Tuesday, August 4, 2026
While this is the first trek of the month, you are probably getting tired of hearing from me after my latest four-part blog series with a Behind the Camera intermission to break it up. The irony of those two blogs might become apparent as we go through this trek, so if you haven’t read through those, go ahead and give them a skim. Part of the frustration in this trek is directly related to that last Behind the Camera believe it or not. There is no actual link, but the reason that I was out this morning has a lot to do with what I have just written about. You see, last week I was approached through my Yelp profile about doing some family photos in Banner Elk. After talking with the client, it was decided that I would go out there this morning while all of the family was in one place. This came about during a lengthy consultation call with the client. We talked about wardrobe and the fact that this was going to get put together very quickly to accommodate the schedules of the family. That family, by the way, included as many as 19 members which would be broken up into five different subgroups. Their intention was to do these outside at the rental cabins that they were staying in which were each too small to house all of the members at the same time. This meant that I was going to have to work outside with them.
While this is not normally a problem, the weather forecast was calling for rain through the entire week, and it was going to be a matter of luck to be able to do this without the rain. Regardless, the light was going to be flat and low which meant that I was going to have to bring strobes. For the size of the family, I was going to need some pretty high-powered studio strobes and two umbrellas to get the large group lit well. If this was going to be in the rain, I was going to need to have the strobes protected from the rain with plastic bags. Of course, I wasn’t going to leave the family out in the rain and had plans of putting them on the porch, so they were dry while I bore the brunt of the weather. This was not going to be a simple session, and I was expecting to be there for roughly two-hours with at least twice that spent in front of the computer processing the images.
The client seemed to be happy with what I was suggesting and didn’t seem to balk at the price which I did keep conservative considering what I was going to have to do to provide the level of service that I was promising. She said that after presenting it to the rest of the family and seeing if they wanted to split it four ways, she would be back in touch with me, but her phone would be off until Sunday or Monday. That wasn’t going to give me much time to get packed and prepared, but I bent over backwards to accommodate her needs as part of my client centered approach. Even though I was trying to work with her, she didn’t give me the respect of a return call to say that they had decided to go with a different option or had decided to forego the family photos. Either way, by the end of Monday, I still hadn’t heard back from her at all. I was glad that I hadn’t started pulling stuff out to get it packed in the truck.
I had also gotten a call Monday afternoon from a business that was needing some photography work for a project that they were doing at one of the local High Schools. After talking with him, I found out that they were needing a high-resolution image of Rendezvous Mountain that could be done in black and white to cover a 9x18ft wall. We arrived at a working figure for my services, and I found out that he needed the image by the end of the week. Normally this would not be a problem, especially because the location that I would be shooting was less than five miles from home. However, the week’s weather was pretty much rain and storms every day. Based on what he was wanting, I was going to actually need a blank sky with detail in the mountain. Based on how the scene was facing, I was looking for a sunny morning between 9:30 and 10:30am when the sun would be raking across the face giving that depth that I wanted. I would just let the blue sky go white in the final image which I hate to do, but that was what was needed.
Since my Tuesday morning shoot fell through, I looked at the weather and saw that the rain was holding off and that there was going to be a full overcast sky. Since I was looking at doing the large photo in black and white, I could cheat with the blank sky and add contrast into the mountain to achieve the same look. It was worth going out there to see if I could make it work out. I ate breakfast kind of quick and got the truck loaded before heading out to the spot where I was going to get the photo.
When I arrived, I found that the tops of the mountains were covered by the low clouds. The light wasn’t terrible on the scene, but without the full view of the mountains, it was pointless to get the photo shot. This photo was more than likely going to be a seven to ten image stitched panorama so that I could get the most resolution out of the scene as possible. There was still a chance that the clouds would raise up a little as I only needed a few hundred feet of altitude to make this work out.
