Sunday, February 2, 2025
And here we are back again to talk about the short trek that I wanted to take on Sunday. I seriously went out with the thought that I was going to be working one location with a few difficult subjects to compose images around. Of course, that thought fell through because I wasn’t inspired enough to open a gate that came with a dog warning in order to get to the front door. I turned those lemons into lemonade and ended up shooting two other scenes that I came by which I had never seen before. It wasn’t much, but I had something to show for the cloudy day. Yet, I still wanted more from the day. I took a chance on a Ford parked by the road and was forced to leave by a group of dogs that came out and wanted to be involved in what I was doing. I then made a desperate attempt at getting permission from a place that I have been trying to work for years. I knew that it was going to be another dead end, but usually when I am out this way and the clouds are looking good, I will at least go and knock on the door. Well, wouldn’t you know it, this time I got an answer at the door. That answer was go right ahead and take all the photos you want. As an added plus, during the time I was there, I had the chance to talk with the owner a couple of times. She let me know about a relative that lived not too far away with a lot more old cars on the property. I’ve since located that spot on the map thanks to the satellite view and will be out there again on the next good weather day.
I was also quite surprised by the fact that after I left her my card, she actually went to my website and looked around. I don’t think many do when I am working on the photos, or at least they don’t mention it. She had spent a good deal of time there as she knew where I was based out of, that I had a studio, taught photography through workshops and mentorships, and a lot about how I like to shoot. I was flattered that she was interested enough to look for that information. She also shared that she enjoys photography and might want to work with me in the future. I love being able to work with photographers who are looking to improve or figure things out that they are interested in. I really hope that things work out to where I can repay her generosity for letting me work on her property for a bit as well as giving me a location of another spot that might be photogenic.
Yes, there was a good deal of discussion going on during my time there, but it was never intrusive to what I was needing to get done. In fact, I was working at an incredible pace through the day as I had already mentioned. I had been out with the camera for less than an hour up to this point and had basically just done a walk through of the area and had shot the low hanging fruit. I was already very happy with what I had on the memory cards, but I knew that the real interesting images were still to be found because it is one thing to get overall photographs of cars in suitable locations, it is entirely another thing to pick out isolations and abstracts from these old cars. This is one of those areas where I have really gotten a lot of practice over the last few years because I have shot all the easy stuff. In order to find old cars to photograph, I am having to get really good at shooting isolations, and that was what was next on the agenda.
It was only fitting that I start out with the Barracuda that had been featured in the last photograph from the previous blog entry. If you haven’t read it, take a moment and give it a read so you know exactly what is going on. I don’t think I have seen a Barracuda of this body style in person, but I might just not be remembering it. It is not a favorite bodystyle of mine, but it is one that is very much worth photographing. I had captured the entire car with the reflective shade in the windshield already, but I wanted to get something that captured the back glass which is one of the unique design features of this car. Of course, trying to make an isolation of the rear window of a car isn’t all that exciting usually, and I needed this to be an attention grabber more than anything.
The more I studied the car, the more I realized just how limited my angles were thanks to the positioning of everything around it. You can see in that last photo just how close it was to the tires and spare parts which greatly limited my ability to get in position as well as what I could place in the background. My solution was to take a page out of my isolation handbook and look for angles around the pillar. I realized really quickly that the rear window overshot the quarter glass, but the leading edge stayed on the same line as the back edge of the side glass. This created a really nice geometrical language and something that I was sure that the designers included for just that reason. This was going to be the aspect that I wanted to focus on. It was not necessarily the rear window, but the essence of that window was certainly present.
I worked on the framing and the balance of the scene with the primary focus now on the pillar with the rust and patina. There was even a bit of moss that was growing between the glass and body. The angles were perfectly freaky when I started to look at them in this kind of isolation. It was interesting, it was abstract, and I really liked how it was coming out. I knew that it was going to be in color thanks to the browning yellow paint which contrasted well with the teal of the glass. I don’t think it would have been nearly as effective in black and white because the colors added so much here and made the photo even more interesting.
