Thursday, July 21, 2022
Yep, you read that title right. I wasn’t really planning on doing any photography today because I had other things going on. There were two different appointments in Winston-Salem that had to be taken care of, and that was pretty much the entirety of my morning. The weather was calling for storms in the afternoon, so I really wasn’t all that concerned with trying to get out for any photographs. However, after several trips on the back roads to and from Winston in the Miata, I had settled on a few locations that I thought might produce some decent photographs. Since I was going to be out that way, I figured I would just bring the camera along just in case I had time and the right conditions to get a few photos made. It was an afterthought as I was walking into the garage to grab the bag, but I tossed it in the truck just as if I was planning on something special.
The day started out around 8:15 when I went to my annual eye appointment. All during the initial portions of the visit, I kept getting asked about not being able to see up close as well as I once had. This was odd because I had learned to accept that as a part of getting older and after the last three times of saying I was having issues; I was going to stay quiet about it this time. Everyone kept bringing it up and when the doctor came in to do the vision test, he just went right into doing distance and close in tests. Without much fanfare, he told me that I was no longer able to focus as well as I once had. This was not news to me, but I rolled with it. We talked dominant eye and looked at different ways of doing the contacts. At the end of the visit, I found out that my right eye had actually improved so it had been overcorrected for a portion of the past year. We also went with a different prescription for my left eye that was now going to be my close in focusing eye. I wasn’t sure how this was all going to work out, but when I got the new contacts fitted, I really didn’t see much difference in the room, but when he moved the funny vision machine over to me, I was able to read the stickers on the back clear as could be. My vision was as good in the distance as before, but I could now see closer than arm’s length which was good because my arms were no longer growing.
With my new vision, I was anxious to see how it would affect things with my camera, but I wasn’t able to do anything with photos just yet. I still had another appointment set for noon that I had to be at. There was just enough time to pick up some molasses, I mean 20W-50 oil for the transmissions on my mower as I have figured out that they are due for service now. This was after a long ordeal of throwing a drive belt and finding out that all of the transmission mounts were compromised. Of course, I ended up replacing all of those and getting the rear half of the mower rebuilt. Anyway, I got to my noon appointment and signed a few documents and got to see Toni for a few minutes as we put things in place for our daughters’ future.
Once that was done, she did some running around that needed to be done, and I set course back to the house by way of the back roads. I wasn’t sure if the weather was going to hold or not because it was starting to clear off from what had been a really nice cloudy day. My destination was Yadkin County, and it wasn’t too far away from where we had been. There were actually two locations that I had scouted before and was interested in trying my luck at. The first one was a car lot in the middle of a commercial section along the main road. When I arrived, I pulled into the parking lot and noted that there wasn’t much action at all which was very good. I had been worried about that since it was a weekday, but I just took a second and looked at what was there to work with. I was mostly interested in an old International truck in the parking lot and some VW Beetles behind it. There were other interesting vehicles as well, but everything was so jumbled together I wasn’t sure if I could make anything work.
Looking at the sky, I could tell that I was going to run out of good light pretty quick as the clouds were breaking up already. I just put the truck in park and got out to go and ask permission from the owner. When I got to the front door, I could immediately see that the deadbolt was engaged, and the light were off. The sign on the door said that the business was supposed to be open, but there was obviously nobody there. I looked around and found a whiteboard with a faded message on it to call a number if there was nobody there. Well, I did just that and spoke with the owner of the property. It was a quick call, and he was happy to let me get some photographs and was very happy that I had asked before doing it.
I went back over to the truck and grabbed my bag because I really wasn’t sure what I was going to need because I didn’t really have any compositions in mind just yet. I started over at the International first because that was what excited me the most out of everything there. I looked at the setting and started to figure out that I could get an entire view of the truck if I was careful with the two buildings that it was parked next to. The one behind looked like a covered bridge in a way and I loved how it added to the story of the image. The larger building beside of the truck was the main building for the car lot and the front of it was not quite in line with the side of the building. Not wanting to complicate the image more than it would be already, I decided that I only wanted to include the side of the main building and that was it.
