Saturday, March 29, 2025
And just like that we are back! For you, it might be a day between chapters here, but for me, it is a matter of minutes before I am right back here typing away. Before I get back into the trek, I figure this is as good a time as any to share a word from our sponsor…Me. That’s right, while your favorite YouTuber is getting money from each video that is released and even bloggers are getting some cash for their words, I’m sitting here completely unmonitized for my content. This is a labor of love for me and the best way to get my photography out there to be viewed. I only make money off of it when someone decides that they want to purchase a print of one of my photos. In other words, I really work for my income as a photographer and not a content creator. If you would like to support my endeavors behind the camera, consider selecting a print to display on your wall to be enjoyed by all. If you are wanting to learn photography, or increase your skills, consider joining me for a workshop or signing up for one of my mentorship plans. There are a number of ways that I can help you with your own photography journey and we are just a risk-free consultation over the phone away from putting together a personalized plan for you. Of course, I am also available for all your portraiture needs as well whether you are looking for a studio setting or something at a specific location. If all else fails, and you still want to show your support, you will find a “donate” button at the bottom of this, and every blog where you can essentially buy me a cup of coffee with a small donation of any amount. There are also affiliate links that you will find throughout the blog and website which if used to make a purchase of anything at those vendors, will send a few pennies my way without any extra cost for you. Each of these are direct ways that you can help me not fall into the “starving artist” category. For those who have taken an active role in my photography business, I really do appreciate it and hope that I continue to provide you with artwork that you love and content that you enjoy and learn from.
Alright, you know the drill. We’ve been through this many times during the month of March with three different three-parter blog entries from treks that have been rather epic in their scope. I seem to have found yet another location that warrants more than just a single blog entry. I wish that I could say that this one was a long time in coming, or that I went through all kinds of hoops to get out here. The truth of the matter was that I was running into dead ends at a place that I Really wanted to shoot at and had decided to just go out and get lost in the area looking for something else that might prove to be a workable location. You can read all about how that came to be in the first part of this blog which is here if you haven’t seen it yet.
The last photo that I talked about was one of a tow truck that I had worked out to become kind of an abstract composition from the top of the fender. I had done that while I was trying to figure out a way of photographing the entire truck. I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for tow trucks because Toni loves them so much. I find them interesting for sure, but she really loves them. Because of that, I always try a little harder to get the shot when it doesn’t really look all that promising. This particular truck had really caught my eye though and I was really interested in capturing it. What I loved about it was the fact that there was a blue tarp draped across the hood. I’ve had several rusty subjects here recently really look good with tarps and I wanted to continue that trend. The sky was just blue enough to make the tarp stand out as a complementing color to the rust and the leaves without it sticking out too much in the frame.
There was a lot to like about this truck, but there was also a lot to dislike about the surroundings. It was parked next to a long barn of sorts which I liked, but this structure had an A/C unit on the side of the building which was obviously more modern than the look of the scene. There was also a large tent behind the truck which was a very pale yellow. That would easily be the brightest thing in the photo. To the side of the tent was a pile of building materials and a large sign. To the side opposite of the building was more cars that were not exactly what I would want for this subject. Not to mention the light and the look of the truck was much better when viewed from the driver’s side. As with most tow trucks, this one didn’t look all that great compositionally when viewed from the rear, so I didn’t spend much time looking at options from that angle. There was really no good way to shoot this truck, but I still wanted to get a photo of it before I left.
Looking at all the issues with the scene, I decided that the tent was the biggest problem that I needed to deal with. I found that by shooting from the driver’s front quarter that I could use the truck to block the view of the tent. The A/C was fully in view and if I got in close enough to the truck to use it to block the unit, the perspective was all off and I would have to include even more of the background. To keep the perspective right and to minimize the background, I ended up using a focal length of 28mm. I embraced the A/C unit and made sure that there was sufficient separation between the elements so that it wasn’t too much of a distraction. To pull attention away from the A/C, I chose to include a pile of transmissions and a cinderblock which were similar tones and kind of framed the front of the truck. The additional light-colored elements downplayed the visual weight of the A/C and allowed it all just to work with the truck. There was a tube that was next to the unit which I assume piped in the cool air which was just a little more distracting than I wanted it to be. I ended up removing this in post, but I don’t think that it appreciably changed the composition. The signs and building materials in the background were dealt with by reducing the exposure a little bit as well as pulling the saturation down with the red lettering. The close crop on the rear of the truck helped to keep those items from being too distracting in relation to the truck which was rendered large and in charge within the frame.
