Monday, April 1, 2024
It is April Fool’s Day, and I would typically consider starting this off with a joke about how I am quitting photography, or that I fell off the side of a mountain. I’m going to forego that this year because I am really quite lucky that I stumbled upon this particular subject, and I don’t want to downplay that at all. Having looked at the weather yesterday afternoon, I was looking forward to a morning with some clouds that promised to be good enough to get out for some photography. At least that was what the morning held. The afternoon was looking to be a little sunny which I prefer not to work in if I can help it. As I started to consider where I might want to go, I remembered a location in Hays that I have been trying to photograph for the last few times I have been out. I think I’ve knocked on the door to the house twice before with no success, and I have been very interested in working several of the cars that they have on the property behind the house. I felt that I could successfully work the location under the clouds during the morning hours.
There wasn’t any need in waking up too early since I was going to be knocking on the door. I don’t like to knock too early because I know that folks like to sleep in if they are not going to work. I ended up leaving home around 9 I think which put me in Hays around 9:30, or so. The light was great and as I pulled onto the road, and I could already see three cars that I wanted to photograph. I pulled into the driveway at the house and happened to see lights on inside of it which was new. I felt that this was going to be my chance and I went to the door to knock. As always, the dogs went nuts inside of the house, but I heard not other sounds that would indicate that there were people inside. I waited for a minute or so hoping that the door would open. It didn’t.
I went back to the truck once again and began backing out of the driveway as I had twice before. The light that had been on was no longer lit which made me think that there were people inside and that they just didn’t want to talk to me. Having struck out three times here, I will probably not try knocking on the door again. Since I am out that way many times during the year, I will keep an eye on the property to see if I can catch somebody outside which is one of my more successful methods at getting permission to shoot on properties.
This left me with my alternate plan which had changed on the way out to this location. My new alternate plan was to call a contact in East Bend which had received a while back. I had been told that there were several old cars on the property, but every time I had been by the location I had seen nothing, and no clues to suggest that there were any. Not wanting to waste an ask on a day when I may or may not be able to shoot anything, I had passed on the chance each time I had been out there because the light was not as forgiving as it was on this particular morning. Having great diffused light, I was confident that I could work through about any composition I ran across, so I gave him a call.
He picked up and I was able to introduce myself and explain why I was calling. The response was not one that I expected as he told me that he really didn’t have any old cars on the property. The only things that he had were some trucks from the 80’s and 90’s which were more than likely too young for me. I was slightly disappointed but thanked him for his time and ended the call. My day was starting to look a little less promising than it had started out being. I still had an ace up my sleeve and that was to go out and work a property not too far from where I was driving that had a couple of fallen down structures with some interesting details spread around the area.
I was about to give my contact a call to see if it was a good time to go over there but started to think that I wasn’t quite in the mood for the types of photos that I would be getting at that location. Having mentally gone through two different automotive shoots in my head, that was where I was stuck. I was going to need to find something in the automotive realm to photograph at this point which left me with very little idea of where to go.
One of the places that I thought might pan out was one of the five areas that I had scoped out a couple of weeks ago when I started working this area again. I had seen a Cadillac at an intersection which might work under the current sky. It didn’t take me long to get out to that car, but when I saw it, there was just something missing about the scene. I had already determined that it was going to be a hard photo to make, and I was going to have a hard time finding an owner to ask permission since the house was not one that was lived in. Not feeling that the car was worth the time, I kept on driving down the road in hopes of finding something else worthwhile.
The further I drove, the more I started to think about the route that I had taken yesterday which took me into East Bend to scout a location for a client shoot which is coming up soon. I had seen some potential along the way and figured that since the light was good, I would go out that way in an attempt to find something to salvage what was becoming a less than fruitful day. The drive took me pretty much exactly the way I had gone, but this time the light was much better which made everything look even better. The problem was there were just not a lot of photographic subjects to work with. The area was great and had a lot of potential, just nothing specific that I was wanting to work.
The longer I drove, the more I started wondering if I was going to find anything at all before the clouds started to go away. It wasn’t that I was getting desperate, because I really didn’t need any new photos added to the collection as I have been more successful over the past year than I think I’ve ever been when it comes to keepers. I just didn’t want to feel defeated during a trek with such great conditions. To make things a little easier, I started to think outside of the box and try to find some rural scenes that I could shoot. There were a few here and there, but there was always something glaringly wrong with the setting which would make me bypass the subject.
