Saturday, January 1, 202X…2
It seems like I just had a blog entry published. Oh yeah, I did. In case you missed it, I published the first Behind the Camera of 2022 this morning. Normally, I would sit back and rest after such a long entry, but I just couldn’t quite do that today. I do try to get out and do what I love on the first day of the year. I guess it started when I was cycling years ago and tried my best to get out for a ride on January 1st. That was not always that easy to do though because….well…Winter. I rode in the rain, the cold, and even the fog many times. It was just something that I had to do in order to feel like a “real cyclist.” Well, I will say this much. January 1, 2022, was much better suited to cycling than photography. While there were some decent clouds to start the day out, the temperatures went from warm to hot in just a few hours, and that was here in the foothills of NC, not the Piedmont area where I did my cycling. I still got out for a bit today to get the camera used for the first time since last year which was nice.
So, how did this all come to be? Well, earlier in the week the weather forecast was calling for pretty heavy rains and potentially storms rolling through Western NC on the 1st. That wasn’t going to be good at all for photography and I had considered doing something in the studio but kept an eye out for changes in the weather. As the weekend got closer, the rain was getting pushed back and it was looking like there were going to be decent clouds overhead without much in the way of precipitation. By the time Friday night got here, I was looking at the cloud forecast, and it was showing high and mid-level clouds for most of the morning with the mid-level clouds leaving shortly after noon. The rest of the day was going to be overcast which could be with thick clouds or thin ones, each bringing a completely different kind of light. There was a good chance since this was supposed to be a storm that the remaining clouds would be thick enough to really even out the lighting which would be good for doing moving water photography.
That was something that I have been wanting to do again for a while now, but the lack of rain has had me very hesitant to drive any distance at all to try and capture a waterfall. Now that we have had some rain, I was hopeful that I might get some good waterfall scenes when the weather was right for the lighting. It was looking like I might have a decent chance at doing some of this photography and the cloud forecast for the area of Big Creek was looking promising. That was going to be nearly a three-hour drive to get out there which I wasn’t looking forward to, but if I could get some good images, it would be worth it. That was my main plan, but I was trying to come up with a secondary idea just in case the weather didn’t pan out.
As I was considering my options, I started to realize that this was a holiday weekend, and the temperatures were looking to be in the mid to upper 60’s which really sounds like a pleasant time to go hiking for the masses. Not wanting to fight for position to get compositions, I was a little worried that going on a Saturday would be a bad idea. I decided to just see how I felt when I woke up and would figure it out then. Since Toni was working this weekend, we turned in at a very reasonable hour so I really shouldn’t have had an issue getting up in time to drive out to the State Line early enough to take full advantage of the thicker clouds.
Well, I didn’t sleep all that well and when Toni got up, I just wasn’t ready to meet the world just yet. I didn’t have to get up quite that early anyway, so I rolled back over and went to sleep again. I was awake again when she left shortly after 5am which would be a good time to get up for the road trip. I looked at the weather and saw that the thicker clouds were going to be fading away kind of early in the morning leaving just the high-level clouds which might very well be thin ones. Looking ahead to Sunday, the clouds were looking better, and the temperatures were looking cooler as well. I did some crowd math in my head and decided that Sunday morning might be the better option as most folks don’t get out to do this type of activity until after lunch. I would be wrapping up by that point in the morning as long as I could get started by 9ish. The clouds locally were also looking promising, but I was going to have to see what I had to deal with before I committed to a destination which meant waiting another couple of hours until the sun was up. Oh darn, that meant that I had to sleep in some more.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz
When the sun came up, I finally woke up and looked outside. It was just a flat, overcast day with really no good light just yet. I knew that the clouds were going to be changing through the morning and the lower-level clouds were going to be gone in a couple of hours which might change how the textures in the sky looked. With the flat lighting, I decided that I wanted to try and do some more rusty isolations and recalled seeing a Mustang at the local restoration shop when I was out that way last. I had recently had pretty good luck with a Torino that was parked there in the parking lot, and I was hoping that the Mustang might present something interesting, and I also hoped that it was still there. From there, I could go up 18 and check out a Barn that I have been thinking about photographing again but was needing the right conditions. Then, I could go and try some of the doors that I have knocked on previously with no answer. It was going to be a full day if things worked out.
I got ready and grabbed my gear. I was off to the restoration shop to see what I could work with. The clouds were mostly flat, but there was a bit of texture starting to show up which was promising. My first stop was probably not going to require much sky, so I wasn’t too worried about it yet. When I got to the shop, I pulled into the parking lot and found it to be quite a bit emptier than I had remembered it. The Torino was still there, but the Mustang was gone and there was just nothing left out there that was of interest, so I decided to move on up the road to check out that barn.