I went ahead and built the camera with my 24-70mm lens because I knew I wasn’t going to need to go to the extreme on either end of the focal length range. A nice standard lens works so well in this situation. I went ahead and added my polarizer since I was going to be dealing with surfaces that glared. It was then a matter of picking my shooting location so that the vehicles on the other side of the covered bridge were masked by the bridge. I also had to try and get the right cropping point on the main building since it was going to already go against the direction of implied movement from the truck. I wasn’t wild about cropping in so close to the front, but it was a choice that had to be made for the overall balance and effect of the image. I finally landed on the right angle and then started to work with the elevation of the camera so that I could keep the verticals from converging too much and find the right placement of the truck amidst the buildings. I ended up setting the camera up about 3.5 feet off the ground which provided the best balance to the image. I was able to get the sky in the frame which I really wanted to include, but that gave me exposure difficulties because it was so bright. I went back to my bag and grabbed a 3-stop soft edge ND Grad which I slid in behind the polarizer. That brought the exposure down to a perfect level for the sky and the histogram looked great! Of course, I could read the histogram much easier now that I had my reading eye installed. I did a final check along the edges and started making exposures.
I played with the composition slightly by moving the camera around an inch here and there until I had five frames of this composition. I felt confident that in those frames I would have a keeper. I went ahead and picked up the camera and started to look for isolations on the truck but didn’t really see anything else that I wanted to shoot. The light was a little flat on it which can make for less than interesting isolations at time. I decided to check out the other offerings on the property while the clouds were still good.
I started to walk through the bridge to get to the old Bugs on the other side, but there wasn’t a clear path. Not wanting to disturb anything, I walked around the bridge and slid through a small path next to the structure. There were several old Bugs back there, but only one really caught my eye due to the amount of rust that was on it. There was no way to do an overall capture of this vehicle, but I knew that the lines of a Bug were really interesting when it came to doing isolations. I started to evaluate all the angles to see how the light was falling and where the visual interest was. Surprisingly, there was nothing that caught my eye on the front of the car which is usually where I get the luckiest. My second favorite part of the car, right behind the front wheels also yielded nothing. I could find nothing on the back of the car either. Was I going to be left with nothing to shoot of this car? I cleared my head and started to look again.
What I found was the back right corner where the roof line comes down between the windows. I started to look at shapes and how they all worked together. The hint of blue on the fender was another element that I found interesting because of the color contrast with the rust. Yeah, this could work out. I started to frame up my composition in a horizontal orientation. I snapped one frame that way, but it wasn’t quite what I had seen before getting the camera in place. I tried again but wasn’t liking the composition. I decided to try it as a vertical composition, and it started to get better. I played with several different variations on the composition trying to get the depth that I wanted. Initially, I had been pretty square with the side of the car, but seeing that wasn’t working, I started to move around to the rear of the car which gave me the depth and dimension that I was after. I was finally happy with the composition and had to work on camera placement to control what was seen through the back window and the reflections in the side window. After eight frames, I was confident that I had what I needed from this one.
I looked around the Volkswagons some more but didn’t see anything else that really spoke to me so I continued around the property to see what else might work. There was a yellow Fiat parked beside the main building which looked interesting in design. It was in much too good a shape to count as decayed, but it was still interesting to me because of the colors and the lines that it had. I spent some time looking at the angles and the backgrounds available and tried to come up with something. Nothing was falling into place for me, but I was being drawn to the headlights of the car. I worked on a composition on the passenger side where I had more room to move around. I came up with a composition that I liked, but there was something off about it. It wasn’t reading correctly, and my eyes didn’t pursue through the frame easily. I figured out that the problem was the headlight needed to be on the other side to make it work.
I moved everything over to the driver’s side and got the same composition worked out on that side. This time it read much better, and having the emblem included worked wonders for this one. An added benefit was the negative fill from the building it was parked next to. That helped give a bit more sculpting to the body lines which were now in the shadows. The bright yellow really jumped out at me and made this a very impactful image. It only took three frames here to get the one that I wanted locked in. It was those three frames that gave me the idea to go and deal with a bright red Camaro which was much too nice for me to photograph normally.
This car was parked under a shelter and looked to be mostly restored. It was a beautiful car and bright as the morning sun. I looked around it for an idea for a composition. With the bright red paint, I was going to need to find details to break up the color. The front wasn’t quite interesting enough, but when I got to the back, I loved the rear spoiler and the bright chrome of the bumper and wheel. I decided to work with the back corner of this car to get a composition that I liked. It wasn’t difficult at all to get a good composition here, but the difficulties came in with the highly reflective nature of all of the surfaces. I had to make sure that I didn’t make a cameo appearance in any portion of the car. This meant that after I got a good composition worked out, I had to zoom in and look with my good eye to try and find me in any of the surfaces. If I did, I would move the camera slightly until I didn’t see me. I repeated this process several times before I landed on a good location with a good composition. I ended up shooting two different variations on that composition with a slight difference in elevation.
