Wednesday, March 19, 2025
You are undoubtedly waiting for the hint that this is going to be a long trek with many parts to the blog and more photos to go through than we have time in the day for. Well, you will be disappointed with this blog entry because none of that is the case. Of course, if you are tired of going through very involved photo sessions and just want to see a couple of pretty pictures, then this one is for you. Give me a moment to start at the beginning before we get to the photos.
As you have noticed, I’ve been rather active with the blogging lately. There have been fresh blogs over the previous three days starting with this one. I’ll be the first to admit that the last thing that I wanted to do was to get into another epic day of photography, but I had to go with what was presented to me at the time…which happened to be a lot of rusted cars. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed my time there and am thankful for the new photos that have been added to the collection. I was ready for something a bit simpler though. I kind of longed for the days when I would go to a spot and get just a frame or two which could then be edited in less than an hour. The blog entry wouldn’t take much longer than that, and I would have the rest of the day free to do other things rather than photography.
Well, as it turned out, Toni had to return the rental car on Tuesday, but her car was still in the shop being repaired from the deer strike about six weeks ago. This meant that I was going to be taking her to work this morning. Since she works in Dobson, it is an opportunity for me to get a slightly different area to work in. It is actually quite a nice little place, and I’ve spotted several things that have piqued my interest in the times I’ve gone to visit her or taken her to work. In fact, that first day that I took her to work was the day after the deer incident and I took my camera in case I saw something that I wanted to photograph. As it turned out, I ended up photographing an A frame house that was just too cute sitting on the side of the road. I had passed it by several times and taken note of it, but it hadn’t really stood out as a photo until I was out that way at sunrise. With the morning light, the little house took on a whole new character.
I was kind of hoping for something along those lines to happen when I was out that way again this morning. Looking at the weather, there was a decent chance of some high clouds over the area which might bring a bit of color to the sky. The sun was going to be rising around 7:15 and I would be dropping Toni off at 6:45 or so. This would give me just enough time to figure out what to shoot. I had an idea of a barn that was next to where she worked, and if that didn’t pan out, I could go back into the gardens behind the building which had some interesting views. I had something in mind with those options, but I wasn’t committing to either of those because I was willing to take a chance on something that might be better.
This was one of those times when I didn’t really care if I got a photo or not. I had my camera and if I wanted to capture something I would be able to, but it wasn’t a major goal for the day. Mainly, I just needed to get Toni to work. That was just what I did after leaving the house very early in the morning. As I got close to her job, I happened to see the shape of an old tobacco barn off to the left of the road. There wasn’t enough light to allow me to see any detail, so it was just a matter of seeing the shape. I didn’t remember the barn right away, but it was something that I thought that I might be able to shoot since I would be looking at things in a Northerly direction which is where the sky should look the best with the clouds that were forming. I just needed a hint of color; I wasn’t really looking for the main sunrise because the sky wasn’t going to support that kind of shot this morning.
After I dropped Toni off, I decided that there was enough time to go and take a look at the barn a little closer and see if I could make it work. It was only a mile away, so it took me no time at all to get back to it. I drove by slowly, but it was still too dark to really understand the scene. The shape of the barn was looking great though, and I got turned around again so that I could park on the opposite shoulder which wasn’t quite as sloped. Once I pulled off the road, I looked at the scene a little more carefully and found that I did remember the barn. I had discounted it before because of the tin siding on it. However, the tin would go well with the colors that I was anticipating being in the sky. There was a little clutter by the barn, but nothing that seemed out of the ordinary or unexpected. I could make out wrapped bales of hay in the background of the barn which I wasn’t quite sure about just yet. The overall scene looked promising and even though the barn wasn’t the greatest, I was thinking that if the light turned out great and I had a strong composition, I could overcome the lack of interest in the barn.
Straight away, I got the camera built up with the standard zoom because I didn’t know if I would be photographing the scene from across the street or closer to the barn. With the 24-70mm, I would be able to get an idea of both compositional possibilities and potentially be able to shoot either with the same lens. I didn’t add any filters because I really didn’t think that I was going to need any with the lighting the way that it was. I started off getting an idea of what the barn would look like with the road in the shot while I was standing behind the truck. I wasn’t really a fan of how the composition was laid out that way and there was just too much traffic at the moment for it to work anyway. It was still well before sunrise and my exposure times were going to be around 20-30 seconds more than likely. In that time, several cars would pass through the frame and would ruin the shot.
