Saturday, July 26, 2025
If you don’t live in the Southeast of the US, you may not understand just how miserable hot it can be during this time of year. Sure, we don’t get as hot as say Arizona, but they have what is referred to as “dry heat” which is a bit more tolerable than what we have here. With all the rain that we have been having for the past couple of months, the humidity has been miserable and today was just another day of standing in front of the hair dryer while being misted with boiling water. Now to be fair, I probably would not be complaining this much had my CDO not kicked into overdrive around the middle of the day. CDO you ask…..It is OCD, but with the letters in the correct order. Allow me to elaborate.
With not much on my plate today, I decided to take the Miata out for a little drive this morning while it was still tolerable outside, and by tolerable, I mean 82 degrees when I left. I didn’t really have any idea where I would be going but felt that a nice drive would be fun to enjoy the clear sky and some curvy mountain roads. I ended up in Boone where it was still 79 degrees, but the air was more comfortable. While I was driving around up there, I started to think about doing some photography later in the afternoon when it was not quite as hot. I was looking for ideas for things to photograph, but nothing was really jumping out at me. The sun was harsh, and the lighting was just not all that flattering to anything that I was seeing. After making a lap around ASU, I went back down the mountain to get gas and to head home. As I slowed to make the turn onto Boone Trail from US 421, I spotted an old store that I had photographed several years ago. I remembered stopping to shoot it on the way home when we still lived in Forsyth County and since we have moved out here, I didn’t recall working it again.
As I was driving down Boone Trail, I couldn’t shake the simple compositions that I had done with it before. In order to avoid the power lines, I had done isolations of the door, but that was about all that I could remember about it. The store was still standing in roughly the same condition that I had found it in all those years ago, but it was covered by more vegetation now. I liked the way it looked and every time I pass it, I do consider different ways of photographing it.
It just so happened that I had recently commented on a photo that I had seen posted in a beginner photography group on Facebook. This photo was of an old structure that was in a similar condition to this store, but the photographer had kind of done a quick snapshot type composition of it. I had tried to offer some suggestions on things that could be done to improve the photo because I could see all kinds of potential in the subject. Of course, being a decay photographer, that was to be expected. Now I was thinking about some of the suggestions that I had made to set a mood for his photo and how they could apply here. There was one suggestion that came to mind that I hadn’t mentioned in the comments, and that started a ball rolling in my head.
The idea was to do a little light painting which I don’t think about all that often. I’m not exactly sure why I don’t do it more as I do enjoy the technique and it works around a lot of different problems that I face in the course of daylight photography. It was some of these creative workarounds that I was kind of looking forward to. Providing specific lighting on the scene would allow me to direct the eyes exactly where I wanted them to look and let some of the distractions blend into the shadows. I knew that the building was a light color, and with the sky going dark, I could make that the brightest thing in the frame should I want to include the sky. That actually sounded like a good idea because I knew that I didn’t have any photos of this store showing it in its entirety.
Yep, I was getting excited about this idea. I figured that after I got gas, I would start to really flesh the idea out in my head and decide if I wanted to go out this evening or not. I knew that there was a moderate chance of rain starting between 2 and 3pm which was going to last until about 5pm or so. It should be all cleared out by sunset when I would need to be out there. It was only 12:15 at this point and I was ready to get home because it was really quite hot now. There were some clouds moving in which helped block the sun from beating down on me while I was driving topless.
The car….not me.
After I got gas, I was headed back up the road to home and when I was just over two miles from home, I saw three raindrops on the windshield, then a few more, then it started to really fall. Now, I’m a little peculiar with the Miata and over the last five years, it has not seen a rainy roadway. That is until I was going to get it inspected earlier this month. A surprise rainstorm caught me on the way to the appointment. It was the first time that the car had been on a wet road and that absolutely killed me. The very next day, I had the car up on jackstands with the wheels off washing it from the top to the bottom as well as the undercarriage and suspension to get all the nasty off of it. When that was all done, I waxed it again for the second time in a month. Here we were again driving into a rain squall that wasn’t expected and came without warning.
I dipped into a drive thru to determine if this was going to be a quick shower that I could wait out, or if I was going to get wet again. It looked like it was going to be here for a little while, so I raised the top and slowly drove the remaining couple of miles home in the rain. I kept the speeds slow enough that I didn’t kick up any significant spray to keep the underside cleanish. When I got home, I put it in the garage and surveyed the results of driving it in the rain. It was soaked, but not much dirt was kicked up which was good. It was still raining, but it was slacking up. After about 15 minutes it was a drizzle and I decided to go outside to wash it while everything was still wet and nothing had stuck to any of the surfaces.