One of those subjects happened to be a barn off on the right side of the road that caught my eye. It was isolated from the surrounding structures which I liked, and the barn itself looked pretty good. I wanted to go back for another look at it, so I looked for a place to turn around. The next street that I came to on the left was where I turned. As is normal for me, I will always take these side roads for a while to see what I might find since I was on it. As I was driving, I was playing the barn back in my memory and found that the sky was not going to be interesting enough to carry the photo. The light was great, but the sky lacked detail which would throw the photo off balance in my opinion. I was pretty sure that I was going to skip the barn, and by the time I made it to the end of the road, I was fully into looking for something else to shoot.
On my way back out to the main road, I happened to see what looked like a Chevy rat rod behind a house. I slowed and as I passed by, I could see what looked like a Buick or Oldsmobile parked in a shed on the other side of the house. It was a fully restored example and it had plenty of shine about it. Both of these cars caught my attention, and as I was looking, I happened to see a lady working on some flowers beside the house. I got turned around one more time and went back to the house. I pulled in the driveway and introduced myself. I found out that the Impala belonged to her, but not the restored car which was the neighbor’s. She didn’t think that he was at home based on the cars present in the driveway. She was fine with me photographing the Impala and shared with me some of the history behind the car.
Once she secured one of the dogs, I was getting my gear and going behind the house to check the car out. This was an interesting example because most of the rat rods that I have shot over the years have been covered mostly in surface rust, and only a few have been clear coated. This example was probably the newest rat rod that I have shot, and it still had most of its original paint which made it unique. They had decided to wash it, and sand down the surface rust before clear coating it which gave it a nice glossy appearance and added some saturation to the colors which I really loved. The car was parked beside of a large pickup and on a gravel pad within a split rail fence. My first thoughts were that I loved the car, but the setting was going to be difficult to work around.
Figuring that I was going to be working on isolations more than anything else, I selected the telephoto lens from my bag along with a polarizer. This would give me a better chance of getting the details while keeping myself out of the chrome reflections. I spent a few minutes walking around the car to get a feeling for how it wanted to be photographed and then I set to work on the passenger side front quarter which I felt would be the easiest angle to work with to get things started.
The camera was positioned low to the ground, and I had a horizontal composition framed up that focused on the lights, the wheel, and the fender badge. Admittedly, it was the wheel that grabbed my attention the most. I loved how the 5-spoke mag wheel looked with the car and that detail alone told the story about what kind of build this was. I fiddled with the composition for a minute or two and got the exposure set before firing off the first frame of the day. When the image review popped up, I really liked what I saw and had no issues with it. I could have shot a safety frame, but there was nothing moving in the frame, and I saw nothing that needed tweaking which meant that I had my first image in the can for the day. That first photo turned into the first keeper from the day as well, so I was on the right track with this car.
The next composition that I worked on was a tighter crop on the wheel as seen from slightly behind and elevated. For this one, I was actually going through one of the bits of creative advice I am planning on talking through during the workshop this weekend dealing with the art of decay. For what I wanted to capture, the composition was going to be more about shapes than it was about subject matter. I knew that I wanted to get the wheel, but I needed the fender to frame it since the wheel was tucked into the fender. This is why I elevated the camera which shrouded a good portion of the wheel in mystery, while giving more context to the scene. I played with the framing in the field which meant three different exposures as I changed how everything was placed within the frame. I could have shot this a single time and planned on cropping later on, but I hate cropping for no good reason and wanted to keep all the pixels that I could by framing the image correctly in the field.
As you can see from the opening image, the car didn’t have much color to it as the paint was an off white. There wasn’t that much rust left after the sanding. While the first composition showed off enough rust to justify a color image, this second composition didn’t quite have that intensity with the colors. While shooting this one, I was already planning on making it black and white which would force the attention onto the wheel and the general shape of the composition. That is exactly what I ended up doing and couldn’t be happier with the results. The composition that I chose was the middle of the three images which had a bit more of the wheel center visible as compared to the first frame, and just slightly more of the tire visible to the front than the last frame. They were subtle differences, but those are the differences that can make or break a photo which was why I shot the different frames in the field.