I ended up shooting four frames with slightly different framing to make sure that I liked the final balance when viewed on a large screen. It was the last of the series that turned into my keeper. It was the tightest crop that I had shot, and the exposure was a little different from the previous three. I thought that it worked the best, but as I was processing the RAW file, I started to doubt my instincts that this a solid photo. Something about it just didn’t feel right. It was awkward, and not awkward in the sense that I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. It just didn’t flow. Once I realized that, the answer was simple. I just flipped the photo horizontally and that created a much more pleasing flow that didn’t feel like my eyes were swimming upstream. This is one of the easiest tricks in the book to improve a composition, but it was something that I never considered until a few years ago. These days, I’ll flip an image in a heartbeat if there is nothing identifying for the original orientation. When it comes to abstracts, there is usually nothing that stands in the way of flipping an image.
I wished that I had been able to do more with the Barracuda, but nothing else was really clicking for me. I needed to move on so that I could get a wider collection of images from the day. Since I was still on the back side of the shop, I decided to spend a bit of time with the Falcon which was a 4-door model. There wasn’t much that I really loved about this car, but the patina on it was fantastic. You could tell just how long it had been sitting outside and that was the aspect that really excited me. I looked the car over and really didn’t see a composition that jumped out at me that would really make a different photo from other ones that I had shot of Falcons.
What I did see that kind of stood out was the fact that the scoop trim and the lettering on the hood were still in reasonably good shape which was a perfect juxtaposition to the condition of the paint and even the grill. This was the area that excited me, and that meant that I needed to photograph this part of the car. I started to look through the camera to see how things looked in two dimensions. There is always a trap waiting when doing simple hood compositions as they usually need to be perfectly symmetrical, and in the case of this one I was going to need to include the grill to keep the bottom of the frame holding onto the letters by a thin wire. As I looked, I got an idea about how the different focal lengths were looking and where the sweet spot was for the scaling that I was after. My goal was to have the implied lines from the edge of the hood bulge going right to the edges of the outermost letters. I also wanted there to be a little diagonal element to it. Then I had to make sure that enough of the grill was included to make it look like a compositional choice rather than an accident or afterthought.
When I had decided on the best location and focal length, I planted the tripod and camera and started to set the shot up. I opted for a 16:9 crop in camera to place the visual weight on the letters more than anything else. This worked fine, and as intended, but the result made the letters appear too spaced apart and I felt that they lost their own relationships. The answer seemed clear and involved going with a taller image to change the scaling. I went back to the 3:2 aspect ratio and raised the camera a bit. I was now including more space between the scoop trim and the letters and a bit more grill at the bottom. This seemed to be much more pleasing to my eyes and I shot that version as well.
There were only the two frames of the hood because I didn’t see any reason to push this one any further. I did back up and grab a couple of corner shots of the headlights because….well….headlights. I figured that both of these compositions were going to be done in black and white because there wasn’t much color involved and I knew what I could do with a black and white photo showing this kind of dirt thanks to a trek into Williamsburg, VA, last year. I had some great luck with a Thunderbird which was in pretty good shape when it came to how I edited it. I was able to do all sorts of wonderful things with the little bit of dirt that was visible on the surfaces. In fact, two photos from that car ended up in my significant images list for 2024. I even mentioned how I learned so much from the hood shot which was why it ended up on that list. This photo here is the result of that logic. Because of what I learned on that photo, I was able to create something like this which is the result of taking that new technique and applying it in a slightly different way. I now had a full color image with the same punch as the black and white one. The hints of color work well here because they are faint and subtle. This is thanks to that color profile that I love using which desaturates the colors quite a bit.
The final bit that I did to this was a trick from both landscape and portrait photos dealing with the sculpting of light. There was a slight ridge in the grill right at the top row of openings. This ridge caused the generally soft light coming from above to cast a shadow on the lower portion of the grill. I knew that I could burn that shadow in and make it stronger which is a portraiture technique that I use to fine tune the lighting. In the case of this photo and the location of that shadow, it also served to close in the image by darkening the lower part of the frame. This really helps to push the focal point further into the frame and keeps the eyes from escaping.
