to open the door and announce myself, but I really wasn’t going to do that.
Saddened, I went back to the truck and started to get turned around in the driveway. I was hoping that the louder exhaust would grab somebody’s attention and I kept my eyes on the door. There was nobody coming to the door, and I was back on the road once again. That was my third strike so far during the day and I was starting to take it personally. I backtracked a bit because there was a barn that I had seen with a Sinclair sign over the door that interested me. I had passed bit by because there was a large yellow hopper in front of the front door which I didn’t like compositionally. Now that I was running into dead ends, I wanted to see if maybe I could make it work as I was pretty sure I could photograph it from the street.
It was about 10 minutes away and I finally got there and slowed to check the barn out. There was a fence that was blocking just about every angle I could find. The open gate was the one positive that I could see, but that brought my eyes right to that yellow hopper. I could potentially photograph it if I got permission to access the property so I could get in close. I would also be inclined to ask the owner to move the hopper more than likely.
I looked at the house next door and could see that there looked to be people at home. However, I also saw several dogs milling around in the yard which kind of turned me off for that spot. History has taught me that when the dogs are out, either I’m going to get jumped on, or the truck is going to get peed on. I wasn’t in the mood for that, and seeing the open fence between the properties told me that I would be working with dogs running around me. I wasn’t willing to go through all that drama for a photo that I wasn’t even sure would work. I would save that one for another time.
I wasn’t getting desperate by any stretch, but I was starting to think that I needed to find something soon or I just needed to go home and lick my wounds. I ended up on another road that was unfamiliar to me and could see an old house sitting on top of a hill off of one of the side streets. I took the quick turn to go and check it out. There was an enclosed trailer just to the right of the house as well as an old red Ford pickup beside that. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get a good enough angle on the house to give me a good composition because of these things. It was the first scene that I had come across that I could shoot from the road without permission though. That was good enough for me to pull off on the side of the road next to the Neighborhood Watch sign. I figured with the way my luck was going, I would get challenged by several members of the watch group, but it was worth it just to see if I could get a good photo of this house.
Looking at the scene, I wasn’t going to be able to get close enough to use the wide-angle lens, and the telephoto would be overkill for the size of the subject. That left me with the standard zoom which I fit onto the camera as well as a polarizer. I started working the angles so that I could get a clear view of the house without the trailer or truck entering into the frame. I also wanted the house diagonal to my point of view with the rocking chair by the front door in plain view between the upright supports. There was a lot that went into finding the right angle and once I got it, I worked on figuring out the framing of the photo.
The right side was easy because that was limited by the trailer to the right. That left me lots of options on the other three sides of the frame. If I went too close, the photo would look like a simple snapshot, but if I went too wide keeping that right side of the frame static, the composition would be very unbalanced. I had to find that sweet spot where it all worked out as an overall frame. I found a few variations at slightly different distances from the house. I shot each of the variations in hopes that one of them would turn out. I also knew that this scene would work well as a black and white and as a color image.
I had no doubt that stripping the color from the frame would leave this house looking just a little creepy and I was fine with that. In fact, I felt as though that would fit the mood that the house deserved quite well. On the other hand, though, I could see that one of the trees was starting to bloom and there were red blooms along the top of the tree. Thos blooms matched the chimney and provided a different kind of balance to the scene. I liked the idea of the color image as well to show the dormant grass and the new blooms all at the same time while focusing on a house that is slowly caving in on itself. The dichotomy of decay photography in the Spring.
It didn’t take too long before I had the photos that I was after for this house. It wasn’t a fantastic subject, but I was grateful for the opportunity to photograph something. When I was satisfied that I had all the images that I needed of the old house, I loaded the truck back up and went back out to see if I could find something else to photograph. I was slowly moving from the area of Lomax and Roaring River and getting back into the familiar territory of Traphill and Hays. I’ve had tons of luck out in this area over the years and figured that I would welcome that kind of luck on this trek.
