Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Just like I said, I’m back with another installment of this blog series. This will be the last one and I really could have added it into the previous chapter, but it was in a different town and a completely different subject. With those things in mind, I felt that it deserved its own blog for ease of reference later on. At any rate, if you have been keeping up with the entries, you will know that I decided to go out and shoot a location that had a DeSoto and a couple of trucks under a full sun. This is not something that I normally do as I much prefer the soft light of a cloudy day. However, with this scene, the cloudy day didn’t really hold much interest for me as I was looking critically at the subjects. Only when I was seeing them in full sun did I get inspired to capture them. I was right to hold out for a sunny day because the entire session was very successful with thirteen new keepers added to the collection and a good many of them making their way into my portfolio.
I was pretty much done with the day’s adventures when I was finished up with the DeSoto, but Toni let me know that she was coming into Yadkinville to get her nails done and I thought that might be a good chance to catch a meal out with her. There is a restaurant in the same shopping center that we both like and I was hoping that she would be willing to go there after her appointment. I knew that I would need to kill a little bit of time while she was getting her nails done, so I started thinking of where I could go for another photo or two.
Here recently, I have been pretty active in the Yadkin County area and have seen a number of places that I have wanted to photograph. One of those spots was close to the area that I had been just last week in Booneville. I had spotted a barn between the highway and the road where the cars were located. My intention had been to return to it and get the photo before I left the area, but by the time I was done with the cars, the sky had gone from showing some really nice texture in the clouds to being completely overcast without any detail. That wasn’t going to work at all, so I just skipped it and figured that I would return another time to see if I could make anything work with it. It was about 10 or 15 minutes back up the road and the sky had some interesting clouds blowing by which prompted me to want to give that barn a chance.
It would take the right amount of time to get me in the right part of the day to meet Toni and as long as the light looked good on the barn, it should be a pretty easy subject to shoot. With that in mind, I headed in that direction. It wasn’t until I had pulled off on the shoulder of the road that I heard back from Toni. She had some other plans and wouldn’t be able to do lunch after all. That was a shame as I was kind of looking forward to it. I was here at the barn now and the light was looking decent on it, though I kind of wished that I had the dramatic stormy sky that I had seen over it before. It was good enough to give it a try though.
There was a house that was next to the barn but there were no cars around it, so I was pretty sure that nobody was home. I had already spent the better part of the time out working in the gray area of needing permission and not, so I decided to continue with that theme for the day. I wasn’t going to need to get overly close to the barn to get the shot that I had in mind and more than likely would only need to use the shoulder of the road. There was a distinct boundary between the yard of the house and the yard around the barn with only one of the pieces of property being mowed. I chose to recognize and respect the mowed property as curtilage of the home and stay off of the mowed section. Looking at the area that I was going to be working with, I chose to go with the wide-angle lens which would give me more of the focal length that I intended to use. I could have gone with the standard zoom but figured that I might end up spending more time around that 24mm mark in which case I would want more room to open the lens up even more. As it turned out, I could have just as easily used the standard zoom because nothing I shot was outside of that range of focal lengths.
The lens choice did prompt me to make another choice which was the omission of the polarizer. Looking at the sky, there was too much blue to chance using that filter which would end up showing banding in the blue tones as the polarization effect is not evenly distributed in all directions. Any time I plan on shooting wider than say 35mm with a blue sky, I typically will skip the filter for this reason.
The setup was simple and there wasn’t much to the composition with just the barn at play. I worked with the trees in the background to give some structure to the frame, but essentially, it was just a matter of placing the barn in the right spot within the frame and getting the exposure. It just doesn’t get any simpler than that. What I spent time in doing was moving in closer and closer to the barn while still staying far enough away from it to show respect to the owner. I ended up shooting a total of eight frames of this barn from slightly different angles and from distances that differed maybe by 20 feet or so.
When I got the images home, I picked the three best that I wanted to look at further and then eliminated one in favor of two that I felt were stronger compositions. My plan was to work this as a black and white image because of the contrasts that were across the scene due to the high sun. Of those two, I picked the later composition which was the fifth frame that I had shot of the barn to process.
The processing went very slowly as I had to pay particular attention to all the tonal values while really working the sky to get the mood that I was after. This went from a simple sunny scene to something a bit moodier and lower key which I felt was better for the scene. There was no doubt that I had picked the right photo to process and I was very happy with how it turned out. Having a single keeper out of eight images was fine by me and I gave it not another thought. That is until I was going to be and reviewing the images in my head.
I’ve already shown you one of the images that resulted in the second run through the RAW captures in Lightroom and that was a result of the thought that I had with the barn images. I was kind of wondering what a low contrast processing would look like with the barn in color. I wanted a washed out and more or less vintage look to the image. I knew that I had a more direct composition of the barn which was shot later in the series which might look good in color.
When I got back downstairs to get started on the second part of the blog series Wednesday morning, I looked at the rest of the barn pictures. The one that I was thinking about was the third image that I had trashed in the earlier culling process. Since I had been thinking in terms of black and white, I had dismissed this one, but it was going to be the stronger starting point for a color image I felt. I went through the different profiles looking for that vintage starting point but never landed on an option that appealed to me. The blues and greens actually worked well together to create a very calming image, and I wanted to lean into that. With the blue sky and puffy clouds, I wasn’t looking for drama at all. This was an image to just stare at and relax. The colors were perfect for that mood, so I decided to embrace them and go for some saturation instead of the washed out look. I mean I already had an image that I knew would work with the black and white version, so this one was a risk-free experiment.
It took a bit of working with the tones, but I managed to get a version that I was happy with. It was simple in execution and relaxing to look at while still showing the shadows that the sun was creating. It worked, not in the same way that the black and white one had, but I was still liking it. I also knew that for most of my client prints, color was always the one that folks chose. This would be a more marketable image even though I did prefer the black and white version by a good margin.
I’m glad that I came back to try this one out and because of this version of the barn I was also able to revisit the trunk of the DeSoto which is a photo that is still growing on me. Some of my favorite photos have happened after the photo gets cut during culling. It just takes a bit more time to understand the subjects and locations to really understand what works as a photo at times.
With the late addition of this barn and the one of the DeSoto, that brings my keepers to an even 15 out of 37 RAW images captured. No matter what metric you are using to calculate success, that makes for a very successful trek and one that happened during conditions that I normally would have stayed home for. I’m really embracing the fact that I am having so much luck on sunny days and I’m looking forward to where that will take me in the future. It is definitely opening up the possibilities of days that I can go out with the camera. All light has its benefits as long as you understand how to harness that light.
Thank you all so much for joining me on this latest adventure. I do hope that you have enjoyed the photos and if there are any that you feel would make for a good addition to your own collection of wall art, let’s get your print started today!
Until next time…
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