Wednesday, June 7, 2023
So, there I was driving down the road while taking the scenic route to Greensboro in the Miata. I was kind of enjoying the day, but the smoke from the wildfires up North was starting to make the sky a little hazy. Even though I had been on this road many times, it has been a while since I’ve taken this route which meant that I was looking to see what had changed. Early on in the trip, I passed by a repair shop that is about five miles from home that occasionally has interesting cars parked around it. This time, I noticed an El Camino parked on the side of the building that had not been there before. It was not in a good place for an overall composition, but I did like the patina on it. It would be easy enough to return to at a later date to photograph. Most of the trip didn’t really turn up anything else new until I got into East Bend. This is an area that has a lot of potential for me, and there are occasional compositions that turn up.
The first place that I spotted was a motorcycle repair shop that occasionally has something old and rusty to look at. This time, I saw a Corvair parked in front of one of the buildings which kind of caught my eye. It was a 4-door car, so not really a great body style, but Corvairs are kind of hard to come by which made this one interesting to me. There was also an old black Crown Vic that reminded me of my days as a Police Officer parked on the side of the lot. I didn’t really like the composition on the Corvair with how it was parked, but it was worth considering as I continued my drive for the day. A couple of miles beyond that was an old auto dealer which has been closed for a while. There was an old Chevy tow truck parked out front which I couldn’t remember if I had seen there before or not. It was catching my eyes this time because there was a good deal of rust on the top surfaces which kind of matched the plywood doors to the main building. The best part of it was the fact that the roof was caving in. Yep, this one was right up my decay alley. For the most part, the truck was off to itself which meant that finding a composition would not be too difficult. This one was looking really promising but didn’t look good under the bright light of midday.
There was nothing else of note between East Bend and Greensboro. When I got done getting the car inspected, I headed back home the same way to check things out from the other direction. Each of the locations seemed to have some promise, and each of them would probably look much better under a dreary sky. That got me thinking about the weather forecast. I was doing the Greensboro trip on this day because there was no chance of rain, but the next day was a different story. I remembered seeing that there was a fair chance of rain all day, which would mean clouds through most of the day.
Not wanting to push my luck and have something move or the scene change, I wanted to act quickly with these three subjects. Well, actually two of them because I had not really given the El Camino much thought since it was not in a good position for an overall composition. I knew that the chances that any of these vehicles could be gone soon was pretty high. There was also the chance that another vehicle or some other element could end up blocking the view or crowding the composition as well. One thing that I have learned over the years is that decay subjects are not forever. If I wait too long to shoot them, I will miss out. Since the weather was fitting what I was envisioning for these subjects, I decided to plan on going back out there with the camera.
Looking at the hourly forecast, the rain was going to be starting up around 8:30 or 9am and go through the rest of the day. If I was going to have a chance of staying dry, I was going to need to get an early start. My plan was to get up at 6am and be on the road by 6:30 which would get me there by 7:30. The idea was that I would have an hour to work the two locations which should be sufficient since I wasn’t going to get in close without permission.
When the clock rang, I really didn’t want to get up and it took me a minute or two to even look at the weather. I was hoping that the rain either had been pushed back several hours, or that it was raining now. There was no such luck. The rain was supposed to get started at 9 and go through most of the day. I might have a bit of time in the evening without the rain, but the sun would be on the wrong side of the subjects which was not favorable. I went ahead and got up to get started with my day. I was on the road when I planned, and the conditions were looking great. The sky was not all that interesting, but the light quality was really good. That was all that I really needed. I took the fast and direct route to get there to shave a couple of minutes off of the time and allow me those extra few minutes to work the scenes.
I passed by the Corvair first, and I took a few mental notes about how I might want to shoot it. I wasn’t holding out much hope because it was offset on the building it was parked in front of, and jus to the other side of the building was a purple road tractor which really didn’t fit the vibes of the Corvair. I might be able to do something with it, but I wanted to stop at the sure thing first. It was only a couple of miles down the road and when I pulled in I was happy to see that nothing had changed from yesterday. The truck was still sitting there in front of the building like I remembered it. I took a few minutes to assess the scene and decided that I wanted to keep the writing in the window as part of the composition because I felt it was important to the story. I liked the covered bay doors and the roof that was caving in. The sky was not something that I really wanted but felt that I would probably need it to provide the scale for the scene as well as giving it a good background.
