Thursday, June 20, 2024
There comes a time in a creative slump that you just have to go out there and fake it until you make it. After these last couple of months where I haven’t really felt like going out for my own photos and have lacked the creative drive to find the time, I’ve started to get to that point where I knew that I needed to do something to get myself back on track. There is nothing wrong with taking a creative vacation, but I was starting to get too complacent with not going out. Fortunately, I have had some other photographic projects going on during the time which has kept my photography skills and editing in place, but I needed more than just to maintain things. I’ll get into more of what has been going on in the next Behind the Camera which will be out on July 1st, so watch for that.
The urge to create has been slowing coming back to me over the last week or so as I have been getting all of my spring chores finished up around the house and with the cars. Not wanting to waste that urge, I started looking for a day that I could go out and then what I might want to photograph during that time. I was thinking about doing some landscape work for the quiet of it all, but didn’t think that I would be able to connect on the level that I would want. I didn’t want another day of forced creativity as I had in Charleston last week. This left me with looking for decay subjects or maybe a photo walk around a different type of area. As I considered the options, I felt that I would have a better chance of getting back into the mindset I wanted to be if I looked for some old cars. This would also help as I have a client shoot coming up next week with two classic cars that I will be photographing. While his are in great shape, just dealing with the shapes of cars would certainly help me in preparing for that shoot.
Looking at the weather, it was looking like the clouds were going to be better in the Jeffersons just up the mountain, but Yadkin County was also looking promising as an alternative. I started to look through some notes that I had about some areas in Jefferson to work through and started to get a gameplan in place. It was nothing grand or anything and I wasn’t expecting to come back with a lot of photos, but it was hopefully going to be enough to jumpstart that urge to go out and hunt more photos once again.
As I went to sleep on Wednesday night, I saw that the clouds were thinning to the North of us and were looking to be much better in the late morning in Yadkin County. My plan was to get up around 7am and be on the road around 9 so that I could be at a location around 10 which was when the split-level clouds were supposed to arrive. I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to shoot but had a few areas that I knew had promise around East Bend. When morning came, I looked at the weather and it was showing clear skies through the morning no matter what areas I was looking at. I just rolled back over and went back to sleep.
An hour or so later, I woke up and got out of bed. The weather was still not looking good at all, and I went down to get my morning stuff done at the computer before starting my day. As it got closer and closer to lunch time, it was looking less likely that I would be going out at all. I just settled into my chair and started reading under my blanket. I was cozy, and happy to just sit there and read, but I didn’t want to feel lazy just yet. I had been going and going for weeks now, and it just felt odd to stop. I started to look at the weather again and saw that from 2-5pm there was going to be some partly cloudy skies over Yadkin County and that was good enough to at least get out and try to get some photos. I read a few more chapters and then got up to look out the window to see nothing but clear blue skies overhead. Knowing that my visibility was limited from in the house, I decided to give it a chance.
I got some shoes on and loaded the truck before heading East. Within two miles from home, I was starting to see the clouds that I had been hoping for. Things were starting to look up for me, but I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to be shooting. I just got on the highway and went to Yadkin County where I was going to get gas. After I had filled up, I decided that there was no better place than right there to start looking. Over the years, I have found some great subjects just along the road where the station was and that was where I started to explore.
Not even a block away, I looked over into a hotrod builder’s lot where I had found a 40’s Chevy about six years ago. There was nothing out front and I figured that there was nothing there for me at all this time. As I cleared the side of the property, I could see the tattered soft tops of three convertibles parked on the back side of some storage buildings. It was enough to catch my attention and make me get turned around to check them out. As I rounded the buildings, I saw three Triumphs parked closely together between the storage buildings and the main shop. There was a brick wall with a chain link fence beyond them, and there was nothing at all special about their location which might help tell a story. The close proximity of the group was going to make any composition difficult, but I did like the patina on the two blue ones. The white one in the middle didn’t really interest me at all, but it was there in the mix.