Minute after I started washing it, the clouds gave way to full sun and there was no shade to be had because of the time of day. It got real hot, real quick and this was another thing that I don’t like to do…wash a vehicle in the direct sunlight. I had no choice, and if I were to get the dirt off without a major undertaking like I did last time, I was going to need to get it now before it dried up underneath of the car. With it being in full sun, I had to work fast to avoid water spots which amplified the heat of the day. After an hour, I was done with the wash, and the car was finally dry again. I wasn’t, but that didn’t matter as much.
I got it back into the garage and slowly finished it up until around 3pm. I was hungry, hot, and tired. I was also still thinking about the old store and getting a few photos of it. Normally after getting that kind of sweaty, I would be getting a shower, but I knew if I did that, I would be in for the day. Instead, I put the clothes that I had been wearing earlier back on which at least were dry and resigned myself to watching some television as the next few hours passed by.
I checked the weather at 8pm and found that there were no further showers expected until much later in the evening. Oddly enough, the rain that was expected during the afternoon never showed up. Just the sun which made washing the car very difficult. I saw no reason not to go out and give the store a try, so I grabbed some shoes and my camera before heading down the road. It was a little cooler than it had been, but it was still registering in the upper 80’s as the sun was hitting the horizon. I knew that the humidity was going to be awful but the fact that the truck fogged over the second I left the garage kind of surprised me. It took about a mile before all the windows cleared off. I realized at that point that I really should have put the camera in the bed of the truck hours ago, because it had been sitting in the studio where the air conditioning had been running. This is something that I am usually pretty good at thinking of, but I was so focused on getting the Miata cleaned up that I just never considered it.
The store was only nine miles from home which put me there in pretty quick fashion. I could see that the sun was right there at the horizon below the mountains, so I had timed this pretty well. I was just hoping that the camera would clear off in time for the brief period of light that I had to work with during blue hour. When I pulled the camera bag out, it felt soaked from the humidity which was not a good sign. I had unzipped it before I left the house to try and get it acclimated a bit quicker, but the camera was actually sweating. Yes, it was that humid and that hot. The camera and lenses were cool to the touch, and all of them were beading up water.
All I could do was pull out the camera and the lens that I was planning on using to get them away from the cool bag so that they could acclimate quicker. I walked over to the old store and started to look at the angles to try and see how I was going to photograph it. I knew that I wanted the corner with the door to be a main focal point, and I had planned on using a wide angle lens to provide some perspective distortion to really enlarge that section of the building within the frame. Knowing that, I found the right place to set the camera up when it was ready. I was going to try and compose an image that included all of the building as well as the sky. In order to do that, I had to decide on whether or not to include the power pole to the right. That was going to have to be a choice made when I could see through the camera.
I went back to the truck and started to dry the two pieces off with a towel that I keep in my bag. When it started condensing slower, I mounted the 16-35mm lens to the body with hopes that I didn’t let too much moisture inside of the body. I wasn’t able to see through the viewfinder because of the fogging, and the front element was totally fogged over. I waited some more, and continued to wipe things down for about 15 minutes.
It was getting close to time to start making exposures and I still needed to finalize the composition which meant that I was going to need the camera ready very soon. I did a final wipe of all the surfaces and glass before taking it over to the spot where I was planning on shooting. I dropped the camera down very low to amplify the perspective distortion as planned and moved it in close to the building. I played around with the positioning and found that the building was looking good at 16mm. I probably could have used the 14mm prime in my bag, but I had this lens dried out and I didn’t have time to dry another one.
What I was starting with was a composition that omitted the power pole, but it was causing a very extreme angle that didn’t quite sit right with me on the far right of the building. By backing up slightly, I included that power pole, which then made it to where I didn’t need to worry about the lines going through the trees. The building also was at a more pleasing angle on that right side. I ended up committing to that composition and that was what I shot for the rest of the time there.
I started out with a normal exposure on the scene to start tracking the light. I liked the composition and figured that there would be a point during the darkening sky that I would be able to get a good black and white image out of this. Ultimately, though, I was looking for the ambient light to look right with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/8 with an ISO of 200. I knew that this would work well for the flashlight that I brought with me. This was just a basic Maglite with an incandescent bulb because I wanted to bring in a warm light to the overly blue scene.