Not wanting to get in too close to the business, I chose my long lens and a polarizer. I started to frame up compositions from the shoulder of the road. I got a couple that I kind of liked, but it just seemed very stagnant when I looked at the image reviews. I kept trying to tweak the composition and found that I was liking it the closer I came to the truck and the higher the camera was positioned. I eventually got to the 70mm end of the lens and decided that I needed to go wider to get the look that I was after. I went back to the truck and grabbed my 24-70mm lens and swapped that in. I was able to get a little closer which I felt comfortable with since I was still about 40 feet away and standing in the middle of the parking lot.
This gave me the angles that I wanted on the truck and I was able to settle down to the business of positioning the different elements within the frame. I had to make sure that the window writing was separated from the truck. There was a section of gutter that was hanging down which I chose to place along the A pillar of the cab for simplicity. I wanted the pully on the tow boom to be within the door opening, and tried to get the chimney away from the tree. Since I was shooting much wider, I was including the sky now which forced a slightly different exposure from what I had been using with the telephoto lens since it cropped out the sky. By underexposing the scene slightly, I was able to capture just enough detail in the sky to make me happy. There was no need for any grad filters here since I wanted to maintain the exposure on the trees.
The first few of these exposures, I didn’t have the trees in the frame to the right which affected the balance of the frame in a negative way. By opening things up to include the trees to the right, I had a nice frame for the sunken roof as well as a visual barrier to the eyes trying to leave the photo to the right. It was all coming together at this point. This was the composition that I committed to and made some small adjustments here and there to the exposure and focus points until I was sure that I had it right. When I reached that point, I looked at my watch and saw that I had been here for just 30 minutes. I was running right on schedule which was good on a morning where I was trying to beat the rain.
With no real need of spending any more time here, I loaded the camera in the truck and went back to the Corvair. I pulled into the parking lot and started to really look at the scene to try and figure out how I wanted to shoot it. The road tractor was more in the way than I thought it would be. I don’t recall seeing it the day before, but it was really spoiling things for me now. I looked at both sides and determined that I just wasn’t going to be able to get the shot that I really wanted which included the house on blocks behind the car. I was going to have to figure out something else. While I was thinking about, I moved over to where the Crown Vic was parked. As I was getting close to it, I wondered if it was an old Greensboro car because it sure looked like one of ours. When I got to it, I could make out the remains of the sticker on the door which read “City of Greensboro”, and I saw the remains of “Greensboro Police” on the trunk lid. There was a trailer hitch and a power outlet on the rear bumper which made this more than likely a Sergeant’s car. It was a trip down memory lane for me, but I couldn’t stay focused on that car because I didn’t want to shoot a photo of it.
I thought about using the long lens and shooting the car from across the street. I pulled out and went over to the Dentist’s office across the street and thought about how this looked. There was a bit more promise to this angle, so I parked and got out. I walked over to the spot where I would need to shoot from and saw that the frame would work from this distance. There was drizzle starting to fall, so I didn’t have long to get this composition put together though. I went back to the truck and grabbed the long lens with a polarizer before returning to the spot I had been standing. I had my ball cap with me to shield the polarizer from the rain drops, but the rain seemed to stop when I got back into position.
I framed up the shot and realized that I was 200mm and was getting way too much of the scene at the distance that I was at. I thought about using the teleconverter, but thought it would be quicker to cross the street and work from closer in. When I got across the street, I realized that my ideal position would have been in a travel lane. Since this was a main road, and it was rush hour, I knew that this was not a possibility at all (See Toni, I can make responsible decisions for my safety with a camera). I just moved around until I found something that kind of worked for me. It was a strange crop where I cut the windows and door of the house to keep the main attention on the car. I tried various apertures to see what worked the best. Just nothing was really singing for me though. I wasn’t really liking anything that I was shooting, and I was shooting a lot of different angles on the car. Sadly, there were negatives with everything that I was coming up with.
I probably shot three times the amount of composition variations with this car than I did with the tow truck. I thought I had something that would work after about 30 minutes, and when I started to fine tune that composition the rain started falling again, but much heavier this time. I covered the filter up and dashed back across the street to the truck. I put the camera away and just hoped that I had something that would work out.