When I got there, the sky was looking decent, and it was good enough for me to pull off on the side of the road and get out to look at things critically. For the most part this scene hasn’t changed since the last time I had shot it, but the barn was aging quite nicely, and I wanted to capture that. The problem that ran into here was that the best angle on the barn included buildings behind of it. I tried to work out a composition where a grove of trees blocked the commercial buildings, but the trees just overcomplicated the composition. Nothing was really working out for me, and I never even brought the camera out of the truck. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the composition that I had was workable, but I needed the benefit of some fog to really make it work because the new metal building that was in the background just ruined the image for me when it was fully visible. Fog would take care of that and put the emphasis on the barn which was what I wanted to happen.
That meant that I needed to find something else to shoot for the day to at least get that first shot in the bag. I still had a couple of locations on a road that I had been working here recently which seemed like a good destination to go for. When I got to the area, I could see that I was going to have no more luck here than I had seen on previous attempts. I’m pretty sure that the houses are vacant, but I will definitely need permission to enter the property because what I am wanting to shoot is well within the property, far from the road. It was seeming like nothing was working out for me at all and I was starting to think that I should have gone to Big Creek after all.
At almost the very moment I had that thought I realized that the clouds were starting to break up. That was good for the textures in the sky, but it was lousy for the lighting that I was needing for the moving water. Since the weather was moving from West to East, the skies that I was seeing now would have been the skies I had to work with had I gone to Big Creek this morning. I was glad that I opted to stay closer to home for this particular day. I was still needing something to photograph though. The options that I had were quickly disappearing and leaving me with nothing to do but drive around aimlessly which I can do, but the light was getting worse which was not a good indication that I had much time left. As almost a last-ditch effort, I considered running out to the end of a road that I haven’t worked in quite a while. There was a scene that I had shot shortly after Toni, and I moved into the area which included an old Ford truck and a Dodge Coronet.
The last time I had been to this spot was in the Summer and it was a foggy morning. I really loved the photographs that I came back with but had wished that I could have gotten the front of the car. The way that the Dodge was parked placed it right up against a fallen tree trunk and a broken stump. In the Summer, the brush was just too thick to work around. When I tried to shoot it last Winter, I gave up because I just couldn’t get a good angle on the front that fit my vision. I knew that the owners had been happy to let me photograph the car when I was there last, so I figured that it wasn’t going to be an issue this time either.
The further down the road I got, the better the clouds were looking. By better, I mean there were some clouds because where I had been had become pretty much clear. I was happy to find the light diffusion because I knew that I would need all the help that I could get in that department. When I got there, I just pulled off the road because with the clouds clearing out, this was going to be my last chance at a photograph. I was committed to this location, so I got out and grabbed the camera with the 24-70mm lens and a polarizer. I looked at the front of the car and just didn’t like how it was looking. I was again having all kinds of problems with this composition and decided to start trying for some isolations on the side.
Well, those didn’t work either and I was starting to get a little frustrated. With the bare trees, I was having a hard time getting a good clean composition from the back like I had done originally. My options were even worse from the front. The brush and the tree debris kept me from getting into my preferred positions at the corners, and there was just no way of getting a full length shot of the car from the front. I was about to put the camera away and just go home, but I told myself that I just needed to work the scene and figure it out.
My first idea was to embrace the stump as a foreground interest that was slightly out of focus. That would allow me to crowd the front of the car with the framing of the photo as it would give a really nice framing element to the front of the car. With that in mind, I was more comfortable cropping off the rear of the car which would allow me to get a shot from the front quarter. The issue that I had been having here was that there was a Ford Escort parked just outside of the frame which didn’t fit the car at all. By cropping in near the back edge of the door, I was able to avoid that newer model car completely and focus on the front of the Dodge which was what I was after.
The entire composition became about the headlight bucket and everything else just supported the composition. Because of that, and the fact that the colors were all fairly uniform, I decided to go with a black and white presentation of this one. I liked the idea of this much more than the color image because it was a rather involved composition and by removing the color, I was able to simplify the image just enough to make it work. The ability to really play with the contrast and tones was also helped greatly by selecting black and white. It might not have been a stellar shot, but it was something and I had the first image in the bag for the new year. The pressure was off, and I was ready to work this car a little bit more.
I had noticed that from the area that I was working, I was possibly going to be able to get in closer and elevate the camera a bit more to eliminate the tree debris in case the composition just didn’t work out. I moved in closer and got the camera up as high as I could get it. It was hard to see, but I was able to use the live view to place the bottom edge of the frame just over the jagged tree trunk. There was a broken branch that I used as a foreground element to help balance out the composition. This one seemed a bit more natural, and I liked the composition better than the first one that I had shot. This one seemed quite a bit simpler which was a good thing and allowed me to keep the color in the image. It was the blue reflections in the chrome that brought in the much-needed cool tones to balance the overall warm scene.
This was the image that I edited first because it was the strongest composition that I shot for the day. It was also the easiest to edit, and for a while I was thinking that this was going to be the only keeper from the day. I had shot a total of 19 images when I was done, and at this point in the day, I was at frame number 16. One keeper out of 16 frames is pretty good and I would have been happy with that. However, I ended up shooting an additional three frames to complete the day.
