Thursday, July 16, 2026
This really isn’t a trek, in fact, the camera was a last-minute addition when I left the house yesterday morning. It all kind of started like this. I was going to help Dad during a routine procedure which would have me staying with him overnight. I was expecting to be busy through most of the time there, and the weather was looking hot and sunny through both days. I wasn’t really thinking at all about doing photos, but I knew that he was four counties over and that the doctors that we would be going to were in another neighboring county which meant that I was going to pass a lot of things between leaving and coming back home. It almost felt wrong not to take the camera in case I came upon something that might work for a photo or two.
As you can tell from the title, I was thinking that I would be lucky to get four out of the spot that I found to work. So how did this little side trek happen in the middle of everything else that was going on? Well, I saw nothing all that interesting to work with on the first day that I was out there. In fact, I was thinking that I had brought the camera for nothing. The second day was an early morning follow-up appointment in another section of High Point. I was really figuring that it was going to be more of the same without anything really jumping out at me. However, going down the road with the early morning sun, we passed a barn between the two counties that kind of looked interesting. The light wasn’t great and would certainly get worse as the sun came up. It was something that I made a mental note of for another look at another time. I could see some potential through the area and thought that there might be several locations that would be worth coming back to work when the light was a bit better.
After the appointment we headed back the same way, and I had a chance to see how the light was looking at this stage of the morning. It was decent; but quickly getting very contrasty with the increasing intensity of the sun. I wasn’t really looking all that hard at this point because I already knew that I was going to be coming back through the area at another time. The fact that we were still in the city of High Point at the moment made it even less likely to find anything. In one of the more unlikely spots, I did see some rust that I had missed going in the other direction. It was a pickup behind a business next to the trees. It was only a glimpse that I saw at first, but once we stopped at the stoplight and I had a little better angle, I could look at it in a bit more detail. As we passed by after getting the green light, I turned and looked from the other direction and saw that there was no hood on the truck and there was a tire propped up against it. More importantly, I saw that there was at least one angle where the buildings on the other side of the trees didn’t show up. It wasn’t ideal, but this spot had promise and the light was still looking good on it. It would be a little while before I could get back out to it, but I knew that as long as I got there before 10 or so, I would likely be just fine with the quality of light.
After getting Dad home, I took care of a few more things and loaded my stuff up in the truck before heading back towards home with a few stops along the way. One of the first stops was to head back down the way to the doctor’s office to see if I could get permission to do a few photos with the truck. I had no idea how many different compositions would present themselves, but I figured that there was going to be at least one that I could get from the front of the truck which was what I had seen after driving past it. I also wanted to check the barn out once again to see how the light was looking.
The sun was getting very bright and I could already tell that it was going to be a hot day. This took a lot of the motivation out of me for looking for too many photos. This wasn’t going to be a full trek by any stretch, and I didn’t plan on exploring any. I just wanted to get what I had already seen if the light was going to work out for the spots. The light was already too intense for the barn, and it wasn’t looking good at all when I went past it. There was definitely a good angle on it though, and worth coming back on a cloudy day.
When I got to the spot with the truck, I took another look at it, more critical than I had looked before. I liked what I saw as the light was still pretty good on it despite the sun being kind of high in the sky. There was really nothing much around the truck which made for a much easier time isolating it from the other cars that were in the area. It felt like a good spot for a few photos, and I pulled into the business parking lot to find someone to talk to about possibly getting access behind the business.
I talked to a guy that was working on another truck in the shop. He didn’t have a problem with me getting some photos and actually seemed like he didn’t really care what I did. I didn’t extend the conversation any more than that and continued to grab my bag and tripod. I wasn’t quite sure what lens or combination of lenses that I would want to use because I was still kind of far away from the truck. By having the bag, I had all my options with me which made things much simpler. After taking a look at things, I really felt that most of what I was going to want to shoot would fall into the realm of the standard zoom. I was pretty happy with how things looked through my eyes and didn’t really see much need in going really wide or going for the compression of the long lens. Normal focal lengths should do just fine.
