Monday, September 22, 2025
I’ll be honest, I really didn’t have time to do this trek today, but the clouds and the lighting pushed me to make time while I was out. If you have been reading the past few blogs, you will know that things have been kind of hectic around here lately with no less than four portrait shoots coming up very soon, a workshop just around the corner, and a special trip out to Eastatoe Falls in Rosman, NC this weekend. Since this is a waterfall on private property it is only accessible by invite and for those that are members of the Waterfall Keepers of NC. I was supposed to go last year, but a little bit of a rainstorm prevented that trek since the Western half of the state was under water. We actually seem to have the opposite problem this year with near drought conditions over the last month, but I’ll certainly take that over floods and hurricanes in the mountains.
My plan had been to go out this morning for some photography, but the weather wasn’t looking good by the time I went to sleep last night, and it was really for the better since I had to run by the hardware store and pick up some supplies to switch out a toilet at Sierra’s house tomorrow. Yep, I’m a YouTube plumber in addition to a YouTube auto mechanic. If I don’t know how to do it, I watch a couple of videos and learn just enough to keep me out of trouble. I think every family has one of those, and I’m it for this one. Anyway, I’ve been working out solutions to the worst case scenarios since the house was built in the ’70’s and had been a rental for a while. I am quite positive that the current toilet installation is more than likely not up to code and I’m having to prepare myself for what might be below it. Wish me luck as I cross my fingers.
After getting my morning business done in the studio, I gathered my camera just in case I was motivated when I was on the way to get the supplies. I didn’t have a lot of hope because I didn’t have anything at all in mind to shoot, but did see this as the only day that I would be able to get out before going to the waterfall this weekend. I started out with a few areas close to home that I have been wondering about, but the light wasn’t all that great, and I wasn’t seeing much reason to pull the camera out. I kept driving around and eventually ended up headed towards Traphill on one of the routes that I had driven in the Miata a while back. I had recalled seeing a red barn out that way that I wanted to photograph, but couldn’t remember exactly where I had seen it. I just knew the general area, but I figured that a barn would work as the clouds were looking really good, but the light was a little bright which would make working with vehicles a little tough.
When I got into the area of the barn, I started to look for it but wasn’t able to pinpoint the location. Instead, I ended up on several roads that I don’t think that I have been on before. This is dangerous in a location like Traphill because once I start to find new things, they tend to multiply and turn into a month or more worth of photos. It was a risk that I was willing to take because there was a lot of potential out this way and I was enjoying seeing what was there to work with.
At one point, I saw the bed of an old pickup next to some trees that caught my eye. It looked like probably a ’70’s model as I got closer which was within the era that I like to work with. I slowed down and started to look at the scene. The first thing that I saw was an old house that I passed first which was down a short embankment. The truck was at the top of the hill closer to the road and was largely intact. There was a green metal building in front of the truck which I wasn’t sure if I liked or not. I took the scene in and continued on as I pondered what I could do with what I had seen. It wasn’t a spectacular scene by any stretch, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to do anything with it. However, I wasn’t really seeing anything else that held as much potential. Since I wasn’t looking for a location to give me a bunch of photos, I figured that this was good for one or two frames which was really all that I had time to deal with as I was taking care of other things. I had also gotten a call from a client who wanted to do a virtual editing mentorship which I was wanting to be able to take care of later in the afternoon.
With everything going on in my head I figured that I probably wasn’t giving the location enough of a chance and I decided to turn around and give it another look. When I got there, I started to look critically at the scene and could see that the truck was positioned in a way so as to prevent me from doing anything with it except from the street. This was convenient because I wasn’t sure where to go to ask permission to get in close. The metal building held promise for the colors and textures that it introduced to the scene as well as the fact that it was just as overgrown as the truck was. I didn’t like the fact that the long bed was what would be the leading element to the truck because I knew that perspective would lengthen it even more than it already was. However, it was a decent composition that I was seeing. There might also be something that I could work with the house next to this scene. I was going to have to work it from the road as well because I could see a sign in the window indicating that they were not entertaining guests at this location anytime soon.
I went ahead and parked the truck out of the way. I noticed that there were two tractors working the field across the street and kind of hoped that they were connected with this property. I didn’t want to disturb their work, so I didn’t try to flag either of them down. I just parked where they could see me and got out in my white t-shirt that stood out quite nicely and started to build the camera right by the road. My hope was that they would get curious and come over to see what I was doing, in which case I would ask for permission and explain why I didn’t bother them while they were working.