After shooting the front end of the car to my satisfaction, I wanted to give those lovely fins some attention. I’ll be the first to admit that the full trees made for a valuable compositional element when I was here in the Summer. I didn’t have the benefit of those leaves this time…or the fog. I did have a nice sky, but I was going to have to shoot it from the opposite side than I had done before in order to really get the sky to add to the composition. That presented another issue that I had not been worried with in any of my other compositions. There was an old basketball goal sitting on the side of the driveway. I was able to keep it out of the other compositions that I had shot here, but when I was shooting it from the back left corner, the goal was right there behind the car. I guess I could have cloned it out in Photoshop, but I always try to figure out how to get rid of unwanted elements with the camera before I rely on post processing.
Since I wanted the sky to be an important part of the composition, I had no problem getting down low in order to get the shot. I knew that there was a chance that I could mask the goal with the fin of the car if I got into the right position. I managed to get the perspective just right so that the goal disappeared behind the fin, but I was so close that the frame cropped into the car at the front which wasn’t desirable. I needed to go wider than 24mm to make this work and I had just the lens to do that with. I went back to the truck and swapped out my lens for the 16-35mm and then went back to place the camera back on the tripod I had left to mark the right spot to cover the goal.
The new lens worked well here and gave a very exaggerated perspective that brought the attention right to the taillights and the glorious fin. I had a working composition but had issues with the exposure. The sky was very bright compared to the car which was largely in the shadows. I could have added a grad filter, but that would have been a lot of work to swap out filters which were back in the truck, not to mention that the division line would have fallen right through the quarter panel which would have been added post processing to deal with. There wasn’t a lot of wind, so the trees weren’t moving too much. That prompted me to think about doing an HDR blend. I got things ready for a quick test run with three exposures. One would be roughly a “correct” overall exposure and I would bracket one stop over and one stop underexposed. I would then blend these in post for a final image with a ton of dynamic range.
As I was making the exposures, I kept hearing dogs barking and it seemed like they might be getting closer. By the end of the third exposure, I turned around and saw two dogs coming around the side of the house. I wasn’t alarmed, but it was my clue to go ahead and move on. They were agitated and making a lot of noise. They were also working their way closer to me which would make any further photographs very difficult. I was hoping that I had a strong enough composition for this last shot because it was all that I was going to get. At least I was certain that I had the right exposure since I had bracketed the shot.
As a funny aside here, when I got home and looked at the images, I went ahead and merged the three files into a single HDR capture. I kept that one in my group of three to edit from the day. I started the process on it and was thinking that it was going to work out, but as I was getting into the nitty gritty of the edit, I saw some really bad chromatic aberration on the tree limbs to the left as well as some ghosting which was brought about from the blending of the three images. It was just not something that I liked to see and while most would not have noticed in a print, I wasn’t happy with that at all. I was also having some issues with the crop because I didn’t think that it needed the full 3:2 crop and I was after something like a 1:1, 4:5, or 5:7 crop to really keep the focus on the car. It was enough to just trash the image and not worry about it.
The more I went through with the edits on the other two images, the more I kept coming back to the idea of that last shot. I liked the perspective and the sky, and really wanted to see if I had something that would work. I went back to the RAW images and looked at the bracketed series. The middle image, which was roughly, correctly exposed actually looked pretty solid. There was just one small bit of clouds that were starting to clip, but there was still detail to be had there. The shadows weren’t bad at all either which meant that I might be able to pull that detail out. Without blending the images, there was no issue with the trees moving because it was just that single capture. I brought that one in and started to process it the same way I had been doing the HDR. I was surprised at how much dynamic range I had captured with this one and was having no problems at all pulling out details from both the highlights and the shadows. I didn’t even have to deal with much noise at all. I’m glad that I went back to this composition because the more I look at it, the more I actually like it. That usually doesn’t happen when I just shoot my first idea for a composition. There are some things that I would have changed with that composition had I had more time but considering everything. I’m quite happy with how this turned out.
I hope that you enjoyed the rather long trek with a single location photographed. It was good to get out on the first of the year, and I’m excited that I finally figured out a way to photograph the front of this old Dodge. There are just not that many of these floating around so the chances of getting another one in similar condition was going to be slim. If any of these photographs strike your fancy, I would love to make a print for you so that you can proudly display this gem on your own wall. There is just nothing quite like holding a fine art print in your hands because there is just no comparison to looking at it on your monitor, or heaven forbid… your cellphone.
I hope that everyone has had a great New Year’s Day. If the weather works with me, I’ll be back at it again tomorrow with some landscape photography from Big Creek. It is about time for me to do some long exposures and that aqua colored water is just too much fun to work with. Keep your fingers crossed that the weather looks promising. I’ve got a full tank of gas and I’m ready to get my feet wet first thing in the morning.
Until next time…
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