From here, I moved to the front of the wheel and tried another variation on the composition I had just shot. I liked it in the image review and didn’t feel like there was any reason to reshoot it as I saw no room for improvement. In the field, I liked this one better than the tighter capture that I had shot right before. I was surprised, however, when I got the photos loaded into Lightroom because I was now liking the other composition a bit better. Both of them made the cut to the editing process, and I did full edits on both photos. It was during the last culling after the edit that I decided that the shot from the front of the car was just too boring when compared the more dynamic swoop as seen from behind the wheel. Since both photos were of the same subject, I decided to only keep one, which meant that the weaker of the two would get trashed.
I did try one other tight composition from the front of the wheel that I thought would be a successful photo. It really centered around the wheel with just a bit of the fender with some rust staining present. I liked the juxtaposition of the rusty metal with the nice wheels. In the end, it met with the same fate as the wider composition from the similar location. It too was just boring and offered nothing beyond what the other photo had provided. In the end, I had shot five frames of the front left wheel, with three different compositions. It was the second frame out of all of those that made the final cut, but I’m glad I kept trying different things with it.
I was starting to feel more connected with the car at this point and thought that an overall composition was warranted. I knew before even trying to set things up that this was going to be a bear of a composition to put together. There was a house and a couple of cars behind the Impala, there was a large truck parked on the driver’s side, and there was a fence that surrounded two sides of the car. My only hope was to get low enough that the car blocked the house behind it, and I would be able to shoot around the pickup. To keep the background as minimal as possible, I left the telephoto lens on and started to work out a composition. I had one that I liked, but when I started to really look at it in detail, I found that there was a structure showing behind the car which was going to force me to move to the right a bit more. By doing that, I changed the proportions of the scene, and started to cut part of the car off, not to mention that the truck was starting to edge into the frame on the right.
No matter what I did, there was no getting around the fact that I couldn’t make everything fit in the frame without having the truck block a part of the car. I was going to have to shoot wider and get in closer to avoid the truck. I went back to the bag and swapped out my lens for the standard zoom before going back to the spot where I had the tripod positioned. The legs were spread out wide, and the center column was how affixed horizontally to get the camera as low as possible to the ground. Now that I had a wider focal length, I was able to move the camera in closer to bypass the pickup. I just had to be careful about the background beyond the fence because the wider angle was picking up more of the environment than the telephoto.
After what seemed like 10 minutes of moving the camera around and changing the framing, I had a shot that I really liked lined up. I had a great angle on the car which was positioned low in the frame allowing the bare trees to stretch out above it. The perspective was nice and dramatic which I liked better than I thought I would. The only issue that I was seeing was the fact that the sky was very bright in comparison to the car. In order to get the exposure right on the main subject, I was going to need to pull back the exposure in the sky. Back to the bag I went to grab a 3-stop grad filter which I slid into the filter holder behind the polarizer. I was able to get a few more clicks of exposure to the car while keeping the highlights under control in the sky. Now I was set and shot a series of four frames here with different depths of field applied. It was the last one that I shot which made it to the keepers.
That last shot had a perfect look to it, and one that I thought demanded being done in black and white. The color didn’t really add to the photo at all, and since the car was largely white, having the color around it would potentially distract from the purpose of the photo. This was the first photo that I edited because I was so excited about it, and within about 15 minutes I had a workable rough edit on this one which I absolutely loved. Everything just seemed to work together so well with it, and the low camera position suited the low-slung character of the car which was another nice benefit I received just for trying to cover the house in the background.
Not wanting to give up this angle prematurely, I decided to raise the camera and get another composition from the same corner, only closer. As I mentioned, I loved the wheels, but I also liked the front tag that said “Old School” as well as the bare metal that had been clear coated. The shine on that metal was showing the reflection of the trees above and I thought that added some nice interest to the hood. From this angle, I was able to get all the things that I liked about the car in addition to the “Chevrolet” script on the grill and the headlights which I always gravitate towards. There was only a single frame necessary for this composition because it was a very simple one to make, and with nothing moving, I knew that I had what I wanted with that first frame shot.
