Monday, April 20, 2026
I’m a patient man, or at least I think that I am in most situations. I have no problem waiting years for something and have talked about that very thing here in this blog many times now. There is plenty to photograph out there so that I don’t need to rush any particular scene. However, there are times when I wait too long and miss my chance which has happened recently. When it comes to decay photography, it is a fine line of knowing when to hold them and when to fold them. Who is singing Kenny Rodgers now? Who remembers Kenny Rogers? OK, that is beside the point. I recently was out driving and went by a house that I had just found after they cleared the trees away from in front of it. Within maybe a week of seeing it, I had been out to photograph it. Now the property shows some dirt where the house used to be. As I had suspected, it had been torn down and was barely there long enough to even realize that it existed at all. Fortunately, I did get my chance to photograph that subject before it was gone forever.
If you have been following the blogs for the past several, you will know that I have been looking for a good day to photograph an old car that was spotted by a friend of mine that has given me way more good tips than ones that don’t turn out. I had scouted it on a sunny day when there was no chance of photographing it. I did find out that morning sun was awful for it because it was heavily backlit. I also found that the canopy around it made direct sun a problem in general because of the dappled light that would be caused. There was also a blue Jeep pickup parked on the driver’s side of the car which was going to cause me some issues and made it impossible to photograph from the street. I was going to need permission, clouds, and afternoon lighting to get this car photographed in a way that I would like. I would also get bonus points for being able to get out there at night when I could do some light painting with it.
Over the next couple of weeks, we had precious few clouds and the ones that we did have were thin enough that they didn’t really diffuse the light the way I was wanting, and for the most part, the clouds were in the morning. However, on the rare days when the clouds were workable, I would venture out to the car which was only about 12 miles from home. I would knock on the door of the house that I was certain was associated with the property but would never get any answer. I did this about three times when each of the times had lighting that wasn’t perfect but would work if I was able to get in and work the subject. Not being able to get permission wasn’t a huge deal on those times because the light was only marginal and I was going to have to make some concessions in terms of what I really wanted. I was also nowhere near the evening hours so that I could do any painting with light as I had speculated would look good.
Fortunately, I have found plenty of other subjects on most of the times that I have gone out with the intentions of photographing the car. I just wrote the attempts off as the cost of doing business and didn’t dwell on any of them. In fact, I had about convinced myself that this car probably wasn’t going to get photographed by me any time soon and I was OK with that. I had other things to focus my attention on. In fact, I’ve been contacted by yet another model, this one from Asheville, who is wanting a studio session for his portfolio. That is going to be happening in a couple of weeks and I’m just now starting to get that session organized in my head so that I can build out the sets. I’ve also been working on several services on the cars which takes some time out in the garage. All of this comes at a great time because the sky has been pretty much blank for the last several days.
With Toni back at work today, I had to run by the pharmacy to pick up a few things for her and figured that they would have everything filled shortly after lunch. I had looked at the weather the night before and saw that there was a chance for some low and mid-level clouds around the noon hour. It was only around 60% coverage, so I wasn’t holding out any real hope, but decided that since I was going to be going out anyway, I would wait to see what the clouds were doing and then if I could squeeze in a quick trek I would do so. I didn’t really have a firm idea of where I was going to go, or what I was going to photograph, but clouds were clouds and I needed them.
Sure enough, around 11am, I was looking outside and saw that there were some really nice clouds moving into the area and they appeared thicker than I was expecting. Looking at the hourly forecasts in the area, it looked like Traphill was going to get the best clouds and that worked out well because I am always able to find something to shoot out that way. Figuring that it was worth taking the camera, I loaded it up and headed out to see where the sky took me. As I was driving down the road and thinking about the route that I was wanting to take out to Traphill, I thought about the car from the tip once again. It wasn’t really on the way, but there was a back way to get to Hwy 18 which I was going to have to be on in order to get out to Traphill. It wasn’t far out of the way, but the sky was actually looking really good for working that car.
The sky wasn’t completely overcast so when the sun was out, it was out very strong, but the clouds were thick enough so that when they were in front of the sun the quality of light was perfect for what I wanted to have. I was just hoping that I would be able to get the permission that I needed while the light was still good. When I say the light was good, I mean that it was the only time I have had workable light since I found out about the car in the first place over a month ago. I was a little excited about the prospects and started to think about what I would do if I didn’t find anyone at home.
I knew that the property was still being used because there was a horse that lived in a small shed near where the car was parked. The house looked lived in, but I had never seen any of the cars near it move. There were no other houses in close enough proximity that I felt that they would be related to the property. If I wasn’t able to reach anyone, I might be able to get a shot of the car from the shoulder of the road as I used the easement approach that I rely on from time to time. It wasn’t ideal, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to mask the Jeep with the car from that distance, but I had it set in my mind that if nobody was home, I was going to give it a try without getting too deep into the property.
