Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Let’s see, how long has it been since I’ve been on a trek? I don’t see anything at all during the month of December, though I have been out scouting areas and trying to find something to photograph. As I go through November, it looks like the last time I did a blog was on the 18th, which might as well have been a month ago. I know that I have been saying that since my portrait shoots were pretty much wrapped up, I would be able to get back in the swing of getting some photos. That was the plan, but it appears as though it wasn’t quite as easy as I had hoped it would be to get back in the same creative space that I had been in. First of all, I was creatively exhausted after some pretty involved portrait sessions over a relatively quick amount of time. Second, I had gotten really used to photographing people and that was where my energy was wanting to be directed, what little energy there was. Lastly, I have been working on my year in review and have started to look at how the year has gone. It has been a dismal year in terms of being a business and when I started to really look at the numbers from that business standpoint, it kind of put me in a negative space with photography. Without a doubt, this has been my most busy and productive year in regard to photography, but all of that effort just hasn’t translated into a good year, fiscally speaking. I’ll get into more of that when we get into the year in review on New Year’s Day.
For now, I just want to jump back into the trek at hand. What you haven’t seen is that last week, I went out on two different days looking for potential photos to be made. Nothing was jumping out at me, and after nearly 300 miles driven, I packed it up and decided to focus my attention to things here at home. I was actually ready to just take a little vacation from photography, but fate had other plans. I actually received a phone call from a new client that was in need of getting a professional headshot for his job. After talking with him for a little while, I felt that I could satisfy the requirements for what he was needing, and we got a session scheduled. That is happening this coming Friday and I’ll be getting things set up for that later this week.
I also received a message from a friend of mine who is always out looking for decay subjects that I might like to photograph. I’ve mentioned Don here many times when he has found the scenes that I end up shooting. This time, he sent a couple of photos of what looked to be a late ’40’s business coupe which he said was located close to the road near Traphill. He gave me rough directions on how to find it and that was it. As it turned out, the day that I had gotten the message would have been a good day to go shoot it, but it was too late by that point to get out there. The following day was too sunny to even bother with it. Of course, then we had the winter weather coming through which kept me wanting to stay dry and warm.
By the time Monday night rolled around, Toni and I were looking at the road conditions after a day of snow. While the snow had not stuck to anything until the very end of the day, there was a high probability of black ice and she was still having some issues with her eyes. Out of caution, she let me take her to work. I felt better about this because I could see without a problem and my tires are much better on ice than her performance rated tires. I figured that while I was out, I might as well go and photograph the car if I could find it. Based on the photos that Don had sent, it looked like it was going to be in a pretty good spot to even shoot from the road.
Toni and I were on our way shortly after 5:30am and it was still quite dark at that time. The roads were better than either of us imagined, but I was still glad to be taking her. After I dropped her off in Yadkinville, I checked the phone to see when sunrise was. I mean it has been a while since I’ve been up this early, so I wasn’t really sure when the light was going to be happening. It was showing for 7:22, which was still about an hour away. I needed the sun to be up pretty good to photograph the car, so I started to think about other scenes that I might be able to get during sunrise. I started out in the direction that I had scouted during the Summer while helping one of Toni’s coworkers with a flat tire. I knew of a few barns that might look good during the sunrise, but as I was driving North, I remembered a photo that I had been after for a while. The last time that I had tried to photograph it, I wasn’t able to get into the field because of the vegetation. I had seen that the field had been cut back and cleared during one of the last times I had driven out that way. It was worth a try, even though I wasn’t really expecting any color to hit with the low level clouds.
I wasn’t too far away from the old feed mill, so I was there long before the light started to take over the sky. As the darkness started to fade away, I got my coat and scarf on, along with a toboggan and gloves before grabbing my bag and tripod. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to need, so I just brought it all with me. As I started walking into the field, I was happy that the vegetation had been cleared which allowed me to actually get close enough to the building to photograph it. That happiness was kind of muted though because they had apparently come through and fertilized the entire field with manure. I was hoping that it was frozen solid, but at 27 degrees, it was still a little soft. Oh well, I would just knock it off of my shoes before getting back in the truck. I needed to do something with the camera before this hiatus turned into full-on creative funk.
