Thursday, August 11, 2022
I’ll be honest with you. It feels like old times with my trekking these days. A month ago, I ventured out on a rainy day into Boone for what was my first trek in a while, and since then, I’ve been out pretty regularly. I followed that one up with an early sunrise adventure less than a week later. Just five days later, I decided I missed decay and made a quick stop on the way back from Winston for a bit of rusty goodness. Not wanting to get out of the landscape mode, I went back out to Price Lake for another sunrise just a bit over a week later. This was followed up with a sunset trek to Doughton Park just a few days later. Just a few more days later I was itching for some rust and went back out to Booneville to work a location that I had passed many times before. That is like six different times I’ve gone out in the past month and in those trips, I’ve done a great deal of landscape and decay photography. I guess the reason for this is that my portrait work has slowed down from what I was doing for the past year or so. My test shoots are coming to a close, and I’ve pretty much got the studio outfitted as well as the new kit built. That leaves me with nothing but marketing to do on that end and getting back out to stretch my landscape and decay skills a bit.
A couple of days ago, I was looking at heading out to the Blue Ridge Parkway for another morning shoot, but the weather didn’t quite pan out as the clouds never materialized that morning. From that point, I started to consider other options as the weather forecasts continued to change each day. As of yesterday evening, I was looking to go out to Traphill for an old steam tractor that I had seen as yard art the last time I was out that way in the Miata. I wasn’t sure where it was exactly but remembered my route that I had taken to get to it. The location hadn’t been committed to memory because at the time, it really didn’t strike me as a good subject. However, the image kept rolling around in my head and I started to see a composition developing which would make use of low clouds and light from the East which would make this an early morning shoot. The weather forecast for Thursday was showing low level clouds through most of the morning with storms developing in the afternoon.
I wanted to go with Toni to pick up her books for the official start nursing school because it was supposed to be two heavy boxes as well as a bag of supplies. Plus, I just wanted to be a part of this stage of her adventure. The pickup was scheduled between 10 and 12 which meant that I would have plenty of time to go out and get the tractor shot before needing to pick her up to go to the school. I had my clock set for 6am which would get me out there roughly an hour after sunrise when the sun was putting directional light on the ground, but hopefully very diffused from the clouds which ideally would be rather dramatic above. When the clock rang, I checked the weather and saw that the clouds had been pushed back to 10am and currently the skies were mostly clear. That wasn’t going to work at all, and without a plan B to revert to, I just rolled back over and went back to sleep.
Toni and I woke up and went out to the school to pick up her books and such which wasn’t quite as big a haul as I was expecting. It was still two good sized boxes, with a smaller box, and the bag which we had to get. There is a lot of stuff that nurses have to know, and the amount of books that she got was more than I came into on my first day of the Police Academy in 1999. At least all of these books will be used through the entire two-year program, so she won’t have to cover all that material in just a semester.
I had pretty much decided against going out for photos today because I couldn’t get my early start, and the afternoon was supposed to be rainy with higher level clouds. However, on the way back home, the sky was looking really interesting, and I could see it working for the tractor that I was wanting to shoot. We got home and got the truck unloaded before I loaded it back up with my camera gear. I left Toni unpacking what looked to about 50 books and started out towards Traphill and the tractor.
Remember, I didn’t know exactly where it was, so I was just winging it and following the same route that I had taken the last time in the Miata. When I got to the road that it was supposed to be on, I was scanning constantly to the left looking for it. I came up to a property that looked familiar and was wide open at the front which was what I was looking for. I slowed down and started to take in the landscape. This was what I was looking for, but something was different. The tractor was gone. Could I have the wrong property? It was possible, but I was pretty sure that it was the same location that I had seen before. It was a real letdown, not so much because I wasn’t able to shoot it today, but that I would never be able to shoot it. I’m still not convinced that it would have worked out like I was hoping because I was going to have to set the camera down pretty much on the ground for any hope of eliminating the background house and other structures on the property. On the off chance that I was remembering wrong, I decided to continue on my route just in case.