After all the planning on this composition, I only needed to shoot two frames to make sure that I got the shot. The only reason I did two was because the wind was starting to blow kind of hard and I needed to make sure that the frayed edge of the tarp would render as still in the photograph. I had tried to allow the wind to blur the tarp in the past for a creative choice, but that ended up looking terrible. Since that experiment, I have avoided showing motion in tarps.
While this is a busier scene than I would normally have shot, I think that it works well and I’m glad that I stuck with the desire to shoot it until I came up with a set of compromises that worked out so well. I love the color palette that is represented here and I’m really glad that I was able to get a view of the grill that I learned about in a discussion that I had with the owner in just a few moments after getting the photograph. It still hadn’t really dawned on me about the horizontal slats on the larger section being different with the GMC, but in my defense, I had been looking much more closely at the distractions in the frame rather than the actual subject.
Something that I think really baffles folks when it comes to building a composition is that it is more important how you deal with the distractions than what you are photographing in the first place. What you want to take the photo of in the first place is easy to figure out. You find something interesting and then find the angle that works best for it. Anyone can do that, but it is the little things that will destroy the photo that you just shot that have to be considered. As with the tow truck, there was a large beige tent that was set up behind the truck. Had that remained in the frame, every bit of the attention from the viewer would have been centered on that tent. It would have distracted from the color palette as well as changed the visual weight of the scene. The clutter behind the truck that was left in the scene had the potential of having the similar effect on the overall composition, which is why I made it less prominent in the scene. All of these little details had to be worked out while composing the shot because the composition is one of the main things that can’t be changed after the fact in post.
While working on that composition, I had heard several voices from the other side of the wall of the structure. When I was happy that I had what I wanted from the tow truck, I moved around to the front of the building that was a garage of sorts. This was where the two Chevys were that I had seen from the street. I was thinking that they were further inside of the building, but I found the two brothers and a friend of theirs sitting in chairs at the front chatting. I didn’t want to disturb them, so I made sure I was OK working some with the daily driver that they had rolled in with originally. With their blessing, I started to turn my attention to the grill and emblems on the front of the truck. This was when I was quizzed on the difference between that Chevy and the GMC that I had just worked. My mind was in a completely different place than it should have been for that question. As I said, I was looking at compositional considerations and not specifics to the vehicles. Normally, I would have been able to answer that pretty quickly having just looked at the two. As it was, I did get a bit more of the history of the different body designs of the trucks of this era. That kind of information is always interesting to me, and I try to remember as much as I can when I hear the information.
While I worked with the front of his truck, I learned more about the different vehicles here and some of the history as well as a bit about the car club. It was all fascinating and I enjoyed the chat, but my mind was still very much in a creative space, and I was responding to the visuals that I was seeing all around me. I spotted a teal ’46 sedan that I had seen earlier and forgotten all about after the tour. It was calling out my name at this point and I remembered that it had been one that I wanted to shoot. I had gotten several shots of the front of the truck I was working with, but in the end, there was nothing all that different from previous compositions that I had shot of similar trucks in the past so none of them made it through the culling stage of the process. When I got to a break in the conversation, I disengaged so that I could move over to the ’46 and try some things out.
I walked all the way around it to try and figure out if there was an angle that had a manageable background to it. As it turned out, there was a great angle from the front passenger side where I could get low enough to block the distractions behind the car while using the nearby shed as a mask for the rest of the background. I got the camera in position and started to work out the little decisions on composition and what settings I was going to use. After I was happy with my concept, I fired off two frames just in case the breeze was blowing anything. Since I saw no room for improvement on that composition, I didn’t waste any more time with that one.
Of course, the color combination was rather perfect with the orange toned rust and the teal. I knew that I was going to have to do some isolations to really take advantage of that combination. The first and most obvious shot that I needed to make was of the hood ornament. I had learned about the one-year only emblem during a quick session on the way home from the Outer Banks last year when I met the owner of a purple ’46 Chevy. Without that bit of information, the “V” molded into the crest might have been lost on me in terms of its significance. Knowing that bit of information helped me understand how to effectively capture the essence of this car.
Of course, I could have gone for the standard straight on shot of the crest, but I decided to do things a little different with it. In order to pull in more of the teal color and the orange browns, I extended the frame a good bit. I moved over the passenger side and made the emblem the focal point for the frame which worked even better thanks to the area around the emblem being slightly cleaner than the rest of the hood. From this angle, I was able to include the grill and the headlight which gave me a bit of a dramatic path to follow with my eyes. For that last bit of tension and visual balance, I decided to include just enough of the bumperette to form a triangle in the shot without pulling too much attention away from the main subject. In keeping with that need to retain visual interest on the emblem, I went with a very shallow depth of field so that the grill, light, bumper, and even the leaves would go soft pretty quickly.