I walked around for a bit until I found the angle that I wanted to photograph from. I liked what I was seeing from a distance, so I pulled the camera out and fitted the standard zoom which I zoomed to about 65mm to start with. This gave me a pretty good composition with enough sky to keep it interesting. As the light increased, I fired off a few frames and quickly realized that the building was getting lost in the frame. I needed to make it larger while keeping a good amount of sky visible. That was an easy fix, and I was able to address that concern by moving in closer and going to a wider focal length. This effectively enlarged the building and gave it a bit of perspective distortion while I was still getting a large amount of sky in the background. I liked this much better than what I had started with and committed to this composition.
Over the next half hour or so, I would fire off a shot as the sky changed or as the lighting changed. There were a lot of clouds in the sky, and I was getting kind of worried that there wasn’t going to be enough detail in them to really sell the image. The last thing that I wanted was for the sky to be just a blank overcast since it was taking up so much of the frame. The alternative was to use a very close crop on the building which just seemed boring to me. I wanted to have a bit of negative space, and if I was really lucky, I would get a little bit of light on the side of the building as the sun came up.
There was a break in the clouds just over the horizon to the East and I checked with my sun locator app for the position of the sun when it crossed the horizon and found that it was going to be right at the break in the clouds. There was a pretty good chance that I would get to see some color in the sky, but I was pretty positive that I would get the warm light on the side of the building before the morning was done. I just stood there and realized that I wasn’t nearly as cold as I thought that I would be. That was good because I wasn’t really doing much to make myself any warmer as I was just standing there and firing off an exposure every once in a while.
I was starting to look at this as a black and white scene because there was no color coming into play and the sky was looking rather bland. I knew that with black and white, I would be able to pull out more contrast and that was going to be the key to whether this image was going to work or not. The sun was now up, and I could see it through the clouds. I was also seeing the red light from the sun on the trees to the right of the building, and I could see it on my camera as well. Where I wasn’t seeing it was on the building itself. This had to be because of the building on the other side of the street blocking the sunlight. The side of the building was just being blocked from the sunlight and there was a bank of clouds that the sun was about to enter into that was going to block even more of the light.
I decided to stick with it and wait because there was another slim opening that the sun was going to go through that might be high enough to light the side of the building. That was going to be another five minutes or so away. I just waited as the entire scene went gray with the sun behind the clouds. When it started to peek out again, I was still seeing the shadow from the neighboring business, but I wanted to stick with it just in case. I started to be able to see some warm light on the side of the building and started to make more exposures as that light quality changed. It started to get rather intense as the sun gained altitude and more of it was visible between the clouds.
Just before it started to go into the next bank of clouds, I got the shot that you see above which had the most intense light on the side of the building. The sky wasn’t as dramatic as I had hoped, but I was pretty sure that I would be able to address it in post to pull out the faint contrasts that I was seeing with my eyes. I was still really hopeful that the sun was going to light up the clouds though. There was still a chance. The sun was now going behind another bank of clouds that had been blocking the warm light from hitting the clouds above the old mill. In another couple of minutes, I would have one final chance to get light on the building and color in the sky.
When the sun started to come out for the third and final time, the light on the building was faint at best. There was a little color in the sky, but it was all over to the left and out of frame. I waited until the sun poked back into the largest bank of clouds which was part of the overall overcast sky. At that point, there was no more light to be had and there was no reason to stick with this composition anymore. I figured that it was time to pack it in and head out towards the area of Traphill to find this car that Don had sent me the tip on.
Before I did that though, I wanted to do something with the colorful siding that was beneath two windows on the front of the building. There were lots of vines covering the wall, and the windows had long since been broken out. This whole scene had kind of grabbed my attention while I was shooting the entire building. I can recall photographing it years ago and felt like I might want to try it once more. I moved in closer and started to look at the angles on the wall. I didn’t want to shoot this part of the mill in the same way that I had before, so I started to really look at the corner to find a new way of working it. By moving over to the right of the windows just a little bit, I was able to include the background through the window on the other wall. This gave a sense of depth that my other photos had lacked. The colors were also much better this time after some more aging had happened.