Well, I got to the end of the road and was back in familiar territory without seeing the tractor at all. I did have a chance to look at a barn that I am planning on shooting in the Fall and confirmed that the composition will work if I have good lighting. That was good news, and I was happy to get out there for the scouting purpose at least, but I was really wanting to do something with these awesome clouds that were hanging overhead. I decided to go hunt for an old barn and truck that I had shot a while back but couldn’t remember quite where it was located at. I knew the rough area that it was in but that was all I could muster.
I ended up on a road that I have been on a handful of times over the years, but it was the wrong road. I just settled into the hunt and started to look for something that would work under the sky that was going on. Roughly 8 miles down the wrong road I passed an old barn that was sitting up on a hill between two different houses. The siding was missing from the face of it, and it generally fit the decay theme that I love so much. The distance from the road was going to be a problem though and would force me to use my telephoto lens to get any type of composition worked out. It was interesting though, so I turned around and pulled off on the side of the road to look at it in more detail. No matter what I was able to figure out, there was going to be a house included in the composition that I didn’t want. The only way to avoid it was to shoot the barn at a very unflattering angle. I decided to abandon that location and continue on down the road. I just needed to get turned around once again.
While going past the barn again, I saw a different angle that I hadn’t considered before and it was worth a third look, so after I got turned around, I slowed down and looked at the new angle again. It was better, but still not quite what I wanted from the composition. I was really needing to be much closer to the barn to make it work. Wait a minute, was that a person I saw going to a different barn on the property? Yep, it appeared as though the homeowner was home and out. I didn’t give it much thought at all and just pulled down into the driveway. I got out of the truck as he was coming out of the barn. I introduced myself and asked if it would be OK for me to work the barn from his driveway. He was happy to let me do that and showed me where to park so I wasn’t blocking his driveway.
I started out with my standard 24-70mm lens because I was much closer than I had been thinking I would get. From the bottom of the driveway, that lens worked, but the only compositions that were available to me included a newer house up on the hill which wasn’t terrible but didn’t really fit with the story that I wanted to show with this photo. As I moved down the fence, further away from the barn, the composition was looking much better, but I was much further from the barn once again. The 70mm limit on the lens wasn’t giving me the reach that I needed, so I went back to the truck and grabbed my 70-200mm lens along with the polarizer that I had been using with the other lens. I went back to the spot where the angles were looking right and set the tripod up to get the composition framed up.
This combination was much better than the closer in shot and I was able to isolate the barn which was what I wanted to do. From here, I had to do some fine tuning in order to provide separation from my elements while keeping the sky from creeping into too many places beside the barn and beneath the shelter. It became a game of a quarter inch here and a quarter inch there which is usually not the case when shooting with a long lens. I just wanted to make sure that the trees behind the barn didn’t have a large white void between them and the barn, and that the shelter didn’t show the sky beneath the roof. These are all little things that probably would go unnoticed in the final photo but would feel awkward to look at which I wanted to avoid.
When I finally had a workable composition put together, I started to look at the exposure. The histogram looked fine as there were no indications of anything blowing out or bunching up which meant that I had plenty of detail to work with. However, with all of the effort that had been spent getting the composition right, I wanted to have the best possible RAW file to work with, so I noticed that the sky was quite a bit brighter than the barn and the grass. In order to deal with that, I went back to the truck and grabbed a 3-stop soft edge ND Grad filter and slit it in. This helped to remove some of the exposure from the sky giving me much more detail straight out of the camera. The histogram also closed in a good bit as the brighter tones were stretched out more. All that was left at this point was to watch the sky and wait until the clouds complemented the scene.
With that accomplished, I had my first one in the bag. There wasn’t much else that I could do at this location because of the layout of the landscape, but I was really quite happy with the one shot that I knew I had. I got the camera put away and I was back out on the road. I had left out thinking that I was going to get a single image, if anything, so I was right on target with how my day was supposed to go. That being said, I was really feeling like I had more photos in me. There was still time, and the storms were not coming in like I was expecting which just yielded nice skies. I decided to just drive aimlessly for a while and explore some different roads.