My next stop was the area around the A pillar where the fender, cowl, door, and hood all meet. I’ve had plenty of success with this composition recently and thought I would give it a try now. I wasn’t able to include the mirror because that seemed to overcomplicate the pattern of body panels. What I came up with was a more simplistic composition that showed the body lines only along with the windshield. It looked good in the camera, and I shot two different frames with slightly different focus points to make sure that I had the depth of field that I wanted. In the end, neither of the frames made it past the first culling. They just weren’t good, and I saw no real interest in either one of them.
I’m glad I didn’t stop with that part of the car, because my next compositions would take me to the rear pillar and the quarter panel. The concept was roughly the same as what I had wanted to do on the front of the car, but this time, there was a good deal more interest on the body panels with different color paint as well as rust and bare metal. The body lines had something of interest to frame which I was missing on the front-end compositions.
I ended up shooting two different angles on this area, one from the front and one from the rear. While they both focused on pretty much the exact same part of the car, the change in angle made the whole thing look completely different. Both of them made it through to the edit stage of the culling and I started with the one that didn’t include the rear window. I played around with the color profiles and the way that the colors were dealt with until I had an edit that I liked. It took a good long time to get it all to come together and when I started to look at the other angle I had shot, I just didn’t have it in me to work through all of that again to arrive at something different.
Instead, I just copied the edit and applied it to the other version for a starting point. From there, I made a few more tweaks that felt right for that image and called it a day. Both of the photos appear similar, but the compositions are completely different which is why I wanted to keep them both. I can see them being displayed as a diptych or possibly along with one of the black and white photos to show the range that this car offers artistically.
The next five frames shot of the car were isolations from the rear quarter panel which were either shot through the fence, or from just inside of it. I tried to get the taillights, but there was just not enough room to work with around the fence. The different shots that were coming in didn’t seem all that good at the time, but I felt that I needed to try the angles at least. There were even a couple of other shots done of the headlights which again felt a little forced. I was starting to think that I had reached the end of the line with the options on this car. I was walking around and trying to find different angles but was just coming up with mediocre ideas. It wasn’t until I was trying to get something along the driver’s side rear quarter that I finally had another solid composition come to mind.
Once again, it was the wheel that dictated the composition, and fortunately for me, the Impala lettering was missing the “M” which meant that I didn’t really want to capture that in the shot. As I was starting to build a composition around the wheel, I decided that I liked the rear pillar and the sky above which showed the clouds starting to have more definition to them. There was no way to do this as a horizontal composition because I would be including the house which took up the entire background. However, if I positioned the camera down low once again, I would be able to cover the house with the car simplifying the composition as well as allowing me to include more of the sky.
I flipped the camera vertical to concentrate on just the wheel and pillar which actually looked really good as I got the camera lower and lower. The perspective of the lens brought a lot of visual weight to the wheel which I really enjoyed. It seemed to go up into the quarter panel for days. The pillar pulled the eyes up and into the sky which was showing just enough detail to make it interesting. It was also very bright, so I was back to the bag to get my 3-stop grad filter once again. That one filter controlled the exposure in the sky well enough to allow for the shot to be made in a single exposure. I shot two frames of this composition with slightly different depths of field before thinking that I had what I wanted from this shot.
If I am being totally honest here, this was one of those crazy photos that I shot. I really didn’t know how it was going to turn out, and I don’t think I have ever shot a composition quite like this before. I took a very long and low-slung car and made a vertical crop of the side of it. This goes against most common thinking, but my thoughts were that it would help focus the attention on the wheel as well as the shape of that pillar which defined the car. It was a gamble, and probably why I only shot two frames, but after I did the edit, this photo is in my top three favorites from the day. It was that crazy idea for a composition that happened after I was pretty much sure that I had exhausted the possibilities around this car which turned into a favorite keeper. I’m never more amazed with myself than when I can pull out a great photo like this after exhausting all my options. It just goes to show that there is always another composition that can be shot.