I fitted the lens on the camera and added the polarizer to reduce the glare and give some saturation to the scene. I then started to frame up the composition that I had figured would work the best from the front corner of the truck. I wanted to have something more than just the postcard shot of the front since it was missing some key elements like the hood and grill. The tire gave some visual interest to the front, but I also liked the idea of having the little storage building in the background for a bit of a framing element. This would also allow me to get the sky in the photo which was showing a few thin clouds that I really liked.
The composition came together really nice and I fired off the first frame to see how I liked it all. I felt that the depth of field was slightly off, so I adjusted the aperture and fired off another frame. This was better, but I was clipping some of the highlights on the door, so I knocked the shutter back a third of a stop and got that straightened out. After only three frames, I had my first keeper for the day. I liked the composition and felt that it was probably going to be a black and white so that the attention could be more firmly placed on the truck rather than having the storage building show up as an important element. I needed it to be there, but not as a distraction from the main subject. Black and white would remove that distraction and leave the building as a shape only.
Wanting to get in closer to the truck, I started to look for isolations and found that the badge on the left fender was broken and missing some letters. That bit of detail interested me greatly and I started to look for a composition around that. I started from the front of the truck and tried to work something out, but the mirror and the shadow from the mirror were causing me problems. I fixed that by moving to the rear of the fender and changing the perspective. This worked better and I was able to use the mirror in a meaningful way with the composition. I was also able to bring in the red wheel which I found to be quite interesting.
I think that it was around this time that I started to really pay attention to the grass around the truck. I noticed that it had been recently cut and that the grass under the truck had been cut at the same time. What this told me was that the truck had not been in this spot for more than a few days. Not seeing any places where the grass was different or worn down, I had to think that this truck was a relatively new addition to the property. With it being a shop, I could only imagine that it probably wouldn’t be here very long before moving again. This made it very fortunate that I spotted it when I did and decided to come back for the photos. There was every chance that the next time I was through here that it would be long gone.
While I didn’t want to stagnate on the side that had the full sun, I decided to see what the shaded side had to offer. The patina was roughly the same on that side, but the lighting was totally different. I also found a fully intact emblem on that fender which I decided to work with as well. This time, I wanted to bring in the blue paint on the firewall which contrasted nicely with the tones of rust that occupied the majority of the frame.
It was this blue firewall which was another consideration on the first image being done in black and white. The blue turned into a distraction with the truck and felt like it didn’t really belong with the truck. Now that I was looking at things in a much smaller scale, the blue was a nice contrast and a way to break up the warmer tones while bringing some context to the white paint at the top of the firewall. Each color defined a shape in this area, and I built the composition around that feature of the truck. Of course, it was all anchored by the badge on the fender.
While I was on the passenger side, I looked at the door handle which wasn’t showing any shadow like the other side, but I liked the patina better on this side. I also liked the more simplistic set of shapes without the handle casting a shadow. With all this in mind, I decided to frame up a similar composition to one that I have started using more and more. I felt that it really worked well with the droopy handle and the keyhole cover. As I had to work through before, I needed to figure out the placement of the door panel line. This became a bit of a game based on the actual size of the frame and how I wanted the handle placed within the frame. Fortunately, there was a slight curve at the top of the panel gap that seemed to rotate around the fulcrum of the handle. This little detail helped me organize the different elements within the frame into a composition that I really liked.
Now, if you are paying attention, you are probably looking at this image and trying to place it on the passenger side of the truck. It is probably making your brain hurt, and honestly, that is to be expected. The photo has been flipped horizontally to make it read better from left to right. This was part of the decision that I made when figuring out the actual scope of the frame around the elements. I knew that I was going to be flipping it so that the handle had a less static feel to it. This was easy since there was no script or other identifiers that would give away the “proper” orientation of the photo.