As I was building the camera with the standard zoom, I noticed that neither operator across the street seemed to be interested in me in the least. It was looking more and more like they were not related to the property at all. It really didn’t matter because what I was wanting to shoot was going to have me right at the edge of the street which is a public right of way allowing me to be there legally. Of course, if a property owner ever had issue with me being there, I would happily leave to avoid any undue discord over something as harmless as photography.
Now that I had the camera all set up, and I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be approached, I started to work out the composition between the truck and the building. This was actually much harder than I thought it would be and ended up having me in about a dozen different positions along the road. The basic composition was simple enough to figure out, but I had to work the perspective out which meant changing the focal length as I moved forward and backward slightly. I also moved left and right to foreshorten the bed a little bit as well as working different elevations of the camera to get some different dimension to the frame and determine how much of the sky, if any, I was going to include.
I ended up shooting a total of eight frames with each one having a slightly different camera angle as the exposure was pretty easy to get right in this situation. I was really thinking that I had it all figured out towards the end of the series and shot a couple of frames with the same composition but with slightly different exposure values as the sun was starting to come out a bit. It was these last two frames that I thought would make the keeper out of the series because of the light and the fact that in the camera the perspective looked spot on.
However, when I pulled the images into Lightroom, there were two that made the cut after the first round of culling. These were the third and seventh frames which were kind of what I was figuring would happen, at least with that seventh frame. When I started to process the ones that made it through the culling, I started with the latter one and started to see that it wasn’t looking all that great. The perspective was fine with the bed looking like a normal length despite the fact that I was having to shoot kind of wide to get everything in the frame. The problem was the building was looking smaller, and I had more background in the frame than I really wanted. It just looked boring the way that it was and even after I started to do a little bit with processing, nothing really changed.
I eventually moved my attention to the third frame where the bed was much longer appearing, but the overall scaling of the scene looked better. I started to work this photo out and found that it was looking much better. The bed was a long bed in reality, so to have it appear as such in the photo was realistic. At some point I fully embraced that aspect of the photo and it became the title for the piece. It wasn’t as strong a photo as I had hoped for, but at the same time, it turned out quite nice. I was happy with the final image, and at the time I was shooting the frames, I was pretty happy with the overall concept. I was about so happy with it that I thought about skipping the house because it wasn’t really looking all that picturesque to me. Sure, it was the right kind of subject, but it seemed to be kind of plain and unassuming just sitting there with a porch full of belongings.
Something that I have learned with decay photography though, is you don’t pass up a chance to shoot these subjects because the minute you do and decide to come back later, a Dollar General has taken its place. This has happened a number of times over the years, and I figured I had better be safe than sorry, so I turned my attention towards the house. The part that I had noticed right at the first was a sign in the window that clearly stated “No Trespassing” and that was a good enough indicator to me that I didn’t need to venture down the hill to the house. Like the truck, I was going to have to shoot this from the roadway. That took the tool of perspective distortion out of my toolbox because I was going to have to shoot this from a distance away. The one thing that I really had working for me was the sky which was full of very interesting clouds.
I looked around to see what was in the area that I could include in the frame in order to get the sky into the photo. There were taller trees on either side of the house which I could use as framing elements and there was a bush with some purple/magenta leaves that I wanted to use as a foreground. It was just something to show a bit of depth to the scene, but I rejected the idea of using a limited depth of field here because I wanted the textures of the bush as much as the colors of the leaves to introduce the house into the frame. Including just a sliver of the bush, I was able to get a good portion of the sky above into the frame which set the mood of the shot.
Now that I had all of that figured out, I dialed in an exposure and fired the shutter. The first shot came out pretty good, but I noticed that there was a slight breeze blowing which made me concerned that I would see movement in the bush. I wasn’t able to see anything in the image review in motion, but to be sure, I cranked the ISO to 200 and fired off again. Even though I matched the adjustment with the shutter speed, this frame was slightly overexposed, so I dropped the shutter one more click, and fired again which gave me a similar exposure to the first frame. I was sure that I had something workable out of these three frames, so I started to see if there was another composition that I could work with.