I spent some time looking at the scene trying to figure out a way to make it work and to get a gameplan for some shots before I bothered asking for permission to shoot them. The longer I looked, the more I liked the patina on the one car that was parked slightly further away from the others, but it had the most horrendous hubcaps on the wheels. While I did like the colors, I really didn’t care for the setting at all, and I was not seeing a great way of minimizing that setting short of shooting isolations of the cars. The conversations that I had been having with myself over these cars had pretty much talked me out of working with them, but I just couldn’t drive away.
As I was pondering options, I saw a guy come out of the shop and start towards his truck. I called out to him and asked if he had time for a stupid question. He came over and quickly volunteered that the cars are for sale and the owner wants them gone cheap. While I appreciated that information and did consider my need for a bit of yard art briefly, I let him know that I wasn’t there for that. Once I explained what I was hoping to do with them, he was happy to let me come back when the lighting got a little better to photograph them as much as I wanted to. I thanked him and took a last look before driving off in search of other options.
I was thinking about the options with the three cars and really didn’t like my odds, but I was finding nothing else that interested me nearly as much as the old Brits had. I guess I have a soft spot in my heart for these British Roadsters since I’ve grown quite fond of my Miata over the last few years. My car owes everything that it is today to these Triumphs, MG’s, and the like. When I get the opportunity to shoot one of them in a decayed state, I generally jump on it. I hadn’t jumped on these because I was still feeling a little gun-shy over being creative and I realized that I was looking for that low hanging fruit which I could shoot with my eyes closed. Eventually, I started to realize that was what was stopping me from shooting these cars. Sure, the location could have been better, they could have been parked better, but in the end, this is how I am used to photographing old, rusted cars. It is just a matter of working the compositions, and I knew how to do that.
The decision had been made that I was going to go back and shoot them, but I was still looking for something else in the area while the clouds were building up. Nothing was jumping out at me, and I was realizing that the perfect light was probably not going to happen as the high-level clouds were absent from the sky, just leaving the puffy low level one which make for great skies but are kind of hit and miss with the light quality. As I was headed back to the cars, I had a really bad attitude about shooting them and was already making excuses for why the photos weren’t going to come out good. Fortunately, I recognized what was happening here and put a stop to that thought with a very unique response to myself. I said…”self, we are going to make this a challenge today. The location is not great, the subjects are not in ideal positions, but this is something you pride yourself on when it comes to creating working compositions in difficult times.” There, I had issued a challenge, and I took all the pressure off of myself and just decided to go out there and do the best I could with the conditions and location.
This simple challenge gave me what I had been missing from this trek, a reason to get the photos. Yeah, I wanted to capture some photos for my portfolio, and for the blog, but after so many client shoots where the reason is very clear as is the goal, doing photos for myself seemed a bit boring. Now I had a specific reason and a goal. I needed to create compelling photos of these three cars because it was difficult to do. I was going to force myself to fall in love with these cars and get to know them. It wasn’t going to be a situation of grabbing a photo of a car and moving on, I was going to try and capture the essence as I tend to do with these subjects. I was going to take all the time that I needed to make that happen. It was now more than just about the photos, and I was starting to get excited about it.
I pulled back into the parking lot and went to the cars once again. This time, I just sat there in the 4Runner and thought about what angles I might be shooting from and where reflections might be in the chrome. I figured out the best place to park the truck and got out to walk around the cars looking at the different heights that I could shoot to see how the background would be affected. This was the step where I started to listen to the landscape, and it really felt good to be able to do that again. It only took a few minutes and I had started to form a gameplan for what I was wanting to do. There would be a mix of full spread shots and several isolations. I even found a few abstract possibilities to work on as well. It wasn’t anything ground-shaking, but it was a start, and that was what I needed.
I pulled out the camera with the telephoto lens attached because I wanted to minimize the background as much as possible. Since the clouds were covering the sun a good bit at the moment, I wanted to get an interior shot that I had spotted during my walk around. The lack of heavy shadows would work to my favor with this one. I loved the wood trim laminate on the dash which matched the color tones of the rust on the quarter. Of course, those warm tones played nicely with the blue paint on the car. With this being the only car parked facing East, I had a good chance of using the directionality of the sun to help illuminate the interior as well. The shot kind of put itself together as I started to position the camera. I just moved things around until I had the organization that I envisioned. The first shot that I fired off turned into a keeper which usually doesn’t happen at all. It just worked, and the few tweaks that I made to it after didn’t work as well. I had my first one in the bag, although I really didn’t know it at the time.