After working out the composition for a few minutes, I dialed in an exposure and fired off a few frames. I still didn’t have the polarizer attached because I wasn’t dealing with any glass, and the sun was behind the clouds now, softening any glare on the metal. I decided that I wanted the bits of highlight here and there for some added contrast to the scene which would have been evened out with the polarizer. I didn’t stick with this idea for long because there weren’t many different ways to shoot it. I was happy with what I had after only a few shots. With that, I packed things up and headed back to the truck to get warm again.
I had no way of knowing that this shot of convenience would turn out as well as it did when I shot it. Everything that I loved about the scene just came through so well with the image and I think speaks more effectively for the entire building than the overall shot had. There are just times when a part is more communicative than the whole, and that is really the key part of synecdoche that I have latched onto this year. You have no way of knowing what you are looking at in terms of what the building actually looks like. However, you know that it is abandoned and derelict. You can see the vibrant colors of age as well as the vines covering everything. The glass is missing, yet the window frame is still present. The colors all work together, and you can see the background off in the distance. There is a lot to look at here, but there are more questions than there are answers. This is the way I love capturing scenes.
I had to remember that this wasn’t even the reason that I wanted to go out for photos this morning. I still had another location to find and determine if I would be able to make it work as a photograph. I had some time to switch gears as I was driving back out to Wilkes County. I needed to get in the right frame of mind for this car because the only thing I had seen of it was a single view from the roadway. I didn’t want to just go and mimic that shot, yet I had no idea what was around it. There was also the other concern that I hadn’t really considered…snow. It wasn’t really a bad concern, but it was something that I wasn’t quite sure what the impact would be. The closer I got, the more snow I was seeing on the cars parked outside and a few driving through. I didn’t want the snow to be a distraction for the car, and depending on how it was looking, there could be bright white splotches that stood out more than anything else which would make this a very difficult photo to capture. On the other hand, it could give me the contrast that I really needed with the car that was largely the same color of rust front to back. I just needed to lay eyes on it in order to figure out how best to photograph it.
I found it much easier than I thought that I would have. I swear that I have been through this area before and haven’t seen the car, yet it appeared to have been here for some time now. It is in an area that I have spent a great deal of time in, but for some reason haven’t done much with this particular road, so there is a possibility that I just never got this far down before. In any case, I was here, and the car was as advertised. It was close to the road, and actually between two cross streets which gave me plenty of options for angles without leaving the shoulder of the road. That was all well and good, but there were other considerations that made a composition less than easy.
The car was down a short embankment and positioned between two trees. On the other side of the field was a white box of some sort right at the trees and just inside of the trees was a late model Chevy truck which wasn’t too visible but was still there as a distraction in the background. Further to the left was the framework for what might have been a greenhouse which also threatened to interfere with a composition. From where I was beside the road, to exclude one from the frame was to include the other. If I shot the car straight on, I would have a tree in the way, not to mention I wasn’t able to get a clear shot over the weeds along the roadway.
I really started to look at this scene for anyway that I could get a good clean shot of this car. The only thing that I could work out was including the box and the truck across the field. I grabbed the camera and set the shot up. I dialed in a narrow depth of field to try and blur the distractions out, but that wasn’t all that effective at all. I got a few frames like this and just figured I would deal with the background distractions in order to get the shot.
I needed to make this happen today because the snow was absolutely perfect on the car. There was enough of it on there to leave no doubt that snow had fallen, but not so much as to obscure the details. There was a little bit of snow on the ground as well, but the textures were all still there. It looked better than I could have imagined it, yet I was looking at a photo that looked like a snapshot from the street. I wasn’t doing the scene justice at all, and I needed to do something about that.