With that in mind, I moved across the street and got positioned on the shoulder of the road looking Northeast. I knew that the lighting wasn’t going to be idea in this direction if I wanted to capture any real detail in the barn. Since it was the shape I was mostly after, I figured that this would be a good gamble as it would allow me to get a more interesting sky. The background in that direction was also simpler to work with because from the other side of the barn, there was a house visible kind of close into the barn. I got the composition set up and found the right exposure with 30 seconds at f/8 which would be sufficient to capture the barn in focus while the sky went soft.
I fired off a test shot when no traffic was coming by, but there was a car that passed by and lit up the side of the barn during the exposure. Looking at the image review, that effect wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t really preferred. I tried the shot again and wound up with the same result. I was starting to see that in order to get the sky to expose right, I was really only getting a silhouette of the barn which from the angle that I was at wasn’t really working out. I decided that I would come back to this composition after the sun came up a little more and there was some ambient light to balance the exposure a bit better. In the meantime, I was looking at a lot of grain silos on the other side of the road that had some nice clouds above them that were already picking up color.
I moved across the street and tried to frame up a shot there and decided that I didn’t like the long buildings in front of the silos because they blocked the viewers eye from really going through the scene. Even when I added in a tree and a fence to the composition, it was just a very bad photo. I decided to cross the street once again and start to look at the original barn once again, although from the opposite direction. I now had the house to worry about which was just on the other side of the barn.
As I tried to figure out the composition, I found that to get the shape of the barn, I was going to have to shoot it from a quarter view which would put the back porch of the house really close to the front edge of the overhang on the front of the barn. I didn’t want to have the house in the photo, but to crop it out of the frame, I was going to have to put the entry to the barn close to the edge of the frame. I didn’t really like this because I felt that it would crowd the photo too much. To combat that, I decided to give the frame more room on the other side of the barn and hopefully find a point of interest in the background that would balance with the overhang.
As luck would have it, there was a tree that was showing some red growth on it which was the perfect look for the season. It would also match the tin roof and provide that visual balance to remove the awkward direction of the main subject. Now it was just giving visual tension to the frame which I could live with. I finished setting the shot up and got the exposure figured out at 20 seconds. The light was still very dim, but the ambient light was climbing. The clouds above were already starting to pick up the color from the rising sun which really helped the composition. Unlike the last time I had photographed a sunrise scene out here, there was no wind which meant that I had no problems at all with a long exposure and I happily kept the ISO at 100 to allow me more ability to pull detail from the shadows.
What you see here is my fourth frame of the day, and the first shot that I made of the barn from this angle. I shot another 26 frames of this composition with some slight changes in the framing as the sky moved out of the frame to the right. My hope was to keep a little bit of color in the scene while the sunlight hit the barn. I wasn’t sure if that was going to happen or not because there was a bank of clouds on the horizon which would likely snuff out the sun as it crossed the horizon. I was also fighting a losing game of keeping the clouds in the frame as they kept moving away.
Normally, it is one of the latter shots that turns into the keeper from a series because I am constantly improving and watching the light change. I thought that the light was getting better while I was working the scene, but when I started to cull through the images, the clouds were losing color and with them moving out of the scene, they were becoming less and less important to the composition. I didn’t like the empty blue sky for this shot either, especially without the benefit of warm lighting directly on the barn.
After a while, it became apparent that I was going to lose any clouds in the sky and there were no hints at the sunlight providing any soft warm light on the barn. I was starting to see that the light was actually getting worse, and I had lost the best lighting of the day. I pulled up the camera and tripod because I was tired of the constant traffic whizzing by as I was just a few feet off of the road. I made it back to the truck and started to put the camera away, but couldn’t help but notice that the clouds that had been over the barn before were now spread out on the other side of it. There was quite a bit of interest in the area of the sky that had been the background in my first compositional idea. Now that there was light available, I was thinking that I could get a little detail in the barn while still capturing the color in the sky.
I knew that I was going to want to get in close to the barn and remembered that my standard zoom had been sitting at 24mm when I was right off of the road to get the barn. Now that the sky was more interesting, I was going to want to get more of the sky in the shot which meant I needed to go wider. Since I was at the truck, I swapped out lenses for my 16-35mm which would certainly work better for the composition that I had in mind. I didn’t bother with filters because I knew that the barn was going to be well into the sky and any grad filters would just darken my main subject along with the sky.