In an attempt to get to know the cars even better, I started working around the car pointed in the wrong direction finding the little details that I was after. Of course, I had to shoot a headlight shot because that is just what I do. I found that the passenger side light on the other blue car paired very nicely with some flaked paint on the bonnet (hood for us Yanks), that revealed some great warm tones to balance out the blue. It was a simple shot, but one that I felt was very effective.
As I continued to move around the cars, I found that the same basic color palette was working on the passenger side of the one that I had shot from the driver’s side. There was also a badge on the dash that identified this car as a champion of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and listed a series of years. I really liked that plaque and I thought that it helped to tell the story of the car better than most any other part I could photograph. The problem was that the white Triumph was parked inches away on that side and kept me from getting in close at all. The more I looked though, the more I wanted the photo which made me get creative. That was part of the challenge to myself and I stepped right on up to it.
I went with an odd concept of framing the subject car with the neighboring car. This added a slight triangle due to the windshield, and the wiper blade and arm turned into a pointer for the plaque. I had just enough of the car included to make sense with the overall composition, but not enough to where the white paint would distract from the main subject. I placed the camera to where all of the angles worked together and framed it in a way that made it all fall into a nice golden spiral composition. I really didn’t know if it would work or not, but after going through the edits, I am very happy with it. The rust tones work well with the dash, the plaque is framed many different ways and even pointed to by other objects. The soft top frames everything and it is just an interesting photo to look at which was my goal.
At this point, I went back to the one car that was a little spread out from the pack. I had noticed that this one had the badges on the rear quarter panels still in place and I liked how they were positioned with the marker lights. Also, by this time, I had started to really like the ugly wheel covers and felt that I needed to incorporate them into the photo as well. I worked out the placement of the camera to get the look that I was after which meant that it was well above eye level. This made it hard to get the shot composed, but I managed to make it through well enough by standing on my toes. The ugly wheel became the visual anchor for the shot which I didn’t mind, but the badge fell right into place. Since there wasn’t much color contrast going on here, I chose to make it a black and white photo to really concentrate the viewer’s attention on the wheel and badging. Not only does it identify the car, but also the era and makes for a more complete story.
While working on the back corner of the car, I was able to see the other blue one which was just feet away. This was a benefit of having the cars so close together. I could spot compositions on all of the cars no matter which one I was working with. This new idea for a composition was to capture the houndstooth seat cover as well as the patina on the door that I had already established that I liked. The door handle shell also added a bit of visual interest, but I had to worry about the white car being so close in. All I could do was try and see how things would come together. With the telephoto lens attached, the composition wasn’t nearly as difficult as I had expected. In fact, it all came together naturally and quite quickly. The white car didn’t even enter into the frame from this angle and the shot was pretty simple.
Now that I had worked some of the isolations that I had in mind, it was time to look at some more of the establishing shots that would be a little more difficult to work out because of the setting. I left the long lens on for the compression because I didn’t want too much of the background to come into play. When I shot the photo of the three cars, it felt a little flat to me and I was wondering if using a wider lens would help out. It would be something that I would come back to later on to see.
I also tried to get a single subject shot of the one Triumph that was parked slightly away from the other two. I got the camera down very low to cover the house in the background and shot a few frames with the long lens. This worked but wasn’t quite what I was after. The sky was just too good, and I wanted more of it to be seen in the photo. I was pretty sure that I would do better with a wider angle lens for this shot as well, so I just remembered that I wanted to come back to it again.
One other shot that I tried while the tripod was down low was a tightly cropped vertical shot of the other blue Triumph so that I could get the more traditional wheel and the tattered soft top which was still fully connected to the car. This one, I just couldn’t get to work out with the long lens and that meant it was time to switch lenses because I had three compositions that I wanted to try, but the telephoto lens was limiting my choices too much.