One of the roads that I ended up on was one that I think I had been on maybe a year or so ago, but I didn’t remember what all was in the area. I was driving slowly and saw that there were a couple of cars that were stacking up behind me, so I pulled into the first gravel lot that I could find. This lot turned out to be a car dealership with a couple of cars on the lot. There was another business behind the building where the dealership office was located. Along the driveway between them was a couple of old Ford trucks, and something that was quite a bit bigger and quite a bit rustier. I just continued down the driveway to get a closer look. It was an old International truck with what looked like a salt spreader bed attached. The bed held no interest for me, but the cab of the truck had a beautiful patina to it and some interesting shapes. I pondered it for a moment but decided that it was too crowded to work on compositions and I wasn’t sure that I would be able to get any good isolations either. I just put the truck back in drive and started to head back out to the road. As I was driving past the dealer office, a woman stepped out and got into an SUV that I remembered had a normal tag on it. I pulled up beside of her and lowered the window. She lowered her’s and I asked if this was her place which it was. The truck didn’t belong to her, and she wasn’t sure if it belonged to the other business down the driveway. She offered to call the owner for me to see if it was his, and if he minded if I shot some photos. I thought that was very nice of her and I gladly accepted her hospitality.
She spoke with the owner who said that it wasn’t his truck, but that he had no problem with me taking the photos from the property. With that, I was all set and pulled in behind the dealership to get my camera out. As I was getting set up, she came back out to talk with me and told me that her son was going to school for videography and was into cameras quite a bit. I told her how much videography didn’t appeal to me and that I was 100% still photography. She said that she was trying to get her son into still photography, but he felt about stills like I did about video. Guess, this can be a polarizing subject for some folks.
After the quick chat, I started to go to work. I had the standard lens fitted which was my favorite lens for this type of work. Of course, I also had the polarizer fit to it to control the glare from the metallic surfaces. The first thing that I worked was the area behind the driver’s side of the hood and into the door and fender. There were some very interesting body lines here and I wanted to get a nice abstract piece to represent the shapes of this old truck. I was working on the shaded side as that gave me a bit more visual interest with the contrasts, but I also looked at the same location on the passenger’s side. It was certainly better on the first side, and I stuck with that. I also changed up the composition and started to add the emblems from the hood for a bit more visual interest. The shapes were very soft on this truck, and I wasn’t sure that the composition that I had started out with was strong enough without a good visual anchor. I actually tried two different compositions with both of the emblems paired with the shapes of the panel lines. They all turned out pretty good, and I was feeling like I had all that I could with this truck.
The reason I wasn’t overly anxious to try getting a larger composition was that the side that had the best background was in the shade, and the background was just trees on the other side of a road. There were also power lines that would have to be dealt with and just no real visual excitement to the composition. From the opposite side, I had much better lighting on the truck, as well as a very dramatic sky. In the background, there was a boat, the roof of a long steel building, the business down the driveway, and even more power lines with a power pole. Neither of these compositions jumped out as good ones, but there was something about that sky as I looked from the passenger side. It was dark and mood, and the truck was in just about full sun which gave a wonderful contrast. The colors looked great together, and I determined that this composition had so much working for it that I really needed to try to make it work.
I started to look for camera placement at this point, and in order to eliminate the power pole and attached light at the top of it, I was going to have to get down really low. This also covered up most of the power lines with the truck, only leaving the lines coming out from the very front of the truck. As I was working on the framing, I started with just a portion of the cab, and made it bigger and bitter until I had the entire truck in the frame…well, almost the entire truck. At 24mm, I wasn’t able to get the whole thing in the frame convincingly, but I did see that all of the background clutter was reduced in size to where nothing stood out but the truck.