When I arrived, I saw no difference in the positioning of the cars by the house which meant that more than likely I wasn’t going to have any different luck. The lighting was great on the car, and the horse was in the shed so as not to create any issues for what I was wanting to capture. I went ahead and parked by the car which got me out of the road. I walked over to the house and knocked on the door. There was no answer at all, and no signs of any movement inside. After waiting there for a minute or two, I slowly walked back to the truck and contemplated my situation. I saw no signs indicating that I couldn’t be there and short of the fence between the car and the horse, there were no barriers to the access of the spot where the car was. I felt comfortable enough to go ahead and get started with the photos.
I grabbed the camera with the wide-angle lens on it because I knew that I was going to have to get a wide-angle shot in order to cover the larger Jeep with the car. The question was how close was I going to have to get in order to do that? I started looking through the viewfinder as I inched closer and closer to the car. It was going to be a little further into the property than I wanted to go, but I was still in full view of the road and wasn’t close enough to touch the car which made me feel better. By getting the camera down to the ground level, I was able to get the height of the Jeep covered, and I worked the angles on the corner of the car until the front of the Jeep was gone. That brought me to another element that I had been considering which was the small shed that housed the horse. I had already decided that if I could cover that with the car I would. However, in order to do that, I was uncovering the rear of the Jeep which was less than ideal.
The decision was made to include the small barn in the photo and that meant that I had to give it some separation from the car which involved getting in a little closer and going wider with the lens. The composition was all coming together quite nicely, and I even had a bit of the sky above to round out the elements in the frame. I really liked how this was looking and I started to make some exposures to check how the luminance range was being handled by the camera. The first two frames were a little hot and had more blowing out in the chrome than I wanted and one of them had some clipped highlights in the clouds. Once I got that all dialed in to where nothing was being clipped, I started to get several exposures in between the small breezes that came through and moved the grasses. It didn’t take long before I had several images that were sure to work out for me.
So far, there had only been one truck that had driven down the road, and they hadn’t given me as much as a look as they passed by. It was in no means permission to be there, but it did put my mind at ease a little more. I went back to the truck and swapped out to my telephoto lens because I had wanted to work some detail shots of this car. I still didn’t want to get in too close to it, and felt that with the reach of that lens, I could get a few details captured from a respectable distance.
The first composition that I wanted to work was the broken glass on the passenger door. I really liked the pattern of it and the fact that the glass was completely missing from the rear portion of the window. Not being able to get in close limited my options for compositions, but I was determined to get something that I liked. After elevating the camera a good bit and getting a nice curve to the beltline of the car, I was able to get the composition that you see above. It contained everything that I was wanting to capture in the frame and did it with some very nice shapes forming the composition. I rattled off two slightly different framings and moved on to the next area of the car.
I had shot a reference photo with my phone when I first found the car and had been studying it for ideas since that day. I knew that I wanted to do something with the front of the car since the grill was still intact. That was the area that I went to next which was kind of a disappointment for me. After all this time of working on dialing in my detail shots, I was limited to capturing the entire front of the car because of the distance I was having to keep from the car. I would have loved to have gotten in close and worked the shapes and angles, but that wasn’t on the menu for the day. Instead, I went with an old standby composition that I knew would work here and shot a few frames.
What had drawn me in initially was the ferns at the bottom of the bumper. I liked how the colors played off of the rusty tones of the car and really thought that was going to be my story. By the time I got the images into Lightroom, I was seeing the photo as kind of boring when I looked at it in color. The other two had turned out so much better than expected and I really liked how the colors were looking in those photos. This one seemed to fall flat when viewed in color. Before discarding the image, I changed it over to black and white which immediately perked it up. It was now just a matter of finding a profile that I liked for the black and white and then finishing up the processing. The end result turned out so much better than the color image and actually pulls more of the attention onto the car and the grill which was my initial desire to capture before I spotted the ferns.
I had been photographing this car for roughly seven minutes at this point and had clicked off 15 frames in that time. I easily could have spent another thirty minutes here working with the car, but I didn’t want to overstay my perceived welcome and there was very little that I could do without getting in a lot closer to the car. I had done more with it than I suspected that I could without permission and counted that as a win. Not wanting to push my luck, I packed up the camera and continued down the road to get to Hwy 18 which was just a couple of miles beyond where I had been.