When I got the lens swapped over for the 24-70mm, I came back to the group photo of the cars. I got in a lot closer this time and went with a wider angle focal length which made the foreground car really stand out from the crowd which was what I wanted. I then worked the framing until I had the storage buildings to the right, just out of the frame, and the clutter associated with the main shop out of the frame to the left. That was the rough composition that I needed and that just left working the altitude out to get the fence and the brick wall in the right position in the frame. Ideally, the fence would not have been there, but I found a way to make it work in the photo which was what this challenge was all about.
The clouds weren’t moving too fast, so nothing really changed except for the light occasionally. I fired off a few exposures here as the light changed to get some options on how I wanted the photo to look in the end. Because of that white car, I ended up going with one of the shots where most of the scene was in shade. This kept the white car from overpowering the blue ones, but yet it still matched nicely with the clouds in the sky above. I really liked how this version looked as opposed to the telephoto shot because of the perspective that was captured. Lens choice is so important to composition, and it is one that is too easy to overlook.
Now that I had an overall shot that I liked, I went back to the single car shot that I had tried earlier. I knew basically how I wanted this one to go and went right to the rough position where I could make this happen. It was another case of getting lower to the ground, but not nearly as low as I had been with the telephoto. By using a wider angle focal length, I made the car bigger which made it easier to mask the house behind it. The fence also got smaller in the rear while more of the sky was showing. The only drawbacks were the storage buildings to the right and the white car to the left which I had to be careful to omit in the framing.
It was this simple photo of the single car that became one of my favorites from the session. It was a shot that I didn’t think that I was going to be able to get because of the fence, but it ended up not bothering me as much as I had thought that it would. When I was editing the photos, this was one of the first ones that I did, and also the very last one. You see, I knew that I wanted to use one of my favorite color profiles which desaturates the colors and helps to emphasize the blue tones in an image. I felt that it really lent itself to the photo as a whole and I enjoyed the end result quite a bit right off the bat. It wasn’t until this morning when I was showing Toni the edits that I pulled that on up and she started to talk about the way that the colors looked. In typical fashion, I showed her the RAW image and then showed the different color profiles that I would have normally done with this car. They were all over the top in color after the processing that I had done to bring the colors back up in the desaturated space, but I also went by a black and white profile that caused me to stop and stare for a second. I really liked how it was looking in black and white.
When I got finished showing her the photos, went back to the one and created a virtual copy. From there, I looked through the different black and white profiles and found one that I really liked. There were a few tweaks here and there, but the conversion went very fast. The resulting photo looked as good as the original edit but had a completely different feeling to it. I don’t usually like to do a color edit and a black and white edit on the same photo, but they both seemed to suit this one quite well. I couldn’t decide which I liked better, and just decided to keep them both. It happens from time to time, though I really don’t like to have an image used twice like this. I would much rather pick another version to do a different edit on that has a slight detail that is different and better suited to the presentation. I wasn’t able to do that here because I only shot two frames, and they were both the same. I was doing that a lot during this shoot which is why I had so few exposures compared to the number of keepers. Most of what I shot was a single frame, or one with a safety just in case something was missed like a passing car, or a bird in the frame.
The next composition that I went to was the one that was a little out of the norm for me with the other blue car. I wanted to get a vertical shot of the wheel and the small passenger compartment showing the top and a bunch of the sky. For this one, I dropped the tripod right to the ground and had the camera inches above the pavement. The lens made this composition much easier to control than the long lens had allowed. I wasn’t quite sure it would work but remembered thinking the same thing with the Impala that I had shot a couple of months before. That had turned into one of my favorites from the day and I was hoping that it would happen again with this one. I knew that the clouds were looking great overhead and I liked the way that the top looked on the car which was my favorite aspect other than the rust on the quarter and wheel. The rest of the car wasn’t all that interesting and by avoiding those bits, I was able to minimize the fence as well as omitting the white car beside it.
When I got the photo home, and there was only one here because I didn’t have a lot of faith in it at the time, I saw a lot of things that I really liked about it. The clouds had been offset to the right which I didn’t really like looking through the camera, but they weren’t moving in a way that would bring them to the center of the frame. However, as I was looking at the photo, the large white clouds provided some great balance to the white door, while the blue in the sky balanced out perfectly with the blue quarter panel. The shape of the top with the windows worked well with the wheel in the lower right. Everything provided diagonal relationships as well as triangles throughout the photo. It was a quirky composition, but I think that it worked quite well and served the purpose that I had wanted for this photo. I kind of wished that I had spent some more time with this one, but at least I got this frame which worked out.