In short, this simple image is the result of an editing lesson that I learned early last year, tweaking of light that I have been learning while doing portraiture, and a time honored technique in processing landscape images to keep the eyes in the frame. You never knew that this much thought went into a photo did you? This is why I have a significant images list every year because I think that moments like this deserve to be remembered and celebrated. I’ll be able to use all the lessons that I have learned on this photo with a different photo down the road, and I’ll add more to it which will hopefully make it even more successful. Will this image make the cut by the end of the year? It is too early to tell, but I do believe that it has earned a place on the list for consideration.
Not wanting to get too far off topic, and knowing that I still have a good bit of this trek still to go through, let’s talk about the next subject. Candidly, I will say that I had no real clue what this car was. My first view of it was the front end which looked like a Ford. There was a design on the rear pillars over what used to be a landau top that reminded me of a Thunderbird’s. However, I never knew that there was a four door Thunderbird. Upon closer inspection, the rear doors were suicide doors. I thought that was a Lincoln thing, but here I was looking at something that wasn’t a Lincoln with suicide doors. I did look this up and it appears to be, in fact, a Thunderbird. I wasn’t able to match the front fenders to a year, so I don’t know the particulars, but I’m going with it being a Thunderbird for the purposes here.
The car had some awesome weathering on it, but the actual design of the car didn’t really appeal to me that much. I did want to do something with it so that the beautiful patina didn’t go to waste. I looked around the front of the car because the fenders were bulged out like chipmunk cheeks which I thought was interesting. However, there wasn’t a composition to be had with what I had to work with. I thought about getting the emblem on the pillar because it looked good under the remains of the vinyl, but that seemed anticlimactic. I was stymied about how to capture this car, but I was overlooking the single most unique quality about it. That was the rear suicide doors.
That was my answer about what to photograph here. I just had to pick a side and work with it. I didn’t really care for what I was seeing on the passenger side, so I moved over to the driver’s side. I had a bit more room to work with over here and could see more of the car. It was still closely parked next to more cars which limited what I could do. I wasn’t able to shoot the dual handles straight on, but honestly, that was for the best. I’ve tried that composition before with Lincolns and it never works out like I intend. My only option was to get a sweeping side view, but I didn’t know how that was going to go. I started to look through the camera to get an idea of how things were looking through the lens. Within a second of looking I landed on a rough composition that seemed to capture the car beautifully. It wasn’t a composition that I would have necessarily come up with because there was a good bit of ground included as well as the rear wheel. The side windows were cropped to just include a small bit of them, but it worked.
As I got the camera positioned roughly where I had seen the composition, I started to dial it in better. I loved the fact that the twin door handles were the foreground and I was able to get the camera at the right height to have them in a nice diagonal line which matched the body line below, and the trim above. These lines carried the eyes through the image and then the eyes stopped at the terminal of the chrome trim at the top, the wheel well at the bottom, or the gas lid along the line with the handles. The wheel also performed a valuable function of balancing out the door handles and filling the lower right corner of the frame. The composition actually looked really nice the way it was set up. There was just one problem…
Remember the cats that had joined me at the beginning? Yeah, the ones that would be underfoot the entire time. Well, they were engaged in a little cat fight there at the back of the car since they both wanted to be near to me and there wasn’t that much room. Well, they were knocking tall grass in and out of the frame. I had pulled two long strands out of the way and wrapped them around the leg of the tripod. There were other strands that were out of the frame to the right, but as the cats rolled around those strands would end up in the frame and I would have to wait until they moved back out. usually by that time, one or both of the cats would be in the frame. This was a hard fought composition and relied on split second timing to ensure that there was nothing accidental allowed into the frame.
There were a total of four frames shot of this composition with a slight shift in framing for the third and fourth. I managed to keep extraneous element out of the frame for all but one of the shots. Oddly enough, it was the first of the four that turned into the keeper. This usually doesn’t happen as it is one of the later ones that I usually like best. I really think that I overthought this one a bit as I was waiting on the cats to get out of the frame which detracted from the image. It was that original gut reaction to the scene that turned out to be the strongest of the four.