Once there, I chose to go North to pick up another road that I have been on many times over the years that we have lived out here. This road went through Traphill and ended up on another road that would bring me back towards home. I knew of two locations right off of the top of my head that I have thought about photographing in the past. The first is a property with several tri-five Chevrolets in various states. I have stopped to ask permission to access the property a couple of other times, but there is a fence after you cross the bridge which has never been open. Not wanting to open a fence where I am seeing evidence of a dog, I have passed on the property every time I have tried it since I wasn’t able to see an actual person to talk with. As I drove by, I saw nobody outside and the fence was closed once again. The older parts cars were covered up with other parts now which made them less easy to work with. Feeling that wasn’t worth the time to figure out, I went to the next spot.
This was another house with lots of cars scatted about, but there was on Ford that had caught my eye months before which I wanted to check out. The light was good on it, but it wasn’t really speaking to me today. There was nothing about it that I found particularly interesting which meant that it would more than likely be a waste of time to try and photograph it. Instead, I decided to check out a barn further down the road that I had shot a few Autumn’s ago. I felt that this might be a good day to capture it again.
When I got out to the barn, the vegetation on the fence had grown up to a problematic height which was going to prevent me from being able to get a clear view on the barn. I knew the angles on it from the last time and remembered how hard it was back then. It was harder now, and there was livestock roaming inside of the fence. The only angle that I could possibly shoot it from would include a neighboring building which wouldn’t be terrible. However, there was a side by side sitting in front of that building that didn’t really fit the overall look that I was going for.
Things were not going all that well at this point and I was thinking that the only photos that I was going to get today would be of the Chevy that I started out with. That wasn’t a terrible thing because I had been looking to photograph it for a while now, but I still wanted to get something else before I was done for the day. As I was driving, I came up to a church that I had photographed many years before and recalled talking to a lady about an old school that her mother had taught at some sixty or more years ago. I remembered the directions that she had given and it was only two turns from the church. It was worth a look to see how it was looking under the clouds.
The last turn to get to the school was down what looked like a driveway. It was actually a little two-track road that went behind the houses and led to the school. It was right where I remembered it being and looked pretty much exactly as I had remembered seeing it. I pulled off on the side of the “road” and started to look at the angles of the building. I had shot it from pretty much straight on the last time because of how the sky had looked. This time, I had more leeway with the sky and chose to go with an angle off to the right. Once again, I grabbed the camera with the wide-angle lens attached and got into position nice and low in the tall grass. I wanted to give the school a bit of dominance in the scene and figured that getting down low would accomplish that. There were no signs indicating no trespassing, but I didn’t want to push my luck which meant that I was keeping my distance from the school. I was still able to get a very nice perspective on the scene with the wide lens though.
I remember wishing that this building had a little more going on when I was photographing it last time. I think that the decay was coming into its own at this point because it had some interest on the front of the building now that I didn’t really remember. What I did notice about this composition was that the school stood out against the trees because of the white siding. The tall grass turned into a great texture that went perpendicular to the lines of the siding while matching the direction of the slats in the roof. From down here, the photo was all about luminosity and texture which meant that I was going to have to look at this as a black and white photo when it came time to process it.
I actually did shoot this with the thought of black and white in mind. I used a red filter effect in camera to see how it would look with some added contrast in the sky. That really set the sky off and made the overall image rather dramatic which matched up with the perspective that was being used in the composition. My idea held through the processing, and I ended up really liking how it turned out in black and white.
I had shot another version of the same composition from a slightly different location and from a higher elevation to relax the distortion a bit. This composition wasn’t nearly as dramatic but had a more calming feeling to it. For me, this one felt like a color image all day long. I liked the color contrasts with blue and yellow being the primary colors in the frame. From here, there was more emphasis placed on the tree with the fresh greens showing on the branches. That element completed the composition and provided the balance that it needed. The only thing that I needed now was for the sun to come out slightly to give some shadowing on the school for added interest.
That didn’t take too long as the clouds were moving rather fast across the scene. In fact, they were moving at a rate that I considered, rather seriously, doing a long exposure here. The clouds were moving in the right direction to make it work very well and there was enough texture to the clouds that I would be able to get some nice streaking effects. The part that killed it was that there was a strong breeze at the ground level which was moving the trees. They were not moving at a rate that caused any problems with capturing a still shot, but if I were to expose for a minute or so, the trees would all be very blurred which was not what I wanted, especially since I was relying on the structure of the tree to the left. Had those branches started to blur, I would have lost that aspect of the composition. Not wanting to waste the light on something that was probably not going to work, I just stuck with the basic exposure that I had worked out.