I was onto something here, so I went and swapped lenses for my 16-35mm which I rarely use in this type of photography. I usually don’t care for the extreme perspective distortion, but in this case, I felt that the truck was big enough and the shooting position was low enough to justify the distortion. I had the tripod down to its lowest position without making the neck go horizontal. This covered up everything that I needed with the cab of the truck, but I didn’t have enough weight on the front grill for a balanced look with this lens. There was an old Ford pickup parked maybe six feet in front of the International which was pretty close up against. I ended up putting the camera right next to the truck which made it difficult to use the LCD in live view to get the composition figured out. I managed to get things worked out and with some careful use of the zoom feature in live view, I was able to get the edge patrol figured out and all the offending elements eliminated from the field of view. Once again, I realized that I had spent a very long time on a composition and had a histogram that was passable, but I wanted more drama in the sky. Just as I had done with the barn, I went back to the truck and grabbed a 3-stop soft ND Grad and slid that in. This gave me a very pleasing gradient across the sky that accentuated the colors of the truck.
I shot three frames with this setup trying to get a moment when the grass was still in the breeze. I quickly realized that I needed to bump the ISO up to 200 in order to get a 1/15 shutter speed which froze the grass well enough. Before I called it day, I tweaked the composition and closed it in just a hair and shot another two frames trying to get the grass to be still. With this, I had 40 exposures on the memory cards and felt that I was done for the day. The sun was getting stronger, and the sky was starting to break up which meant that the lighting was not going to be favorable much longer. I was happy with the day and figured that I had three to five images that would be keepers which was plenty for a quick drive into Traphill.
I got things packed back up and started on my way home. Of course, I was looking for any other subjects that I could capture, but nothing else stood out to me on this trip. When I pulled the images into Lightroom, I was really surprised at how good the compositions looked even though the look of the images was rather boring and flat. I ended up with seven that I wanted to edit and evaluate further. Of these, I ended up with four that I really liked. It might not be the same number of images that I had from my last trek, but I wasn’t looking for a high volume of images from this trip. If you recall, I was actually only looking to capture a single image of a tractor. I might not have gotten that, but there is no denying that I found some great new subjects that I hadn’t ever photographed before.
I hope that you have enjoyed this trek and the resulting images. Remember, the best way to enjoy any photograph is to hold an actual print in your hands and be able to have it hanging on your wall. I would love to discuss sizing and media for your prints, so let me know which ones you would like to order. Nothing makes me happier than seeing a photograph that I shot being printed or being done as a metal or canvas print. It does my heart good, and it also helps to fund these treks, so you get to see even more of these images. If you would like to learn how to better capture this type of photograph, consider joining me on one of my workshops. I’ve got three of them scheduled starting in the Fall. If rust is your thing, you might want to get signed up for the Decay workshop in November because I’m talking to several folks right now that are interested in joining and there are only a limited number of spaces so that I can effectively teach and facilitate. I’m expecting each of these workshops to sell out, so reserve you slot today to ensure that you can go along with us.
I’ve also got an advanced mentorship slot opening up in about a month or so, which means that if you are wanting to take part in this highly personalized educational process, let me know so we can get you in the books. I’m working with two very different clients right now and both are showing huge strides in their photography. If you think that you aren’t advanced enough for this program, you are wrong. One of my clients is essentially just starting out in photography and has mastered basic exposure and has a good grasp on composition at this point. We are already starting to explore what will become his style of photography. My other client has been into photography for quite a while but has decided to take things up a notch and learn how to cull images effectively and to really edit a photo in Lightroom with both global and local adjustments. As you can tell, I can work with a variety of experience levels and invite you to give me a call (336-681-0220) so we can discuss if I would be a good match for your needs. Of course, the consultation is absolutely free, and you have no obligation to work with me.
Don’t forget that I also offer portrait services and am ready to work with you on any number of portrait type sessions. I’ve done family photos, couples, engagement, headshots, basic portraits, boudoir, and figure studies. We can work on location, or you can come out to my fully equipped studio in Purlear, NC. You can check out my work on Facebook @gregkiserportraits. This is a new Facebook page that I have just recently started that will hopefully work in unison with this website. Drop by and give it a like and follow if you want to see more of my people photography work. Of course, not all of the sessions that I do will be posted because unless I have a signed model release, I don’t release the images online for any reason. Let’s talk about your ideas and make them happen!
Until next time….
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