The next stop was another Fairlane which was parked over on the side with a group of other vehicles that I hadn’t really spent much time with. I think I had gotten one or two shots from over here during my first walkthrough. Now, I was looking for isolations where I hadn’t been before. I remember the conversation that I had with myself that included the advice, don’t get the same old shot that I’ve done before. Look for something new that will elevate my images. Essentially, I had a lot of great material to work with here, and in order to avoid getting snowed under with images and editing, I needed to avoid photos that were not sure to be better than ones that I had done before. In some cases this meant experimenting with things in an attempt to level up my decay isolations. It others, it just meant finding patina that was markedly better than what I had found with similar compositions in mind.
It was the rear quarter panel of a Ford that grabbed my attention first. The patina was awesome with lots of rusty tones, texture, and even green moss growing on the side. The trunk was open with a tire on top that usually would have steered me away from trying anything. My excuse would be the lines aren’t clean because of the open trunk, and there is clutter around the car. While that would not be an inaccurate assessment of the situation, I was looking for something different and my mind was open to new things. What I was seeing here was an extra triangle formed by the open trunk with darkness inside to add to the mystery. The pillar of the coupe added another triangle, and where I would have usually included the glass, I felt that avoiding that feature made more sense so that I could just focus on the textures. The little bit of the rear window that I would need to include became another dark triangle which added to the overall composition in terms of shape only. There were plenty of diagonal body lines that went up and to the right based on how I had the camera positioned which added to the visual excitement. In short, there was a lot of drama in this photo which worked well for having so many warm tones in it. The bit of green and bluish tones balanced out the warm tones quite well also.
There were only two frames shot of this composition with the second one being a bit wider to include a portion of the tire on the trunk. This was an attempt to gain more context, but in the end it was just too complicated of an image for my tastes. Once again, it was the first frame that turned into the keeper. I’m really happy with how this turned out and love the simple nature of it when compared to how complex a bit wider of a focal length would have been. Simple is better in most cases, and this is where I am really spending a lot of my time as a photographer.
Speaking of keeping it simple, there was a Dodge that I really liked parked near the Ford I had just shot. This was a yellow car with some of the nastiest paint and Bondo work I have seen in a while. It was all cracked up and even had lichen growing in places. It was full of visual interest, but it was right in and amongst so many other vehicles that my only option was to get isolations. That was only going to be possible from the front because I couldn’t get my gear between the cars to do anything else. Fortunately I really liked the front of the car with the missing grill and missing lights to boot. The bumper was still mounted as were the cushions which gave me another element to work with. I just needed to figure out how I was going to make sense of this part of the car.
I knew that if I got in too close that the chipping bodywork would take over as the most important aspect of the photo. I didn’t want that to happen as I thought that it was a great canvas for the elements to reside on, but I didn’t want it to be the sole reason for the photograph. The other side of the coin was that if I captured small areas of the car without a lot of the textures, that aspect would be lost. I needed to have a balance where there was enough texture present to establish that part of the story, but the focus needed to be on other elements or shapes of the car.
Since there was no grill, I was a little better off in cropping at a random point because I didn’t have to worry about any of the bits in the center messing with the edge of the frame. My first composition was on the passenger side and was horizontal. I felt that was the best layout for the car from this angle. I carefully decided which aspects to include which would obviously be the headlight and the empty socket. I needed the corner of the fender which necessitated the inclusion of the marker light which then brought in the lichen behind it. That was used as the frame on the left side. The bumper needed to all be in the frame, so I made sure that it had enough breathing room at the bottom. I was fortunate that it wasn’t picking up my reflection which is always a concern with these compositions. The top edge was a little more difficult to figure out. I knew that I wanted to include the hood because from this angle, that added a great little triangle thanks to the hood being popped open. Where I was running into problems was the hood pin which was just out of frame to the top. Had I included a portion of it, I would have needed to bring in the whole shape which would have added too much to the top edge of the frame. By bringing that edge right to the base of the pin guard, I ended up with the right side of the frame placed just past the midpoint of the grill opening. Thanks to the rubber bumper, that was perfect for balance and I even had a piece of grass right at the lower edge which worked with a closer tuft of grass to frame the rubber bumper and fill the negative space at the ground which would have become empty space.
This was the composition that I ended up processing after culling the other variations out. This was the only horizontal shot that I did and the only one from this side of the car. During the initial culling, I felt that this was the strongest composition and that stood to reason even though I only shot one frame of it. I had spent a lot of time setting it up and with nothing moving and no light changing there was no reason to make any adjustments. There were two frames from the driver’s side that were done vertically which I didn’t think were nearly as strong, even though one of them made it through a couple of rounds of culling before it got cut.