Before I left, I decided to swap out to the long lens and get a shot of the front door. This door had always interested me because it had two different stairways that came off of the door. One that came out straight and the other than came down to the right side. It was not a symmetrical scene and that really interested me. The windows on either side of the door were also rather interesting to me because they did not match, and there was some missing glass as well.
It took me a little while to set up the shot because I kept waffling on whether or not to include both windows. What I ended up deciding on was to include both, but to keep the asymmetry alive in the composition, I cropped through the window to the left while including the entire window to the right. This fell into line with how the side stairs came off of the doorway. This felt like the most natural way to capture this aspect of the old school.
I liked how this worked out in practice after converting it to black and white. The focus was on the shapes and the lines which provided plenty of visual interest. The area where there was the most contrast and most texture, as well as breaking the pattern was the front door. That side stairway was the only diagonal line in the composition which drew the interest to that point. It all brought the eyes to the front door which was my favorite aspect of the scene. It was framed by the two windows which created three elements in the scene and that fell right into the rule of odds which I do enjoy working with.
There were a few other compositions that I worked with while I was at the school, but none of them really worked out. Two of them were all centered around the bell at the top of the building, but I didn’t like the angle that showed the bell, and the photo with the best angle and light blocked the bell entirely leaving just the structure around it which didn’t tell the story that I wanted to tell. The other photos were more overall captures of the school as shot with the telephoto lens. These were good, but not as impactful as the ones with the wide-angle lens.
Having gotten to the point where I had run out of ways to photograph this school, I packed up the camera and got back out to the main road. That got me to the point where I started to think about the next stop and what I might want to photograph. I had been keeping an eye out at this one location where there was a truck parked in front of an old barn that I had shot maybe five years ago. It was beyond a gate just to the side of a long driveway. That gate had a sign that kept me from going past the gate all those years ago. Fortunately, I was able to get the shot with the long lens from that gate. Having been past that location several times over the years, I knew that the truck was still there and in the same condition as it had been all those years ago. I was feeling a little froggy and felt that I might want to give it another try now that I was out here.
When I arrived, I looked into the property and found the truck as I had expected. What I wasn’t seeing was the gate that had kept me out that last time. Could I possibly be able to get further into the property this time? Would I be able to find a house to ask permission? I remembered a comment that I got on Facebook in reference to that photo that they knew the owner and knew that he wouldn’t mind if I had gotten in closer to the truck that last time. This is not permission but did give me an idea about the owner’s point of view. With the gate gone and no signs out, I started down the driveway hoping to find a house. I didn’t see one and felt that going further down the driveway would be taking things a little too far not knowing what was at the end of the driveway. Instead, I came back out to the road and parked the truck. I knew that the long lens would work for this truck even as far away as the fence. I was planning on getting a little closer to the truck but staying on the driveway in full view. The long lens was still the right choice for the location.
I made the quick walk back down to the fence. I looked one more time for any signs and not seeing one entered the fenceline by maybe ten feet or so. I stayed on the driveway and set up the shot as I had envisioned it. It was a bit wider of a shot that I had captured before, but I didn’t have trees to worry with to the right as I had last time. I really liked the composition, but the sky was very bright while the truck was in the shade. As you know, I can’t stand a blank sky and that is especially true when there are great clouds in it. I really needed to get the exposure right so that I had detail in the dark areas as well as the sky. The simple answer would have been to go and get a grad filter to calm the sky down. The problem with that was the filter would darken the trees to the left which I didn’t want to do. The other options were to try to get it all in a single exposure or to try multiple exposures and blend as an HDR image.
The first thing that I tried was going with the single exposure using a technique called “Expose to the Right” or ETTR. This takes the exposure just to the clipping point in the highlights so that the shadows can be captured with some amount of detail. This worked according to the histogram which had detail in all aspects of the frame, but looking at the image review everything that I was wanting to have detail was stuck in the shadows. The histogram told me that I could pull the detail out, but my gut was telling me that it would be very muddy and wouldn’t look good.
This left me with an HDR blend. The problems that I had with that was that the breeze was causing the trees to move as well as the clouds. I was needing two stops between exposures to make the image work and I could do it with just two images to minimize the movement. However, there would still be two images with aspects that moved between them. It was worth a try though. I got things set up and fired off a couple of series of double images with two stops between them. I wasn’t going to know how that worked until I got the images home and merged in Lightroom.