This is a bit of artistic license that I like to use when I can to make the photo a bit more impactful and a little easier for the eyes to move through the frame. There are some situations where I can’t use this technique, but this wasn’t one of them.
I spent some time looking around the truck to see if there were any other isolations that would work out and I wasn’t really finding anything that I liked. The light was getting too harsh to do much in the way of detail shots of the truck. With that in mind, I started to look at some alternatives to the overall composition that I had started with. This kind of brought me to the rear of the truck which took advantage of the fact that the steering wheel was turned to the left a bit. That put the front wheel pointing in a way that made it natural to photograph the truck from the back left. This was the area that I started to look at.
The problem that I ran into from this direction was that there was a white car parked a bit further down the line which had nothing at all to do with the truck. I needed to avoid that car at all costs. It was the corner view that I wanted because that was the most flattering for the truck. To avoid the car, I was going to need to shoot it from the side which I thought was way too boring and showed the buildings on the other side of the trees. I played around with the angles and found that if I got in closer and lower, I could must mask the car with the truck while keeping most of the angle on the truck that I wanted to have. I just had to be careful about getting in too close as I didn’t want the bed to be that much larger than the cab since the cab was the more interesting part of the truck.
I did try to include an old Mitsubishi van that was parked off and to the left, but there was a go-cart of sorts blocking the view of the van which I didn’t like. It wasn’t a great composition even though I did spend one frame to give it a try. I decided that it was better to just have the truck in the frame for simplicity and that was how I framed the subsequent two shots as I dialed in the exposure to avoid clipping on the lighter colored door.
While working with the horizontal composition, I really couldn’t help but notice the shapes of the trees above and how they kind of framed the truck as well. I liked it so much that I decided to flip the camera vertically and recompose a similar composition keeping the white car perfectly hidden by the truck. It would have been visible if I moved as much as an inch to the left which is how close I had to come to get the angle right for both of the photos. I do really like both of these compositions, though I think I am favoring the vertical one over the horizontal for the overall effect. For the details being visible, I like the horizontal one best.
At any rate, after a total of 15 minutes working with this truck, I was dripping sweat and feeling like I wanted to be done. I still had to go and do some wiring at Sierra’s house on the way home, so I didn’t want to be stuck outside in the heat doing that much later than it was already going to be. I looked at my frame count and saw that I had shot a total of thirteen images in that short amount of time that I was out with the truck. Looking through the, I figured that I would be lucky to get four keepers out of that batch which was actually pretty good in terms of a hit rate.
I was really surprised when I culled the photos down to a final six frames to look at in post to see if I wanted to keep them or not. Those remaining six photos were pretty strong, and I was really quite happy with them even before I started to do the processing on them. None of the edits took that long and I found that each of them earned their places in a collection of keepers.
It really is amazing that I found this truck in the city of High Point when I wasn’t even really looking. There is just something about rust that draws my eyes after all these years of photographing rusty vehicles. I’m not saying that I can do this in my sleep, but I did get up really quite early this morning for the doctor’s appointment and didn’t sleep as good or as long as I normally would have. I might have done a good bit of this truck in my sleep when I actually think about it.
Thank you for joining me for this impromptu trek. I do hope that you have enjoyed the photos. Don’t forget that if you are interested in having a print of any of these photos to hang on your wall, I do sell fine art prints of all of my photos. Not only is this the best way of viewing my work, it is also a wonderful way of supporting my art. Print sales help to finance these treks and the print is always so much better than the jpeg image that you see here. These images have been reduced in size by roughly 75% and then having the compression added in for ease of viewing online which puts them as low as 19% quality from the originals. It is almost unfair to see a print if you are used to looking at the images through a computer monitor or a handheld device. We won’t even get into the issue of calibration and overall brightness of your device of choice. Just know that the print is the only way that you can truly see the photo for what was intended.
Until next time…