So, why are we seeing one of those cut images here? Well, When it was all said and done and I was looking over the edits to make final adjustments, I went back and looked through my discards one last time which I always try to do before doing the upload portion to the website. I really try to avoid having to come back later and adding a photo that I had overlooked originally, like I did recently. I stopped on this vertical shot and reconsidered it mainly because I didn’t have that many vertical shots from this trek and I’ve been noticing that I’m not really shooting as many verticals as I once did which is kind of concerning because they are very effective at capturing a lot of different subjects. I was also looking at this one and thinking about the processing that I had done on the horizontal one. I really liked how it turned out and could see something very similar with this shot.
I went ahead and copied the edits to the first one and transitioned them over to the vertical shot. It immediately looked 100% better and became something that I was interested in working with. The next thing that I did was adjust the contrast and overall exposure to account for the different lighting on this side of the car. Once that was done, I decided to work out the aspect ratio. I generally don’t care for the native 3:2 aspect ratio with verticals. I much prefer a 5:7, 4:5, or 3:4 in vertical. I looked at what I really liked about this shot and found that both sides were placed correctly and I liked where the edges were as nothing looked accidental. I liked the top of the frame because it captured a large chunk of missing bodywork which revealed a rusty patch. The only thing that I wasn’t sold on was the bumper. With the horizontal one, I needed the bumper in there and it fit into the composition quite well. With this one, the bumper was too bright and it pushed the headlight too close to the center of the frame. I decided to shave that extra length from the bottom and leave a portion of the bumper. The amount that I cropped looked to have been done on purpose and not as an afterthought, but had any more of it been cropped out, it might have looked odd.
The main reason for this composition had been for the broken headlight where the bulb was still visible. I thought that was really interesting considering how fragile those bulbs actually are. Since that was my main focus for this shot, and the other light was actually present, I didn’t want to confuse the issue by bringing in an intact light which would be brighter and attract more attention. By going vertical, I was able to simplify the scene and able to include that large rust spot which was another interesting element, though much darker than the broken light. In essence, I had a light element and a dark element that would compliment each other while creating interest in both halves of the frame to bring about balance.
When you look at these to photos you can see how just changing the orientation of your camera can really influence how the elements are displayed. Vertical is a great way of isolating things and it worked perfectly well here. Both compositions are effective at what I wanted to share, and after getting the crop right and doing the processing on the vertical one, I can say that this is as strong an image as I had hoped it would have been when I shot it. I only did two frames here, and this was the second one of the two, but it was time well spent with a total of three frames on this car in total captured.
Now that I had my isolation itch scratched, it was time to go back to the some overall compositions of the cars. I was still wanting to get something better with the big Dodge that I had opened with just in case, since that first shot that was done with a great deal of feline influence. I started to look at the scene. As we know, I liked the Dodge and the Ford truck that was parked behind it. Just on the other side of the Ford was a large car that I didn’t care much about, but there was also a Falcon nosed into the bank just next to a shed. As I looked, I realized that I could get a position where the large sedan would be covered by the vegetation growing out of the bed of the truck. This was great news and I was happy to see that I could simplify the scene in this way. In order to make that car go away, I had to include the Falcon which would be partially obscured by the vegetation growing out of the truck bed. It was a good tradeoff though, and by elevating the camera to its maximum height, I was able to get most of the car visible and enough separation between the elements to keep it from looking too crowded.
For the next five frames I played with the angles and where the photo was cropped because I didn’t want to have to come home and cut into an image because I needed a closer crop, and really didn’t want to be wishing for more around the edges. I was also working against the cats once again which had followed me over to this spot as they had been doing. They were now playing around the Dodge which had no firewall so they could access the passenger compartment with ease from under the hood. They would just hang out under the front bumper when I wasn’t looking so I had to make sure that they were not visible when I made exposures. There were a couple of times that the best course of action was to just call them over to me to get them out of the shot. They would both rush over to get some head scratches, and I would grab the shot before they got to the tripod to bump it. It was this game that we had just about perfected.