When the light got to that point, the flashlight was barely showing up on the building, but I did like how it looked without the extra light added to the scene. It was one of those exposures that turned into the first keeper of the evening. Everything balanced out in tonality with the ambient light over the scene. It still wasn’t what I was after though, so I stuck around as the light continued to drop. A few minutes later, the building was dark enough that it was picking up the light from the Maglite. I was having to work quickly to get the whole building lit up during a 30 second exposure. This was the part of the equation that I wasn’t sure quite how it would work out. I could see the ambient exposure for the sky at 30 seconds based on the light meter, but the minute I went with a longer exposure, I lost that ability and had to guess at where the sky would end up in luminance values.
After several 30 second exposures with different rates of lighting the building, I realized that I needed more time. With the light levels dropping, I saw that there was an opportunity to lengthen the exposure and keep the sky reasonably dark. I moved into Bulb mode and just left the shutter open while I took my time to light the entire building to see how long it would take without rushing. When I came back to the camera and closed the shutter, ending the exposure, I was just a tick over a minute. The result looked pretty good in the image review with the sky holding that deep blue color that I was after. The building wasn’t quite as dominant as I was hoping as the light wasn’t as warm as I had hoped. I was going to need it to be a little darker for the flashlight to have a stronger effect.
A few more exposures and the building was looking good, but the foreground was going too dark. I needed to add a little light to that so that the building wasn’t just floating in a sea of darkness. I added a swipe of light across the ground during the next exposures and found that to work well. One thing about light painting is that you never get the same result twice. This meant that even though I was getting close to what I wanted, I still needed to keep trying because eventually, I would nail what I was after.
That moment happened on the 20th exposure of the evening, and the 13th using the flashlight. When I looked at the image on the screen, I was confident that it checked all the boxes I asked of it. The exposure had crept up to a total of 72 seconds which allowed me time to light everything that I needed to. Looking at the fading light, I was not optimistic about any further exposures working any better because the sky was getting darker by the second. Blue hour was essentially over at this point, and it was just dark. While this would be fine for a smaller subject, something as large as this building was going to need some more ambient light than what I was seeing through the camera. I was done, and I was happy.
When I got home, I looked at the time and realized that I had left an hour and ten minutes beforehand. In that time, I had driven out and back to the location, allowed the camera to dry and shot 20 frames of long exposures. Not bad for an evening’s work, but I was feeling the effects of the day. My back was sore, and I was tired. For what had started off to be a relaxing day, I had been busy for pretty much the entire day with the exception of about two and half hours when I was watching television waiting on the sun to go down.
It is nice to do this kind of photography this time of year because you do get to avoid the extreme heat of the day. Unfortunately, the rainstorm that I drove through earlier dictated that I experience that hot part of the day too. I’m ready for Winter and the cooler months. I can still do light painting then, but my fingers typically go numb with the chill of night. The tradeoff is that I can potentially do a session of light painting and still get done before dinner time. I’ve never been a fan of going out for a shoot after 8pm because I know it will end up with me sitting at the computer typing away well after midnight. In this case, it is 12:20 currently which is much earlier than I was expecting. I was almost certain that I would be finishing up at 2am based on when I got home. I’m not complaining that I was able to get done early, and I’m actually quite happy about that. I’m tired and ready to get a shower. The bed is calling my name, and I am ready to stretch my back out. I guess the positive spin for the day is that I don’t have to worry about washing the bugs off of the Miata now which was going to be on my to-do list in the coming days. That is now all taken care of, and the car is ready for the next fun drive that hopefully won’t include rain showers.
Thank you for joining me on this quick evening trek, and for listening to me moan and groan about a situation that might only upset 1% of the world. I realize that most everyone will drive a car in the rain and not think twice about it. Having done professional detailing for as long as I did when I was in school, I just can’t drive something dirty, especially when it was purchased as a fair-weather vehicle. If you think about it though, it is my attention to those kinds of details that allows me to be the photographer that I am. I really strive for perfection, not necessarily technical perfection, but perfection in communicating my ideas through the artistic medium of photography.
If either of these photos strike a chord with you, please consider purchasing a print to hang on your wall. Every photo that I capture and share here is created with that end use in mind. While most of my photos are destined to live only online, I always hope that each and every one of them will get printed and displayed on a wall somewhere. When you buy a print, you are supporting me and my art. You are also making it possible for more of these treks to happen. The more photos I shoot, the better I will get, so let’s find out just how good a photographer I can be. If you would like to learn more about how to paint with light, I have done workshops in the past dealing with this technique and am happy to do a mentorship session with you which will cover even more than the workshop would. All it takes is a quick consultation on the phone to determine if a mentorship with me will be beneficial to you. Let’s look at the options and see if we are a match.
Until next time….