When I got back across the street, I plopped the camera down low to the ground, but I was still on a ridge which put the camera about level with the barn. This worked out great for controlling the perspective distortion that this lens can have on architecture. I framed up a quick composition because the light was changing rapidly. I used the driveway to frame the barn and provide a visual pathway through the scene. I knew that I was going to be flipping this image horizontally so that it would read better left to right. I used the trees behind the barn to frame the whole image and keep the eyes from escaping. The wrapped hay bales helped to give a bit more importance to the driveway and the sky was looking just about perfect over the barn.
With the composition set up, I started to look at the exposure. The histogram showed that this was going to be very difficult to capture in the way that I wanted it to look. The sky would easily overexpose if I got enough shadow detail in the barn, but if I kept enough detail in the sky, the barn would have gone nearly black. Grad filters weren’t an option here and a polarizer wouldn’t have darkened the sky enough to have mattered either. I had only one chance here and that was to blend several exposures together. Now, as we know, I much prefer to spend my time in the field to get things right. However, time was a luxury that I didn’t have here. The light was increasing quickly as the sun was just coming over the horizon at this point. I was also very cold, and the traffic was getting dangerous for me. I didn’t have time to see what the light was going to do and play with filter combinations to make it look right. Because there was no wind, the easiest thing to do, and what would make for the best end result was to get a series of stepped exposures and blend them into an HDR. It was really the best…and only choice for me in this situation.
I did a first run of images with four frames at about 1 1/3 stop apart from dark to light. It looked OK, but I felt that I might actually still be missing out on some highlights, so I set the camera up again for another series that was more spread apart. This second series had the frames around 1 2/3 stops separating the exposures with shutter speeds between 1/30 of a second and a full second. I believe that is five stops worth of exposure bracketing. Looking at the first and last images, I felt pretty sure I had all the values that I needed with a decent gradient between them for a smooth transition.
With that, I had a total of 39 frames shot of this one barn, but from two different sides before and after sunrise. It was kind of like the little A frame that I had done last month where I ended up with a keeper from before as well as after sunrise. I wasn’t sure if this was going to work the same way, but I was feeling good that I got something from this spot. Now that I wasn’t able to feel my fingers, I went back to the truck and packed the camera away and headed home.
When I started doing the culling, I ended up with four images passing the first stage of the cull. One of them was that last HDR series that I had shot which according to the “Auto Settings” on the HDR conversion was going to look decent when processed. There was no movement in the frame except for a bit in the clouds which wasn’t showing any noticeable ghosting, so the blend was effortless which I liked. It added about 30 seconds to the processing which wasn’t a bad tradeoff for not being able to get it exactly right in the field. It is nice to have the option of doing some things in post, and this was one of the times when it really paid off.
You will remember that I had planned on flipping the HDR image horizontally to help it read better from left to right. I did end up doing that, but the more I looked at the other composition, the more I wondered if doing the same thing would help it too. I was running into a problem where I mostly saw the barn and not the tree to the rear which made the barn feel crowded. I flipped the image after I processed it, and I noticed that the red tree was much more visible now and the barn wasn’t quite as dominant in the scene which kept it from feeling crowded. I ended up leaving that one flipped as well. Of course, having both of these images flipped is playing havoc with my memory of the scene since I shot both sides, the photos look totally natural to me, and I can’t quite visualize it the way that it was in actuality now. Of course, this is a great sign that the flip was the right idea. What do you think?
There we go, that is the end of that trek. There are no follow up entries, just the two photos out of 39 exposures. I do hope that you like them, and if you really like them, I would love to match you up with a print of your very own to hang on the wall. I mean who doesn’t like a barn under a colorful sky to look at every day. Either of these would be amazing on canvas or metal and would be ready to hang once delivered. Of course, I can always do prints on a wide variety of paper media with my favorite being Red River Baryta Rag which is an archival gallery ready cotton paper. It would make these photos look amazing. No matter what you choose to have your print done on, it will be exactly what my vision was for the photograph rather than when you look through your monitor or device and see it based on an uncalibrated viewer. I have no control over how the colors are rendered on your device, and even the brightness and contrast can vary greatly between monitors. A print is the only way to see the photo as I had envisioned it when doing the processing on my calibrated system.
Thanks so much for joining me for today’s trek. I do hope you enjoyed it and will be back with me next time. If you haven’t subscribed to the blog yet, take a moment and drop your email address on the subscribe page so that you will be notified with each new blog entry. Of course, with those entries comes all the new photos that you will want to see.
Until next time….