As I was driving through one of the areas that I have been several times over the years, I spotted a barn off on the side of the road that I had never shot but had considered it as a subject many times over. It was just off of the road and really close to a power pole with a power line running behind it. For those reasons I had passed on the opportunity to photograph it over the years. It was kind of plain as well which didn’t really give me a good feeling for using it as a subject. However, driving by it today I could see the vibrant greens in the field that had been used for corn recently. Just to the side of the actual field was a slight embankment that had lots of purple flowers growing in the yellowing grass. The colors hit me different than they had in the past. I started to see the scene as beautiful and the barn just gave me something to anchor the photo with.
I got turned around to see if I really wanted to shoot it by checking it out a little more critically. This is the stage when I start to see how the composition would look. I was driving slowly and watching how things would line up. It was actually looking promising thanks to the colors in the field and the textures in the bare trees. The sky also had just enough detail in it to make it slightly interesting. It was worth a try, and I pulled off of the road. I will say that it is times like this that I love my truck and realize that I could never do what I do in a car. The shoulder of the road was a pretty steep embankment and when I pulled off the road, my passenger side went down the hill quickly leaving the left side wheels at the road level. I actually used the ground clearance of the truck to keep from getting hung up on the axles. The angle was such that I could barely keep the door open to climb out of the truck, but I managed. I’m sure there was no semblance of grace at any point during the exit though.
Now that I was parked, I went over to the other side of the road and started to look at the composition that I had picked out. I wanted to use the old corn stalks as leading lines to the barn, and I needed to avoid the power pole if at all possible. Looking at how things were lining up, I figured that the telephoto lens would be the right choice. This was not the time to exercise my goal of shooting more with the wide-angle lens. I needed to minimize the sky while keeping the background restricted to just what was behind the barn. This meant shooting from a distance and using a narrower focal length.
With that in mind, I went back to the truck and grabbed the camera with the telephoto lens attached. I started off with no polarizer because I didn’t really see much need for it at the time. I got the composition set up the way that I figured would work the best. I took a few frames as I dialed in the exposure and depth of field. When I was happy with everything, I realized that the tin roof was a little overexposed due to the glare from the sky. I ran back to the truck and got the polarizer to bring that down a bit. It worked like a treat, and the exposure was looking much better. As a side effect, the green grass in the field was even more saturated than before and I thought that looked great.
The sky was my biggest concern because the clouds were thinning a bit and the sun was starting to make the sky kind of bright. I had not really planned on photographing the sky today and would have wanted a little different look to the sky for photos that included it, but here I was with the second subject that kind of dictated having a sky in the frame. That was how I had shot the first composition, but after thinking about it, I decided that I could just as easily focus on the foreground and push the barn a bit higher in the scene. This is a proven technique for when the sky is not all that fantastic and you would rather eliminate it. I don’t usually shoot this way though because I like having the main subject lower in the frame typically. There was no denying that this scene worked very well with the barn higher and more of the field being shown. It was more interesting than the sky after all.
There was just a little bit of repositioning to get the composition as I wanted it, and it was looking really good on the back of the camera. Something that I figured out while doing these compositions was that the leading lines were going in the wrong direction. They were also causing my eyes to jump over the purple flowers which I did think were important to the frame. I realized that this was going to be a time when I needed to flip the images horizontally so that they read better from left to right. The only things that made that problematic were a “No Trespassing” sign next to the door and a John Deere sign at the top of the barn. Neither of these things were important to the composition, so I knew that I could just remove them easy enough in post to allow me to flip the image.
When I was all done with the processing of the two images, I was glad that I was able to remove those two things easily and flip the barn. It worked so much better for the composition as a whole. In fact, this barn turned out to be much better than I had thought, especially considering that I had overlooked it so many times before. The colors were all working quite well for it, and I liked both the compositions with the sky and the ones without. Initially, it was the one with the sky that had won out and made it through the culling. However, after seeing how pretty it all looked, I went back and tried the one without the sky. I liked that one just as much and they both became keepers. There was something just relaxingly simple about them and I could see them hanging on a wall just about anywhere.