I was now positive that I was finished with this car, and I wanted to go and check out another pickup truck that was at the back of the property before I left. After closing up the camera bag and putting it on my back, I grabbed the camera and started walking to the truck. Before I got too far away from the car, I turned to look at it once again since I hadn’t really done much looking from a distance. The first thing that I noticed was the way that the trees were positioned in a group of three on one side of the car with a dominant branch spreading out over the car. Between that and the fence, there was a nice frame going on with the scene. I moved left and right to see how things would line up and found that it looked really good when viewed from directly in front of the car. I could see another vertical composition taking place with the trees stretching up into the sky above the car.
The backpack was placed on the ground out of the way while I set the tripod up in the area that I thought would work the best. The composition was made as I had seen it with the car pretty well centered in the frame while the trees and fence hugged the left side of the frame. I knew that I would cropping this down to either a 5:7 or 4:5 aspect ratio, so I wasn’t overly concerned with having extra stuff in the upper and lower portions. I shot a series of seven frames with apertures ranging from f/2.8, f/8, and f/11 to see if I could get the depth of field to help me out with separation. There were also two different framings used for these.
When those seven frames were shot, I was pretty confident that I had what I was going to need, but started to wonder how it would look as a square crop since the trees were working a little hard at pulling my eyes up through the frame to the sky. I changed the aspect ratio of the camera to 1:1 and reframed the composition one more time. I went a little closer on the sides with this crop but kept the camera nice and low to the ground. I shot four images with two different apertures at f/8 and f/11 since those were the ones that seemed to look best from the last composition. I wasn’t really sold on the square crop in the camera but wanted to have it just in case that turned out to be the better option.
Essentially, I had shot 11 frames from directly in front of the car as I was walking away. Looking at the number of frames shot, this one composition took up the majority of exposures from the day. There had only been 33 activations of the shutter since I started the session and a full third of them all were on this one composition. Well, I am glad that I tried so many variations here because it was my very last frame that turned into the one that was edited. It wasn’t even a close call among those 11 frames. This one had everything that I wanted for the photo and looked great right out of the camera. A quick edit later and it was one of my three favorites from the day.
In about an hour or so, I had shot 33 frames for a total of eight keepers. The amazing part is that my three favorites from the day were all completely spur of the moment attempts. When I first laid eyes on this car, I was certain that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to capture an overall composition of it. That low down front left quarter view turned out fantastic and disproved my original opinion of the scene. The other two favorites from the day came after I had all but given up on finding more compositions. The wheel view broke all kinds of rules when it comes to choosing vertical and horizontal framing, but it works great, even though it is a crazy image. The last shot of the day happened as I was quite literally walking away from the subject to go to check out another subject. It just goes to show what can be done when you decide to really work a subject rather than always getting the low hanging fruit so that you can move onto the next subject.
Speaking of that next subject, I walked around the pickup for a few minutes, but never did find anything that I wanted to photograph on it. I almost got a photo of the sedan in the shed next door, but there was wood stacked up in front of it which would have presented a distraction in the photo. Without getting permission to get in closer there just wasn’t much I could do with it. It really didn’t matter though because I had a handful of photos from the Impala, and I was happy with that. I don’t get to photograph rat rods all that often, at least not new ones which made this a very special shoot.
I do hope that you have enjoyed this adventure. While I continued to look for other subjects after leaving this location, the sun started to come out which caused the lighting to change significantly for the worse. It did allow me to get home in time to get the edits done before dinner and the blog done before time to wind down for the night. Remember, if there are any photos here that speak to you, I would be thrilled to match you up with a print, or two. You can select from the basic size options on standard media through the gallery store, or you can contact me directly to talk about special orders with larger sizes or specialty media like metal and canvas. No matter what you choose, just know that there is no better way to enjoy a photograph than in its intended form which is very rarely a digital photo on your screen. The amount of detail that is available in print form is mind boggling compared to the low-resolution web version of the photos. Making prints is my favorite part of the photographic process for that very reason. I invite you to start a collection of wall art or add to an existing collection with one of my prints.
Thanks for joining me and I hope to see you again very soon. I’ll be working on preparing for my workshop this weekend for most of the rest of the week. I’m not sure if I will be capturing anything during the workshop or not, but I will be back with new treks soon enough. Spring is starting to arrive in the mountains, so it won’t be long before I am doing some landscape photography once again. It feels like it has been forever since I’ve done mountain landscapes and I am excited to get back into that groove, even if it means getting up way too early in the morning.
Until next time….