An aperture of f/2.8 was selected which is not something that I would have shot with several years ago, but I’m really finding it helpful in some of the compositions that I am work with these days. I think that it suited this photo quite well, but there was something else that was missing when I was looking at the image review. That something was light. I had set the frame up with the clouds blocking the sun and that had given me a fairly flat image to work with. The front of the car was in the shadows so there wasn’t much that I could do about that, but I had noticed that every once in a while the sun would come out and light up the fender on the other side of the hood. I wanted to see what that separation due to lighting would look like in a final image so I waited until the sun came out and would grab a quick exposure each time. I ended up with four frames of this composition, but it was the last one that had the right intensity of light for what I was wanting.
I could have easily been done at that point with this car, but I really wanted to get more of the color combination captured. There were also some interesting body lines to play with surrounded by the colors. I went back to walking around the car and trying to figure out the interesting bits for isolations. I was specifically going for more of an abstract view than what I had just shot of the front of the car. The first place that I landed was on the driver’s side where the door met the fender. The patina was interesting here and I started to look for a composition. It wasn’t long before I had one that centered on the door handle with the trim going at a slight diagonal while the rather large fender and door extension balanced out the composition. I really liked how this was looking but realized quickly that the image was reading poorly from left to right. I was also on the shaded side of the car which reduced the saturation of the colors.
I figured that this would be an easy fix, and it certainly was. While I could have flipped the image in post, I decided to go on the other side and look at the patina there. It wasn’t quite as interesting, but the light on it was much better leading to better colors. It was also naturally going to be photographed the way that it needed to be read from left to right. I got the same composition worked out on this side and grabbed a single frame. I had worked out all the details of the shot with the three frames from the other side. There was no need to reinvent the wheel with this side; I just did the same thing, only with a reversed composition.
Since I was on the side with the better light, I took a moment to look for more interesting body lines and colors. I literally didn’t have to look far as I found a great line at the back door where it mated to the quarter panel. There was a gentle curve that balanced with the door handle and when the sun was out, there was another curve added by the handle with the shadow. I had shot similar compositions with other vehicles before, so this one came together quickly.
There wasn’t a need for any more than a single exposure. The composition was simple, and the depth of field wasn’t really much of a question at all. The only issue that I had was that the photo didn’t read well left to right. I could have gone to the other side and gotten the same composition, but I needed the sunlight for that shadow which wasn’t going to happen on the other side. This time the fix was to flip it in post which I was able to do with the click of a button. That fixed the presentation of the composition and created a much smoother flowing path for the eyes to follow.
I spent a few more minutes looking around the car for another composition to take advantage of the colors but had a hard time finding anything else to photograph on the car. After that last walk around, I decided that I needed to go and work with a COE tow truck that was parked beside the three-story house where I had photographed the Chevy truck earlier. This was one of those really unique vehicles which I don’t get a chance to photograph at all. This flat nosed cab over engine Chevrolet was parked right next to a tree which was next to the structure. There were small riding mowers all around it as well as other distractions. The rear of the truck was missing, and the snub nose was partially lifted which would have ruined the lines had I been able to get an overall shot of it. I had been trying to figure out how I wanted to photograph this one since I had shot the pickup cab near it a while back.
As I was walking around it, I was looking for points of interest that I could shoot to capture the essence of the truck. There wasn’t much to the front end, and I really saw no opportunity there. I kept looking and could barely make out some door art on the driver’s door but it was so sun bleached that there was no sense in photographing it. However, when I looked on the other side, the door art was very much intact, and I really liked how the patina looked on that door. The problem was this side was right next to a tree and things were very much packed in tight. There was no good angle to get the side of the truck and no matter what I did, I was going to have to get more than the door because of how the fender was positioned right under the lettering. With the fender came the turn signal and even the headlight housing. I was stumped for a time trying to figure out how to get this door art.
Eventually, it came to me. I could shoot at a strange angle that centered on the door art but kept it going at a diagonal. The tree could be included as a framing element which would allow the fender to be included without issue. Because of the elevated angle that I was shooting at, the panel line at the rear of the door came in at a similar angle to the tree that created an even stronger frame. The area above the door body line was painted black which made the door handle stand out and provided yet another bit of a frame that matched up to the fender panel below the door. As I was putting all the pieces together in the camera it was all coming together really nicely. It was a composition that I don’t think I have ever tried before and I wasn’t sure if it was going to work out, but I was liking what I saw in the image review.