As I was starting to wrap up the session, I moved on to the abstracts that I had spotted during my walk around. The first one was around the quarter panel of the darker blue car. I liked the colors of the rust against the blue. These colors happened to fall around the trunk lid which provided some interesting lines to follow. It was just a matter of getting the balance right in the camera while preparing for a vertical crop of either 5:7 or 4:5 in the edit. I ended up shooting just two variations on the concept which gave me this one as a keeper. It wasn’t anything off the wall from what I had done before, but I think that it was quite effective for the elements that I wanted to bring into this photo.
Knowing that it was the patina on the lighter blue car which had interested me more when I first got here, I went back to that car and looked for some isolations for abstracts that I could do with it. I spent more time around the front of the car where most of the patina was really showing through. Everything that I thought to do was centered around the headlights which I had already shot successfully early on. I tried working out some more shots with the hood latches and fender emblems but didn’t like how they were looking at all. As I worked my way around the car, I found just some cracking in the paint on the trunk lid. There was really no structure to it, and no lines that I could add in with it, but I liked the pattern of the rusty cracks, nonetheless.
I just pointed the camera down at the scene and framed up a composition that had a nice flow to it. After twisting the polarizer to get the right effect added into the colors, I chose an exposure that worked for how I envisioned it and shot a single frame. There was nothing that I felt needed to be changed, so that was it. When I got home and looked at it, I didn’t like it as a horizontal image, so I rotated it in order to make a vertical composition. I then cropped it as a 5:7 aspect ratio before doing a lot of work with the colors and contrast. The end result is much better than I had expected, and I was really happy that I had shot this one frame.
Ironically, this was the last of 44 frames that I shot during my time here. I had worked the scene rather thoroughly and felt that I had risen to meet the challenge that I had presented to myself prior to starting. Looking back on this, I probably wouldn’t have stopped to shoot it had it not been for the sake of getting back on that horse. This was certainly no low hanging fruit and would normally only be something I would attempt after having lots of creative energy flowing. It was kind of strange to go from very little creativity while starting this to coming up with loads of ideas and solutions as the time went on. It did do a great job of reenergizing my levels of creativity energy which was just what I had hoped. I’m not quite back to where I want to be, but I can tell that the slump is winding down. I imagine after my client shoot on Wednesday; things will be going even further in the right direction once again. it feels good to be able to create again without a specific purpose behind it.
I did spend another couple of hours riding around after shooting the three Triumphs, but never did find anything else that I felt like shooting. I think that part of the reason for that was that I had gotten some news about some issues developing which were going to need some attention at some point. I had hoped that I would be able to put them off for a while and stay focused on this trek, but that just didn’t happen. With any luck, I’ll be able to get out again soon and continue this path towards other new photos.
I’m so glad that you were able to join me for this trek and I hope that you liked the photos. I know they aren’t the normal popular American muscle, or classics from the ’50’s, but I think that these little British cars have their own unique style, and I am appreciating them more and more as I get older. Maybe it is because I really enjoy driving around on a summer day with the top down in the Miata or taking it down twisty mountain roads. I know that the car would have never been originally developed in 1990 had it not been for the cars like I had just photographed. It feels good to me to be able to document these final days for these old chaps.
Should they resonate with you as they have with me, please consider purchasing a print. Viewing them on a monitor or a cell phone (gasp!) is just not the way to truly enjoy these photos. You are missing so much detail after the compression needed to get these huge image files sized for online viewing. The colors and textures are amazing in print and look so good hanging on the wall for all to see. Not only do you get a piece of original artwork to hang and appreciate, but you are also showing your support of what I do while helping to fund these treks at the same time. Buying art from the artist is just a great way of showing that you appreciate what they do.
I suspect that there will be a blog entry after my next client shoot because the subject matter is closely related to what I normally shoot and would think that it would be of interest to share here. Look for that entry in the second half of next week. There will be a bit more editing time spent on those as I am putting together a certain look for the images that will probably require several drafts of the edits to achieve.
Until next time….