There are some things about this shot that I really don’t like. The hood being so bright is one of them. It takes up too much importance in the scene which is why I darkened it in post quite significantly. The better side for this car is the one where the headlights are more visible, but as you will recall from the last entry there was too much in the way of distraction to get a shot like this from that side. I’m not thrilled that the Falcon is facing the other way and partially obscured, but I had no control over that. The truck behind the Dodge is really too close and there was no way to get any separation there, but had it not been for the truck, there would have been a land yacht behind the Dodge which would have been worse. It was a composition of compromises, but on that I generally like overall. I do like that I was able to get three points of interest in the frame, even if they are a little closer than I would have wanted.
When I got done with that composition, I decided to walk over to the other side of the property where I had shot before. I knew that there were some better options open to me with the trees devoid of leaves this time of year. The last time I had been here the trees were much fuller and it was hard to get a clean shot of pretty much anything. I had much better conditions now and was excited to see what I could do. I grabbed everything and started walking to the other side of the property with my two companions along for the walk. I guess I really should have gotten their names so I could have effectively talked to them.
During the walk I noticed that these examples were not nearly as inviting as they had been before when they were the only things that I was given permission to shoot. It wasn’t that they weren’t good subjects, I had just come from an area that had so much better to offer. The subjects over here were more entangled in the woodline and harder to see, even though they were much better spaced than what I had been working with. Nothing except for the Comet at the edge of the driveway was sticking out to me. Sadly though, this was the car that I had spent the most time with the first time because it was the easiest to photograph. That being said, it was also surrounded by customer vehicles in the shop parking lot if photographed from the front quarter. This was not a great view of the car anyway because the hood was leaning up against the radiator support which just blocked all the lines of the car. The passenger door was opened as well which left the most logical choice for a composition to be shot from the driver’s side rear quarter. From this vantage point, I had to be very careful about camera placement as I would start to get other vehicles creeping into the frame.
I did fire off a few shots with this composition, but in the end decided to trash them all. Only two of them made it through the first round of culling, and were shot down during the second round. The reason was the same for both. They were just a photo of an old car. There wasn’t anything special about the composition, and it was just too static in my opinion. Had there been just one other meaningful element in the frame, it would have been a better and stronger photo, but I didn’t recall anything being there that I could have used.
I new that I wanted to give the old Bug a try that was sitting under a tree just inside the tree line by a stream. I had worked this car the last time I was out here, but the vegetation was so lush that the car was mostly obscured which made compositions difficult. This time, I didn’t have any landscape problems to deal with at all. I just worked around and found the best angle. This is roughly the composition that I had shot the first time, but it is so much more effective this time thanks to the visibility. The only thing that I had to worry with was a bit of plastic debris just to the left of the tree trunk. Fortunately, the composition relied on the tree being right at the edge of the frame as the tree arched over the Bug, pointing to it. The colors had been something that I battled with the last time, and I think that was for two reasons. First of all, the lush greens that surrounded the car were very close in color to the paint and patina which made it hard to separate the colors within the composition. The second factor that I have to admit to was that I wasn’t nearly as good with color processing back then and had a real hard time shifting the colors to make for more contrast. Fortunately, this time, the dormant grass had a more yellow tone to it, while the teal of the Bug complimented it very well. I just shifted the colors slightly to arrive at this color palette which works so well.
Once again the cats were wanting to get in the photo. While I am not opposed to adding in a cat every now and again with an old car, these cats were small and would get lost in the scene from the distance that I was shooting. It became another game of wait and see if the cats would go deeper into the car and out of the frame, or if I needed to call them to me. That was how the next ten frames went as I adjusted the framing occasionally and changed up the depth of field to make sure I had options on how blurred the background would be. I just wanted it to go soft and not remain tack sharp, so that was a balancing act with the aperture that I had to play that just required a bit of testing. It was the sixth frame of the ten that landed this keeper and I am very happy with how it turned out. The three tires really completed the scene and were not present in the first attempt to photograph this scene.