It was still rather early in the morning, so I didn’t feel comfortable knocking on the door across the street which might have been the property owners. I knew that a half dozen vehicles had driven by me since I had been here and nobody had stopped to challenge me, and apparently nobody had called the property owners either. Looking around, there was no fence, no signs, or anything indicating that they didn’t want anyone in the field. The car was maybe 30 feet from the road, and I would be totally visible to anyone passing by if I were to get closer to the car. I weighed my options. The conditions were very unique and not likely to be repeated. While this is a gray area, I knew that for any trespass laws to take effect here, I would have to be told to leave by a representative of the property. I was willing to do just that if anyone made contact and denied my request to photograph the car. With all that in mind, I decided to go down the embankment by way of what could only be referred to as a trail.
This allowed me to get closer to the car and to change the perspective of the whole scene. I was now able to mask the distractions in the background with the car from a similar angle that I had shot it from originally. I liked this much better and it was starting to look like a much more considered photograph. I had two trees to the front of the car with one of them near the background which gave me all the depth that I could have asked for with this scene. The shape of the nearest tree framed the car nicely and everything just fell into place. I had a feeling that this was going to be a black and white photo because there was nothing but drab colors all around. I also thought that black and white would set the mood better for what I was looking to capture.
At this point, I was pretty much done because I had the photo that I had wanted to get with the car. However, I noticed that after being down here for maybe 10 minutes working on the composition for that other photo, I still hadn’t been approached by anyone. I was still fully visible and felt comfortable moving around the car to see if there was another angle that might work out even better. I doubted that there was because any other angle would be shooting out to the roadway, but it was worth a look.
When I got around to the front of the car, I couldn’t help but notice how the vegetation was looking from this angle. The warm yellows played off of the white snow for a really nice bit of visual interest. The mound of vegetation was perfect for a foreground as well. The issue, of course, was the fact that the intersection was behind the car from this angle. There were signs, a power pole and the road to be seen. As I examined things, I realized that getting the camera down really low would take care of most of the concerns and if I put a little distance between the camera and the car that I could avoid the signs in the intersection.
I started to find the right distance where I still had a nice, pronounced foreground, as well as a bit of perspective distortion on the car. I then opened the tripod legs to allow the camera to be much lower to the ground. This gave me right look to the composition and I loved the shot before I even dialed in the exposure or took the first frame. I worked through several different creative options with this composition before I landed on the final image that you see here. Even though there is a power pole in the frame, it doesn’t really stand out and really doesn’t detract from the image at all. Everything just works, and I was able to get even more of the snow in the frame due to how the car is leaning to the passenger side.
It was this last of 63 frames that turned into my absolute favorite from this trek. It was well worth venturing out in the cold to get it, and I’m glad that Don had given me the tip when he had so that I hadn’t run out to get a photo under the cloudy skies that were there for most of the day. It was the snow that elevated this scene into just what I would have hoped for. Even though it was still early in the day, I felt that I was pretty much done. I knew that I had at least three keepers from the day and possibly more. I didn’t want to settle in to processing for hours and then have to write a bunch here in the blogs since I needed to go and pick Toni up this evening. I also didn’t want to shock my system after having some time off from photography. What I had in the camera was a perfect amount to get those creative juices flowing once again.
I’ve also still got a headshot session to work on later in the week, so I do still have some more photography in the very near future. For now, I’m very happy and feel a little more positive about things. Of course, it also helps that while working on this blog, I received an email from somebody looking for barn photos in the area of Lomax. I have several of those, and I’ll be sending some samples his way here shortly. Hopefully, that will result in some print sales because my print sales have been few and far between this year. But I’m not going to go down that path again because it puts me in a rather depressed state. I’ll just put it like this, if you like what you see and would like to support my photography, there is no better way than by purchasing a print of your favorite photo. All of my prints are done specifically for your needs which means that you get to choose the size and what material the print is done on. These prints are unique to the client, and I can pretty much assure you that you will have a limited edition because I don’t sell prints in volume. I also don’t keep many prints in my physical inventory. I would love to match you up with the perfect print for your wall space, so let’s talk about it and get things rolling.
I hope that you have enjoyed this trek as well as the photos. I’m not sure if this will be the last trek of 2025, but if it is, I’ll be very happy with the last photo that was shot for the year. There is still time for some more to be added, so we will find out if there are more to come sooner than later.
Thank you for joining me on this one, and I would like to wish you all Happy Holidays!!
Until next time…