When I got the images home, I culled through everything and ended up with two that I wanted to look at further. Both of them were shot at f/4 and had slightly different compositions. When I started to really narrow things down, I was zoomed in and found that the sharpness was not what I would expect from the lens in either case. The image was just too soft for me. I ended up tossing those two as well, and just had two images to edit from the day (the second one I haven’t talked about yet). When I was done, I came back to the Corvair photos and started to go back through them again. Several of the earlier ones with a narrower aperture turned out much sharper and had a workable look to them. I found a composition that was comparable to the one that I had selected to edit and started to work with it.
I looked at this one as a black and white as well as a color image but was having a hard time finding the right presentation for it. I ended up leaning towards the color image and eventually landed on a vintage color profile that got me close to where I wanted to be with the color rendition. After a while of working on the image, I had a photo that I rather liked of the old Corvair sedan. I think what really made it work was the color of the floor on the porch since the warm yellow tones went very well with the tealish paint on the car. The bit of rust on the upper surfaces helped with that warm tone complimenting color as well. The rest of the image was almost free of color which made the car stick out perfectly. I think what really drew me to the scene was the AAA tag on the front that even said Winston-Salem. It set the location for me as well as an indication of care for the car even though Ralph Nader claimed that this car was unsafe at any speed. It was humorous to look at this car, having survived some sixty years in pretty good condition parked in front of a building that was supported by cinder blocks which also looked to be in good condition. Sometimes we don’t need safety for longevity. it would appear.
Anyway, I had spent my 30 minutes here and the rain was now pouring. The two locations that I set out to photograph, had been captured and saved to the memory cards of the camera. I was satisfied and ready to make my way home. I started to think about the El Camino again, but for the life of me couldn’t remember where I had seen it. In hopes of rolling past it, I took the long way home and looked in all the areas that I thought it might be. By the time I got back to North Wilkesboro, I assumed that I had passed it and missed it. I stopped to get gas, and then ended up on the back road home. As I turned onto the main stretch, I remembered exactly where I had seen the car. It had escaped my memory because of how it was parked on the side of the building. I had dismissed it as a composition and just never kept it in my mind.
When I arrived at the shop, I noticed that the doors were all shut and it appeared to not be opened for business today. This was not abnormal because it seems to operate sporadically at best. I pulled down the side road and started to look at the El Camino in detail. There was a power pole right behind it, the building only provided a background for about 2/3 of the car and then there was other clutter behind the building that didn’t work for the car. In short, there was really no composition at all for this car to be photographed. However, I did like the patina of the front and really wanted to do something with that.
Figuring that I could shoot an isolation or two of the car, I turned my attention to the leading edge of the hood and the headlights which were specific to the ’69 bodies. I noticed that the el Camino emblem was still on the finish panel which sealed the deal for wanting to shoot an isolation of the car. I parked and grabbed my long lens since the bumper was really shiny and the chances of me making a cameo in the photograph were pretty high. With the long lens, I could get further away from the chrome and hopefully remove myself from the photo.
I went over and started to frame up some different compositions from a distance away. They were good, but nothing special at all. I needed to get more diagonal lines into the frame to make this work like it needed to. In order to do that, I had to get in closer and get the camera higher. The closer I got, the more chance I had of ending up in the photo, so I had to be careful about that. I was also seeing that the bumper was becoming overpowering in the composition when I included it all. To address that fact and my increasing size in the bumper, I just cropped through it giving just enough of the bumper to frame the grill and lights in the same fashion that the painted surfaces did to the top. It gave a nice diagonal aspect to the composition and just the bit of visual drama that the photo was in need of.
Once I landed on the composition, I played around with the depth of field to make sure that I had plenty of options to work with when I got the images home. When I finished up with them, I saw that I had 40 frames captured which represented just three different base compositions that I had shot. If I was lucky, I would have three photos to work with out of these 40, but that would have to mean a successful capture of each subject that I shot. I would have to wait until I got home to figure that part out.
In the end, I did get the three images that I was hoping for, but only by a stroke of luck with the Corvair images. For a quick morning out with the camera, I was happy to get these three new images added to the portfolio. I hope that you have enjoyed looking at them and reading about the trek. If any of these speak to you, please consider ordering a print for your own walls. That is the best way to be able to enjoy my photography, and it is a sure fire way to be able to see it on a regular basis.
For those that have been enjoying my landscapes here lately, don’t worry. I’ll be getting back to those soon enough. I just knew that I was going to have to act quickly with these subjects because they could be gone tomorrow. I was lucky to have the weather that I did today, and the dry times that were needed to get the images captured. Look for more treks to come as the weather works out for landscapes in the coming days.
Until next time…
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