I looked around and took stock of all the cars that I had shot before in this section and decided that I wasn’t going to be able to really do any better this time with them. There might have been minute changes and I was much more capable of making a good photo now, but the differences would have been so small that it really wasn’t worth my time. I did see a Fairlane that I had not bothered to work with before because it was probably covered in vegetation at the time. There wasn’t much visible with it, but I did like how the vines were wrapping around the headlight assembly on the passenger side. This was the area that really wanted to make work as a photo.
As I looked at the scene, I started to form up a composition. I could tell that I was going to show up in the bumper, so I needed to go back further from the car. This prompted me to change out my lens for the telephoto for the first time since arriving here. That lens did the trick and gave me the composition that I was after while keeping me far enough away that I wasn’t going to have to edit my cameo out of the bumper. The colors really worked her as well with the turquois paint matched with the oranges and browns of the dormant vegetation. It was a pretty standard composition for me, but this one had some things going for it that set it apart from similar ones. First off, I had the vines to add texture and interest. Second, to go along with that color, I had tree debris on the hood making for a natural framework. The car was also sitting on the ground, so I had needles and leaves right there under the bumper which normally would have had nearly a foot of clearance before getting to the ground. The car was just sitting perfectly for this composition to work.
I started to have all kinds of hopes for brand new compositions at this stage with the long lens. For the last couple of years, that lens has been the key to some great photos and finding compositions where there hadn’t been any before. I was excited to go back through the property with that lens and potentially double my frame count. That turned out to be wishful thinking, because I only was able to get one more shot before I called it a day. The long lens was not the key that it had been in the past, at least not in this setting. I can’t complain either because here I am two days later still typing (February 4th at 10am for reference). All of this for a quick outing that was supposed to just get me a handful of photos which could have been processed and blogged about by the time Toni got home from work. She’s been home for two days now.
Anyway, I am getting off topic. I did decide to go back out to the Comet that I had attempted to shoot when I first arrived over here and I’m glad that I did return. The first attempt was a failure and just looked like a snapshot. This time, I had a different set of optics that allowed me to control the background a bit better. I decided to look at the driveway as a secondary element to the photo. It had a nice curve to it, and I thought would offer some cool tones to the overly warm scene. This view also allowed me to include the open door of the car which I had opted against in the first attempt. My thought was that the open door might be a distraction to the composition. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that the open door was inviting and actually worked well with the curved driveway to invite the eyes to move through the scene. As I was setting things up, I had to pay very close attention to the different bits of clutter along the other side of the driveway. After some careful angling of the camera and a very detailed balancing act with focal lengths, I was able to land on a composition that I really liked.
I fired off three frames with some changes in the depth of field once again. I wanted options when I got home with this one. As it turned out, my initial plan worked out and it was the first of the three that turned out to be my keeper. The changes were so mild that any of them would have worked, but the first one had some subtle differences that I preferred over the latter two.
From here, I started to walk the driveway again and made my way through all of the cars once again as well as looking at the stream that had some rapids flowing over the rocks. Nothing else really jumped out at me. It was nearly 1pm at this point and I was really wondering if I was going to be able to get the photos edited before Toni returned home. I had pretty decided that the blogging was going to have to wait, but I did want to get the photos worked out before she returned.
Looking at the time and the fact that my creativity had kind of dwindled from what it had been earlier in the day, I decided to call it quits. I had been out here for a collective two hours and change by this point, and had shot a total of 72 frames here, not counting the 15 that I had shot at the other two locations prior to getting here. The end result was 20 keepers from this location and the two from the earlier stops for a total of 22 keeper images for the day. This was far and away a much greater number than the three to five that I had been expecting for the past several days.
Speaking of the past several days, remember that this all started because I was going to go out to a property that I had thought about many times over the years, but that failed to deliver. I explored a bit and found two other subjects that worked out for photos, and then hit the motherload of opportunity when I finally was able to secure permission to access this property. The day turned out nothing like I had thought it would, but at the same time, this was a much better day that I could have ever expected. The old saying is true. Good things come to those who wait, and after waiting for years, I finally got those good things.
Thank you for joining me on this incredible trek. I hope that you enjoyed the photos, and remember, if there are any that speak to you, I would love to help match you up with a print of your very own. Just call or email me to get your custom order started, or you can go through the gallery store and buy some of the more common print sizes directly from the website.
Until next time….