There was only a single frame shot of this after all the finagling that I did with the composition. There really wasn’t anything else that I could see doing with this, so no sense in lingering. It is interesting that the last three images that I have talked about represent the last three shutter button presses that I made. Seven minutes had elapsed between them which most of that was spent working out the composition on this door art as the previous two only took two minutes to capture. It is times like this that I know I am in tune with my subjects. I’m able to work quickly and efficiently with a very high hit rate resulting in images that I am really happy with.
It was at this point that I was feeling like I was pretty much done with what I could shoot. I was liking the way that the sky was looking now compared to when I first started out. There was a lot of texture and still a good bit of blue present. I knew that there was one composition that I had shot early on which might benefit from the better sky. I walked back over to the Chevy by the small shed which had been the start of this session. The sky was looking much better now than it had been and I decided that I was going to give this another shot. I reviewed the first frames that I had shot of it to see where I could make improvements. I could see that using the wider-angle approach seemed to be better than going with the standard view. Because of that, I decided to switch over to my 16-35mm lens and get in close to the car. This would allow me to fill the frame with the car while still including a great deal of the sky.
I got everything switched over to the new lens and found that there was no worry with the polarization in the sky because of the clouds that broke up the blue nicely. I got in very close and framed up a composition that omitted all the distractions in the background. Well, maybe not all of them, but I was able to minimize those that I wasn’t able to get out the frame. One of the strongest tricks that I used here was to shoot the photo vertically. This allowed me to get more of the sky in the frame which provided a very good contrast color to the predominant browns and oranges of the scene. It also gave me the ability to keep the crop close on the sides.
The first frame looked really good and satisfied all of my goals. The only issue was that the balance was off in the frame. The car seemed to take up a very small part of the frame while the sky took up much more. I knew that I would be cropping this down in post to change the aspect ratio, but I wasn’t sure that it was going to be enough. I needed more presence with the car. The best way to do that was exactly what I had done with the cab of the truck in front of the house earlier. I elevated the camera to get a bit more of the top of the car in the shot by changing the perspective. The stretched out the foreground and ate into the sky a little bit. The resulting balance was much better in my opinion, and it was that second frame that turned into the keeper from this concept.
I was still interested in getting a horizontal composition of it as well, so I flipped the camera to see if the wide-angle lens would do a better job at capturing the car horizontally. I would love to say that was the magic bullet that worked, but having just shot at 19mm, that was way too wide for a horizontal shot. I did find a very pleasing composition at 27mm which I could have done with the standard zoom, but this was the lens that was mounted and was still a very sharp focal length.
The Jeep was gone for this attempt and I immediately realized just how beneficial that was to the composition. With the Jeep being white, it really stood out and became a distraction if I included it. With it gone, I was actually able to include the house it was parked next to because the brick siding didn’t really stand out all that much at all. Having the ability to move further forward of the car in the composition allowed a much more pleasing angle to be had. There were still distractions beyond the shed and the natural thing for the eyes to do was to go and explore the background.
What I had to do in order to prevent that and keep the eyes on the car was to strip the color. There wasn’t enough structure to the background to give contrast and with the colors removed, there was just nothing else to really pull the eyes through except for the clouds which was fine. Those clouds would bring the eyes back to the car eventually which was what I wanted. The sky made this photo, much in the same way that it did in the vertical one, while taking up much less of the visual real estate. I like both versions for different reasons and for the stories that they tell.
I think it can be argued that I have spent enough time with this car between the beginning and now. There aren’t many variations on the compositions that can be shot, but what is available makes for a very nice frame, I think. The favorite aspect might just be the watering can at the front. It is just that one little detail that really sets off the composition as a whole. The sky sets the mood for the image though. Having reached a point of satisfaction with that subject I decided that it was time to start making my way back to the truck to get things packed up. I had other things that needed to be done, and I had in no way planned on being out this long when I left the house earlier that morning.
I ended up making my way back up to the main house and the garage that I had seen from the road. Tony, the owner was still out there, and we did some more talking while he gave me some more trivia with the cars. One of the details that he told me about was the inspection sticker on the truck which was on the passenger window and was shaped like the state. This inspection was for military use in transporting the personal vehicles of military personnel to other countries. It was difficult to see on the back of the sticker, but there were illustrations of the hand signals used in lieu of turn signals. This was handy to have since the truck only had one rear taillight.