I was just about to call it a day when I decided to see what things would look like if I came in closer to the barn. There was another barn off to the side of it with a nice driveway that snaked through the property. It was another type of leading line, and I wanted to make use of it. There were also some more lines that were introduced in the field which came to an end at the driveway. I was now close enough that my telephoto lens wasn’t going to work so well. I could have done a panorama, but that would have missed out on a large part of the driveway. The better choice was to go wider, but there was no need for the wide-angle lens. The standard lens would go plenty wide to capture what I was seeing here.
I went back to the truck and swapped out the lens before coming back and working on finding the right place to stand. It is easy to assume that a photographer just points the camera and presses the button, and to look at something like this, I’m sure that thought has come to mind already. I actually worked on this composition longer than I did the other one because I needed to really figure out how far back to be so that I could get the rows in the field while keeping the driveway shape nice and pronounced. There was also the matter of how tall the camera needed to be in order to capture things in the right relationship. I needed to keep the barn below the tree level so that it was properly separated from the sky. That elevation also allowed me to have the smaller building on a slightly higher plane. The rows in the foreground completed a triangle by introducing a third point to look at. All of these things had to be taken into consideration when figuring out where to put the camera and how high off the ground it needed to be.
Even with all of this work, I wasn’t sold on the fact that this composition would even work out. The sky was looking blank in the camera, though I knew that it wasn’t blown out at all. The success was going to rest on whether or not I would be able to pull any detail back in sky. I did like the idea of the composition, but I worried that it would be too complex to be effective. All of my worries were dismissed when I did get the RAW file into Lightroom and started to process it. The sky came together very well, and I loved how the composition looked on the larger computer screen. The little building that had gotten lost in the LCD on the camera was showing up very well and it kept the eyes from exiting the screen as they followed the driveway. It was just a very pleasing image for me to look at, and I was glad that I took the extra time to give it a shot.
By this point in the day, I had still been turned away from more locations than I had actually been able to photograph. That didn’t make me happy, but I was fairly happy with the photos that I had managed to capture. If I found nothing else, I would still consider the day a win. With that in mind, I started to head in the direction of home. That took me through Hays and then out to Mulberry and Fairplains where I have had good luck in the past as well. I was pretty much done for the day but was still looking as I drove.
I went down a side street where I knew of a location with an old truck and a couple of VW’s behind a vacant house. I had yet to make contact with the owner but had been told that he does come by occasionally. I was hoping to get lucky today since I was out in this direction. Unfortunately, he was nowhere to be found, and I had to pass on that house once again. I continued on in the same direction that I have taken many times both looking for photos and when driving the Miata around the twisty roads. There are several old barns in the area, and I’ve photographed one of the old chicken houses a couple of times on this road.
I passed that chicken house and saw that it was all roped off and was closed from view. As I rounded the bend, I could see that they had a horse in the pasture which was why they needed to block the openings. That wasn’t a problem because I wasn’t wanting to photograph this spot yet again. I didn’t really have anything specific in mind, but figured if something were to jump out at me, I would see if I could do something.
It was a short distance down the road when I found that thing that jumped out in front of me. Well, not really. The barn didn’t jump or move at all. It was a barn that I had passed dozens of times over the years and had looked at it as a potential photo most of those times. I had dismissed it because it was right next to a large chicken house and there was a road that snaked all around it as it was in a curve. At the apex of the curve was a house with several cars in the driveway which was yet another distraction that I didn’t want in a composition. The barn itself was awesome, but it was usually kind of hard to see from the tall grass that grew around it. Honestly, it didn’t look all that much different from the last times that I had seen it; however, I was in a different mindset this time.
This year has been all about seeing things differently and because of that, I was now looking at this barn differently. The power lines behind it no longer bothered me, and I knew that I could crop the framing in a way that would eliminate the chicken house from view. I could also work the composition in a way that would eliminate the house across the street, and I could actually do all of that with the wide-angle lens. Since this barn was close to the road, I would have no problem getting kind of close to it which is where that lens would work the best.