When I did that, I paid a lot of attention to how the branches looked in the merge. The only way to clean it up was to apply the heavy deghosting tool which seemed to clean it up nicely in the preview. I merged the best of the groupings and started to process it. There was some cleaning up in the trees that had to be done due to the breeze moving things around and the deghosting didn’t fix it all that well. This is a problem that I have with doing HDR blends and it is what keeps me from doing them more often. After about 30 minutes I had an image that I was happy with, and the trees looked about 90% OK for me. I continued on with the processing and arrived at the final photo which looked pretty good if you didn’t know where to look to find the artifacts of the blending. For most photographers this would be perfectly acceptable, but for me, it was going to always be sore spot with this photo.
That was when I went to the single frame of the same composition that I had shot which made it through the first two stages of culling. I did a full process on that one but didn’t like the light on it as much as I had thought that I would. For that one, I had waited until the sun had started to shine on the top of the truck which gave some nice highlights to separate the truck from the barn. It looked good in RAW, but the processed image was just too specular for me. The HDR image looked better with the softer transitions. That did get me thinking about using one of the frames that didn’t have the sunlight on the truck. I went with the only one like that which had passed through the first round of culling and started to process that one.
Now, if you are keeping track, I have done three full processings on a single composition at this point. It turned out that the one that got scrubbed at the start of the culling was the one that I went with. It had the smoothest transitions in luminance and had the better overall look of all of them. The HDR image was great and noise free, but there was just too much evidence of manipulation in the trees for my liking. The image that I went with had much cleaner details in the trees and surprisingly, the noise was minimal and very manageable in the shadows. My old camera constantly amazes me with its dynamic range now that I’ve perfected its ability to maximize that latitude. I’ve lost count now of how many times I’ve tossed a well-executed HDR series in favor of a single frame capture because it comes out more polished in the end. I’m glad that I do think about giving myself options, but I just don’t need to do HDR as much as I once did.
My final option for capturing this scene was to reduce the sky and focus more on the shadowed portion of the scene. I was in a great position standing in the driveway to get that tight composition which only needed the lens zoomed to 110mm. This was still a very sharp focal length for the lens, and I had no issues using it in this fashion. I just needed to change my angle ever so slightly to make it all work out in the frame. From there it was just a matter of getting the exposure right which was far easier than I had dealt with before.
I did pay attention to the sunlight falling on the truck and captured some with the sunlight and some with the sun behind the clouds. I wasn’t sure which was going to work out the best, so I wanted to have them both available. In this situation, it was the photo with the sun on the truck that I liked the best and with the contrast that it added, I liked this photo in black and white. It did take a lot of work to get the tonal range where I wanted it which was just a matter of dodging and burning in several different ways. The end result is a much lower contrast scene that how it started out, but one that has much more detail than could be seen initially.
The fact that I was able to keep the barn in the shot in a way where it seemed complete and framed the truck nicely was a great little bonus. I used a 16:10 aspect ratio to limit the sky even more while keeping the barn in the frame as designed. That pole on the left was very important to the framing of the whole image and that is why I needed a bit more width than I did height for the image and this aspect ratio worked fantastic for that.
With that composition shot, I didn’t feel much like lingering at the location, so I went back to the truck very happy with what I had captured. I had no doubt that it was better than the first time that I had shot this truck if for no other reason that I was able to get a better angle on it without having to work around the trees to the right. It felt like the images were a bit more intimate as well which I really liked and I was thankful that the light was as soft as it was. Ideally, there would have been more light on the subject, but I think that might have caused other issues because of dappled light from the trees. The sky could have been darker, but that would have resulted in an even darker truck and exposure times that would have been far too long to freeze the vegetation.
All in all, I was happy with the light that I had and very happy that it was such that the camera could handle it with just a single exposure rather than an HDR blend. For the few hours that I was out, I had really good light and it was variable light which gave me options. I might not have been able to access the subjects as close as I would have liked, but I’m thankful that I finally had a very good sky to work with. It might have only been for a little while and during the least fun time of day to photograph things, but in the end, I had captured 72 frames and those turned into eight keepers.
I hope that you have enjoyed the trek and the photos. Thank you for being a part of it. Let me know which images are your favorites and don’t forget that I make prints of all of my images so that they can be enjoyed up on a wall where all photography deserves to be. Print purchases go a long way to helping me go on these treks as they are a valuable part of financing my photography as a whole. When you get a print, you are supporting me in several different ways, and I can’t thank you enough for that. You also get to be part of a community that celebrates unique pieces of art that are not housed within a computer monitor or a phone. You know you want to be a part of that, so let’s get that print order started.
I’m not sure what the next trek is going to be since I have now finally worked through everything that I have had in mind for a while. I’m hoping to get some landscapes shot in the near future, but I’m going to need some better weather at the beginning or end of the day, and a little rain wouldn’t hurt either. The mountains are starting to get the fresh colors of the season and that is where I’m hoping to be heading soon.
Until then…