I wasn’t sure if the really shiny car was going to turn out as good as I hoped, but it was fun to try working with a really shiny car as a change to my normal. However, it will always be the texture of decay that really captures my attention. There were other examples of rotting cars out here that I needed to look at. I found a Ford Galaxie which was an abandoned project it appeared. There was too much primer on it which made the surface less than interesting. The trim wasn’t on the car so there really was very little to anchor an image. I had to leave that one alone to go and find something else to shoot.
It was on the other side of the parking lot that I found a couple of nice old cars in various states of restoration. One of them had no trim on it at all and was basically a shell. There were some interesting lines on the car, but I didn’t care for the compositions and textures. I was just about to give up on this one when I saw a nice little custom touch that had been added. There was what looked to be an antenna hole at the rear of the passenger side fender. There had been a really nice scallop added to the metal around the hole which I thought was truly special. The primer around it had been roughed up and there was even a bit of rust coming through at the hood. I really wanted to capture this feature in some way, so I started to play with the position of the camera.
I found out really quick that taking a photo of a hole is not all that easy to do. In order for this to be an effective abstract, I was going to have to work out a composition that included some negative space and some body lines to balance out the hole and sculpting. This took a while, and I ended up shooting four frames with different compositions on each. When I started to repeat the compositions, I called it day. I knew that the success of this image was going to fall on the processing more than anything because I had a vision of how I wanted it to look. I knew that it was going to be black and white, and I knew that the contrasts were going to play a huge part. It was the number three image that worked out the best and I spent most of the time working out the contrast of the scene to get it all appearing the way that I wanted it to.
By the time I had finished photographing the fender, I saw that the sun was pretty much out in full force. I was a little surprised at this because a short time before I had heard from Toni was said that she was in near flood conditions on Stratford Rd under heavy rain. Here I was wishing for a cloud or two and had none in the sky, while she was nearly swimming down the road. I was thinking I was done for the day at this point but remembered that there might be something worth working with on the Interational truck now that the sun was out. The flat light had prevented me from doing any isolations on the truck earlier, so I was hoping that was not the case now.
I started to walk around the truck and see what the light looked like. I found that the light was most dramatic on the passenger side which happened to be the side that the dealership plaque was affixed. I’ve only seen the dealer identification placed like this on a handful of other vehicles which made this feature unique. With the other emblems in place and in good condition I decided to work a composition out with these elements. I have a standard look for the cowl section from this era truck, but the body lines on the International don’t really fit that composition. I played around with different angles and found that shooting from slightly behind worked really well and gave a lot of dimension to the image. I just worked out my edges to make sure that the roadway wasn’t visible beyond the hood, and that there was nothing distracting coming into the frame. Once I did that, it was just a matter of deciding on the depth of field that I wanted to use. It took only five frames to get the depth of field figured out and what you see here is the last of the images that I shot of this truck.
I had captured a total of 27 frames in about 45 minutes. The creativity seemed to flow freely considering I wasn’t really mentally geared up to do a trek today. I was going through the different compositions in my head and figured that I would have at least four keepers if not six which was way over my normal 10% hit rate. If I could be this effective every time I go out with the camera life would be good. Maybe it was the fact that my own auto focus was working better, and I could see what I was doing much better than before? That might have something to do with it, I know that the editing went quicker than expected as did the blog entry. All of which I felt had less strain on my eyes.
I do hope that you enjoyed this short trek. I figured it had been a while since I had done decay photographs and it felt really good to get back into rusty subjects again. If there are any of these photographs that speak to you, please consider ordering a print. The print sales do help me continue with these treks, and they help to motivate me to continue to produce new images. There is no better way to enjoy photography than to see it in a printed format whether it is on art rag paper, metal, or canvas. The tangible product is the ultimate end result of photography.
Don’t forget, I am also doing portraiture and boudoir photo sessions both on location and in the studio. If you would like to book a session with me, just give me a call (336-681-0220) so we can discuss what you have in mind. There are still several types of shoots that I will consider discounting in return for a signed model release so I can use the photos for my portfolio. Even if you choose to book a session at full price, I am still working with introductory pricing so I will probably be cheaper than most photographers, but that won’t last for long. Let’s get creative and make some art!
Until next time…
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