We also talked about a Discovery show that was filmed here several years ago but never aired in the US. They had come out to his property after finding it during a scouting mission and filmed one of the episodes there in the garage. He told me about the details of that show and that he has never seen the episode since it was never released here. However, it apparently has done very well abroad. I really should have been taking notes during the conversations because there was a lot of information being shared with me about the property which made it all quite a bit more special than I had considered when I first saw it. Obviously, I saw things here that I fell in love with, but apparently, I wasn’t the only one that saw the beauty of this property.
While we were talking, I had been trying to set up a shot of the coupe which was nosed into the garage. This was one of those concepts that I had thought of when I first saw the property. When I had been ready to shoot it, Tony was entertaining by the two vehicles and I was not going to be so rude as to ask them to move for the photo, even though they did offer. I was now able to work the one side of the garage but wasn’t able to get the composition to come together even slightly. I really thought that the wide-angle lens would be the way to go here, but there was just too much around the car to make it work. I might have been able to get something with both of the vehicles in the frame, but I saw other issues with that now that I was in close to the garage.
I did move inside to see if there were any isolations that I could get from either vehicle. I really enjoyed the coupe and wanted to do something with it. That was where my attention went first. While I was looking at it, I was being told about the Discovery show because they had taped over the inspection sticker as it dated the car differently than they were wanting. While we were talking about that tape, I happened to see the rear quarter panel with the DeLuxe badge over the chrome chip guard. this has long been a favorite set of elements to be used in a composition. I saw that the lighting was really quite beautiful here with the sunlight bouncing off the ground outside and casting a really nice shadow on the leading edge of the fender. I knew that this was going to be my photo, so while talking with Tony, I went back to my bag and swapped lenses for my telephoto which was going to be perfect for this composition.
I got everything set up and framed before shooting the first exposure. As I was looking at the image review, I could see a few things that needed to be fixed with the framing, so I made those adjustments and pressed the button once more. That turned out pretty good, but now I could see depth of field issues which I corrected for a third shot. That one felt right when I looked at it, but I hadn’t been paying much attention to the light and thought that I could get better light if I tried again. There were two more exposures made before I realized that I wasn’t going to get any better than that third frame. In all honesty, after doing the processing, there isn’t much about this one that I would have wanted to change.
While talking, Tony offered to close the hood on the truck since he had been working to put a new radiator in it. I told him that I didn’t need him to do that as my goal is to never be a problem and to leave a property just like I found it except for maybe some footprints. He insisted and closed the hood. In hindsight, I am quite glad that he did because I wouldn’t have seen the hood emblem otherwise. It was the first time that I recalled seeing a “Thriftmaster” badge on one of these. It was just interesting enough to get me thinking of a photo. I like unique badges, and I really liked how this one was looking.
I had memories of shooting another truck in a shed last year when the light was very flat due to the deep shade that it was in. That photo turned into a post processing event to get it to look the way I wanted it to. This Chevy was in better light with the light coming in from the front. It was creating contrasts, but they looked much different than what would be seen outside. The colors and textures were also really interesting in the strong front light. I turned my camera towards the hood emblem which I am very familiar with the compositional possibilities. I went with an angle that would put the light to the best use while still focusing on the emblem. The composition was very simple and almost seemed boring looking at it in the image review. I guess that was why I only shot a single frame.
That single frame was enough though. When I got it home and started culling images, this last shot of the day kept catching my eye. It was one of the last ones that I processed because I really thought that it wasn’t going to make the cut due to lack of real visual interest. However, when it came time to work the image over, this four second exposure took on a whole new life with one of the artistic color profiles. It brought out a variety of colors that just weren’t visible in the RAW file. After selecting that color profile, I went through the full edit which brought out the textures and the subtle lighting over the entire image. Without much help at all, the emblem was glowing with a warm tone that just looked like a chef’s kiss on the canvas that was the truck.
That was the last frame of the day and represented number 67. Of those 67 frames, I ended up with 20 keepers that will be added to the collection. I honestly don’t know how I keep falling into such luck these days. I’m not complaining or questioning anything about it. I’m just amazed at after working around in these areas for the last five years I’m starting to think that I haven’t even scratched the surface of decay subjects. Just looking back at this month alone how many new subjects I have found and shot baffles my mind. It wasn’t that long ago when I would get excited over finding a single rusted car and thought that was a rare thing. Little did I know that a decade later I would be running into full collections of these cars. My business is decay photography….and business is….gooooooooood.
I really hope that you have enjoyed tagging along with me today. Don’t forget to support this starving artist in one of the many ways available to you. I love creating this art and will do it for as long as I can, but it is your support that makes it all possible in the first place. Thank you for being a part of my journey.
Until next time….