Just in case the foreground bush didn’t work out as I had planned, I decided to move to the right and get a clearer shot of the house without the foreground element included. This was more my style, and I felt more comfortable putting this one together. I raised the camera a bit more to get a slightly more top-down view of the house. Ironically, I kept the same focal length of 28mm between the two compositions even though I moved slightly closer to the house and had the camera elevated. The wide-angle wasn’t for the perspective that I usually use it for, it was to make it possible to include the sky above the house which was very important to both compositions.
The light was changing at this point and I had to wait for the light to even out before I could make a shot. I was also changing the shutter speed regularly now with the changing of the light. I ended up shooting six frames from this point with no changes but to the exposure and lighting. Towards the end of the series the wind died down and allowed me to drop the ISO back to 100 and slow the shutter a smidge. It was the fourth frame and the first of the lower ISO shots that became me keeper from this batch.
It was this nearly last shot of the day which was the first image that I decided to process. I loved the stark look of the frame with the lone house in what seemed like a scooped out section of the landscape underneath of the dramatic sky. To further that mood, I decided to make this a black and white image and really concentrate on the loneliness and hopelessness of it all. The more I worked the image the more I loved it. By the time I was finished with it, I would have been happy if that was my only image for the day; I was just so happy with it. I also found the irony of it all considering that I wasn’t all that happy with the house when I was at the scene. I figured that the Ford would be the stronger subject when I was there. Now that I was looking at all of the photos, there was no doubt that the house took the prize for the best subject of the day.
Not to shortchange the truck, I moved to that subject to edit next. Once I decided on the right frame to use based on the angle of the camera, I did that edit in color because the colors seemed to go very well together. The colors were so important that most of the time spent processing that image was on color work. There are a lot of ways to affect color in Lightroom, and I worked through more than half of them as I arrived at what I felt was the strongest presentation of the scene.
Now that I had a color and a black and white image, I looked at the remaining photo that I felt might have some promise and tried to decide which route to go. It was that purple/magenta bush in the foreground that prompted me to do this one in color even though I had seen that black and white was a wonderful way to capture this old house. That bit of color meant something to me at the time, and I was going to pay tribute to it with the photo treatment.
As with the black and white image being based on the composition, I think that the color suited this composition much better. There was a nice balance of colors in the scene thanks to the bush and that helped to separate it from the grass which enabled it to be an important foreground. The only thing that I had to adjust was the amount of space that the bush took up. I felt that it was a little too heavy in that lower left corner, and with the addition of a taller tree to the left, I felt that the house was too static in the center of the frame. I tried a couple of different aspect ratio changes to address that but didn’t really like those options. In the end, I just pulled the crop in from the lower left and eliminated the segment of the tall tree to the left and a little bit of the bush at the lower edge of the frame. What I removed was an insignificant amount of pixels which had no ill effects on the overall resolution of the image which is of very high importance to me as the photographer.
There might have only been three keepers from today’s trek, but I had only shot 17 frames for the day. This was right in line with what I had been hoping to accomplish with the short time that I had available. I was still able to get all the supplies needed to (hopefully) have an easy time switching out the toilet tomorrow and fill up the tank with gas so I didn’t have to do that on the way tomorrow morning. I was able to get that mentoring session taken care of and get the photos processed and the blog written all well before time to go to bed. These are the kinds of treks that I like and the ones that I go after more often than not. Of course, I love it when I hit photographic jackpots, but those do wear me out considering they usually take several days to work through. This was a simple outing and a simple blog to follow.
Of course, I really appreciate you joining me on this trek and I hope you had a great time reading through my day. Don’t forget that I do offer prints of my photos and I sell the smaller, stock sizes here through the website. If you are interested in something larger, or on something like canvas or metal, just let me know and I can get a quote put together for you. My prints are always done specifically for order fulfillment which means that there are a lot of 1-of-1 prints out there which are truly unique in the art world. Just in this website alone, I have over 3,000 photographs in all of the blogs, and any one of them can be had as a print hanging on your wall. Not only do you get a piece of art that speaks to you, but you will be helping to support my photography and these treks that I go on. It really is a win-win kind of situation.
I doubt that I will be back here before the weekend because I have to really get started preparing for a studio session next week, and I’ve got a lot of other little jobs that need tending to between now and then for other shoots that are planned as well as going to Eastatoe Falls on Saturday. I will see you back here soon and look for the newest installment of my monthly Behind the Camera series coming up on the first of October.
Until next time…