In order to stay out in case that happened, I started to think about doing some scouting in the area. I had recently gotten a tip about a Dodge truck that had been moved from the tree line to the middle of a fenced property which I was familiar with. However, this tip included an owner location which was going to be invaluable to gain access to the property. I needed to look at this truck a bit closer to really see if there was something that I could do with it. Since it wasn’t too far away, I headed out there to take a look.
The truck was looking really good, but the background was terrible and I wasn’t really in the mood to do isolations. With it looking like it was going to rain at any moment, I didn’t want to waste an ask to access the property just yet anyway. I needed to ponder my options before I committed to trying for the access. My main purpose in being out was the client work anyway and I needed to get back out there to see if the clouds had lifted up any.
When I got there, I found that the light was still decent, but the clouds were even lower now. It wasn’t looking like this was going to work. I was also really not liking the scene. I had seen it many times over the years and never really felt compelled to photograph it. I was now expected to photograph it in a way that just didn’t appeal to my normal style which made it even more difficult to commit this kind of time to. However, as a professional photographer, I have to set my own feelings aside to provide the client with what they are wanting.
I decided to go and see if there was something that I could photograph for a few minutes as I waited for one more chance to get the mountain photographed. To be fair, the conditions were the kind of conditions that I really do like working in. Unlike the bright sunny conditions of my time at Outlawed Restorations, I was able to work in pretty much any direction without having to worry about shadows. In some directions the sky was actually starting to look rather interesting which was actually a bad thing for the mountain. It did give me hopes of finding something else to photograph though.
Oddly enough though, I was missing the sunny conditions that I had been working in because of how successful that trek had been. Even though these were my preferred conditions, it just felt kind of flat. I guess I had been gearing myself up for a large family photo and then doing a landscape scene which had me in a completely different creative space from where I needed to be at this moment. While I still wanted to stay close by, I started heading out to a few areas that I thought might have something interesting to work with in the light. The places that I went by didn’t really trip my trigger though with the cloudy sky above. It was really strange to me that I was missing the sunny weather which is terrible light to work in for the most part.
Since I wasn’t finding anything to shoot, I started back towards the mountain to see if the clouds had lifted off of it yet. When I got there, I found that the scene was still very hazy and the detail that I needed in the mountain just wasn’t there. I continued down the road to get turned around to go home but ended up looking at a barn that was off on the side of the road. I’ve shot this place a couple of times since it is just a couple of miles from the house. The most successful time was in the snow shortly after moving into the area. Starting last year, I had wanted to come back and get a more updated photo of the barn, but there had always been a logging truck parked next to the barn blocking the view that I wanted. I had kind of forgotten about getting another photo of it but seeing it under the soft sky that was overhead gave me pause to reconsider that plan.
The sky was looking really nice above the barn, though it was still kind of understated. The light was flat over the area and the only thing that I really didn’t care for was the white fence that had been put up a few years ago around the outside of the property. If I was going to photograph this barn, I would have to shoot over that fence and get the barn in a wider field of view. I knew in the past that I had tightened up the crop using my standard zoom to avoid the power poles that were positioned behind the barn, but object removal has come a long way since I’ve shot this barn last. I wanted to see what I could do with the wide-angle zoom which hasn’t been used here yet.
Once I got parked on the shoulder, I grabbed my camera with the wide lens on it as well as a polarizer. I moved in right to the edge of the fence and got the camera elevated above the top rail so that I had a clear view of the barn. I made sure that the power pole was in a position that I could remove it without too much difficulty. It was then a matter of determining if I wanted to focus more of the attention on the sky or the grass. There were visual benefits to both compositions, and they both set different tones to the image.
I also spent a few frames trying to include part of the fence and the gate, but those seemed to be too complex visually speaking. It was the earlier photos that were done from the edge of the property right over the fence that I found to be the strongest out of the whole bunch. That bunch of photos was only 12 frames which seems like a lot, but I was really working on getting things positioned in different areas so that I had a better chance of removing the power poles and the associated lines with a minimal amount of fuss which meant slight movements side to side with the camera to give myself options on where I wanted the poles to be.