I got pulled over on the shoulder in one of the few places that was big enough to fit the truck. I grabbed the camera and fit the wide-angle lens on it along with the polarizer. I went in close to the barn and started doing the dance that I do when I am figuring out a composition. With the camera and tripod held up with my left hand, I look through the viewfinder as I move around and change the elevation of the camera up and down. Eventually I found a composition that I thought would work quite well. It was low enough that the road was pretty much out of the view, the house was just out of the frame to the right. There was a bit of trash below a tree right at the edge of the frame, but the low position of the camera put that trash below the ridge of the road. The chicken house was just out of frame to the left and I had enough of the gate to be a good foreground element to the photo.
There was just barely enough detail in the sky to hold the interest in the frame at the top, so I wasn’t upset about including that sky and the treetops. When I have that opportunity, I generally prefer to have the sky in the shot as well as the tops of the trees because it gives the entire scene a sense of scale and depth that I feel are important. The barn was quite dark and in the shadows which made this a difficult exposure to achieve. I could have used a grad filter, but I really didn’t think that I would need that because I had just enough image data in the shadows and highlights to be able to work out a proper exposure without the filter.
I did work the angles quite extensively as I was trying to get the best image possible of this barn. After years of thinking about photographing it, I was finally doing it, and I was liking what I was seeing as the images came up for review on the back of the camera. Just because I found a composition that worked didn’t mean that I was finished trying to improve the shot. I kept moving around and found another view that I liked as well. With the camera up higher, the road was more visible, but I had a more dramatic angle with the fence that I liked even better. The higher elevation of the camera allowed me to keep the 3:2 aspect ratio unlike the lower vantage point image. For that one, I had to crop down to a 16:9 to really fit the composition which worked, but I liked the more open approach to the image even with the road visible.
It was that last composition that I shot which was the one that I decided would be the keeper from this barn. I spent quite a bit of time processing it to get it just right and to have the colors render as I wanted them to. Because of the lighting disparity, the colors were not all that great straight out of the camera, but because I was working on a very overcast day with flat lighting, I was able to push the colors a bit better to arrive at what I was looking for.
Now, I was really happy with how this one turned out and think it might be my favorite from the day. However, I went back to the other one that had been eliminated in favor of this one and started to look at it as a black and white image. It took a bit of trial and error to find a profile that worked for a black and white presentation, but when I landed on one that I thought might work things started to progress rapidly. I did make the crop a 16:9 which gave the scene a cheater pano look that suited the composition because of the low angle of the camera. The rest of the processing was directed at the tonal relationships which started out as rather flat due to the lighting. After working with it for a while I arrived at something that I am equally as happy with as the color image.
These last two brought my total for the day to seven keepers. That is a far cry from what I was expecting to be something like 20 photographs of the many cars that were on the property I started out at. While I am still very disappointed in how that turned out, there is no denying that I did find some worthy subjects to photograph and I only fired off 35 frames during the day. That made for a much quicker day than I had expected. It is nice to be finishing this blog up right at 7pm rather than still working on processing for the next five or so hours. I wasn’t even planning on starting this blog until tomorrow, but with quite a few less photos than anticipated, I am well ahead of the game. As a bonus, you don’t have to worry about a part 2 coming tomorrow. This is it, and I’m done with it.
Thank you for joining me on this trek. I hope that even though it isn’t what I had promised, you have still enjoyed the adventure and the photos. I know there are a lot of you out there who are enjoying the barn photos even more than the old cars, so I’m happy to be able to bring you some new ones that haven’t been seen here before. I’m sure that I will be finding more and more of them in my travels because for some reason they seem to be finding me with more regularity than the old cars that I am usually photographing.
I’m not sure what kind of trek will come next or even when it will happen. Something tells me that I’ll be staying put on Wednesday and recovering. I have been rather busy with photography for about the last week it would seem. Whatever happens, I know I will be back here soon enough with another adventure, so keep your eyes out for that next blog alert. If you haven’t done so already, be sure and subscribe so that you get notifications with every new blog entry. That way you will never miss one or miss any of the new photos.
Until next time…