I decided on the two best images of the dozen frames that I shot and had one of them where the barn was situated more at the bottom of the frame and one where it was higher up in the frame. The first one, with the barn lower in the frame had a feeling of loneliness and desolation that I felt was perfect for a black and white presentation with a little more contrast added to the sky. The one where the barn was higher in the frame with more of the grass showing seemed to fit a color presentation quite well as the red and green worked very well together. There was much less processing done to the sky in the color one because I wanted to keep that sky nice and soft to contrast with the textures of the grass in the field. The wetness of things really helped to saturate the colors even though there wasn’t much sunlight on the ground.
After about ten minutes of working the scene, I packed the camera away again and decided to start back to the mountain view to see if things were looking any better. It was not even a mile up the road and when I got there, I found that the sky was breaking up and the sun was starting to hit the face of the mountain. Ironically, this was more to my liking as far as the photo went, but I still didn’t care for the scene. The interest in the sky that did appeal to me was ruining the photo that I needed to capture here. The sunlight on the mountain did tell me that my time estimate for the shot was spot on, so I knew I was on the right track if I had a sunny morning to work with later in the week. The sky was just full of too many clouds and would complicate the image that I was hired to capture.
The sun was also getting too high in the sky for what I was going to need if the clouds did break up completely, so it was time to head home. I would have to try the mountain another day. At least I did get to try it this morning when I was supposed to be up to my eyeballs in family photos over an hour away from home. It was a strange day all the way around. I had some of the best conditions I could imagine for photography and was in the mood to capture photos, yet I only managed to shoot one scene and get two photos from it while I had to abandon my primary idea because the weather was not right for it. I still think that I need a fully sunny day for the mountain photo which is just not like me at all. Usually, I would have jumped at the chance to capture that scene as a moody image under a cloudy sky like this. However, that just wouldn’t work for the client, and since I wasn’t in love with the scene, I didn’t bother to do anything with it even under really good weather conditions.
This was one of those days when it really hit me just why photographers charge what they do. I was all prepared to go and do family photos in this kind of weather, on short notice, and I had a plan on how to do them very well. That service was going to come at a premium, even though I discounted it down from what I really felt that the job would be worth. It wasn’t worth the price to the clients though, but that is because they didn’t really know what all was going to go into the process. That is the state of photography these days unfortunately. They could find someone else that had no real idea how to work with the weather and light to snap some photos. Maybe if they were lucky, they would understand how to work with a group that size without having to rely on AI to open eyes, or swap faces between photos because of expressions needing to be changed. Maybe the client just didn’t care about any of that and set a cellphone on a rock to get a picture of everyone. Whatever the case, I wasn’t their choice and that is fine.
On the other hand, I have a different client that is expecting me to deliver a very….VERY large image file within a week’s time. That photo is dependent 100% on the weather which I am having to work with in order to get the image that he is expecting. The price that I quoted wasn’t a problem at all because he already has tried to make this happen without the help of a professional photographer. He’s realized that to get what he is expecting, there is going to be a cost associated with it. I’m not sure when this is going to happen, but at some point during the week, I will get the image that he is after, even if I have to really work the image in post to arrive at the look. These are the things that go on behind the scenes with a photographer. It is not just about buying a camera and pressing a button. Anyone can do that. Being a professional photographer is all about being able to work with different clients who want different things and being able to meet or exceed their expectations. It also means that when all of your original plans fall through and you can’t get the photos that you had been thinking about getting, you can still turn around and create meaningful photos that work with the conditions that you have.
Thank you for joining me on today’s trek. I really hadn’t planned on doing any blogging today since it was supposed to be all client work, but here we are. Depending on how the mountain photo turns out, I might be back here later on this week talking about that process since I’ve kind of gone into detail about it here. At any rate, I hope that you enjoyed these two photos which constitute Plan C for the day, and if you are interested in a print of either of them, I’m happy to match you up with the perfect print for your space.
Until next time….
