Friday, March 18, 2022
I know it has been a long time since I’ve been out on a trek. In fact, the last one that I was close to a month ago when I went scouting at Stone Mountain for an upcoming workshop. Since then, I have been working on portrait sessions as well as a studio session to keep from putting gas in the truck. The real story here is that it has been over two months since I’ve gone out on a dedicated rural road trip to capture some decay. Even that one was designed primarily to take advantage of the snow that had covered the area. It isn’t so much that I haven’t been out, but I’ve been bitten by the waterfall bug since the beginning of the year. I’ve been to some new waterfalls like Big Bear Falls and Cedar Rocks Falls which have made great additions to my portfolio. Even though I have been relatively quiet the past month or so, I have had a very busy start to the year. It just really took me by surprise to see that it had been so long since I had been out in search of decay. The winter is usually the time of year that I do the most with that genre of photography and it really is odd for me to have taken that much time away from it. I guess I was just really motivated to get to some waterfalls which took the priority when it came to planning treks.
Over the past few days, I’ve been itching to get out with the camera once again to go on some type of trek. I really didn’t care what kind it would be; I just knew I needed to get out with the camera and be creative again. Stagnation often leads to slumps which leads to depression, which leads back to more stagnation. In order to break the cycle, I had to check the weather to see what the conditions were looking like. Thursday was looking to be mostly clear after about 10am so I wrote that day off in favor of Friday which was going to have generally overcast skies with some mixed in lower clouds which could provide for some interesting skies. Since Thursday was not looking all that promising, I decided to head into Winston with Toni and take care of a few things with her and spend some time with our youngest. As luck would have it, the clouds were very pretty for the entire time we were out. I wasn’t sure what I would want to put under them, so I just enjoyed looking at them and considered what I was going to get into the following day.
When Friday came around, the sky was generally clear in the morning, but the clouds were supposed to build up by mid-day. I knew it wasn’t going to be good waterfall conditions and if I were being honest with myself, I didn’t want to spend the money on gas to get to a waterfall that could be over three hours away. I needed to stick to something closer and I considered following up on a lead that I had gotten from my doctor about a barn in the community of Clingman just down the road from me. That was seeming to be the best option because it wasn’t far from home, and it was an area that I knew to be rich in photographic subjects. I just needed the sky to start looking better.
When I got done with the business stuff downstairs, I checked outside and saw that the clouds were rather flat looking, and the light wasn’t all that inspiring as the sun was starting the upward climb in the sky. I settled in my chair and cracked open a book I’ve been reading for about a week. After a chapter was down, I looked out at the sky again and saw that there was some definition in the clouds that I could work with. The light was generally decent with the diffused sunlight, so I decided to throw finances to the wind and crank up the truck. I was off to Clingman to see if I could find the barn.
Well, I found the barn that she had been talking about, but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind, and I couldn’t see a good composition with the existing light that was available. It was a good start to the day though because it put me in the right area to find more subjects. I just really had to shake myself out of the stagnation I had been in for so long. In essence, I was having to retrain my eyes to see compositions where they had just been used for assessing visual stimuli for quite some time.
With every mile driven, I was getting more into the groove of looking for photographs and I was finding myself on roads that I had not been on before. What I was seeing was really great, but as is usually the case there were no real compositions to be had there. I was finding great subjects, but there were never any complimentary elements to put in with them which makes for a weak composition. I just kept looking for that perfect scene that looked like a photograph. Shortly after I turned onto another new road, I saw a cute little yellow house off on the left side of the road next to a really nice tree that was still bare from Winter. I slowed and surveyed the scene to see if it would work. I liked what I saw, but the sky wasn’t quite right overhead. As I drove past it, I considered making it a black and white scene so that I could pull more detail out of the sky, and it was enough to convince me to turn around and give it a try.
I pulled off the road across the street and grabbed my camera with the 24-70mm lens attached along with a polarizer. The house was close enough to the road that I was going to be able to shoot it from the shoulder without too much trouble. I got the tripod set up right next to the driveway and started to dial in the composition. I was making exposures, but I wasn’t convinced on the sky at all. There was very little detail to work with. Based on what I had seen at home, the clouds were going to get more interesting shortly, but I was going to have to wait on that. As I was working the house, I saw an old GMC pickup in a barn at the rear of the property. It was a bit far for me to be able to get a good photograph, but it was close enough that I wanted to try.
I went back to the truck and swapped out my lens for the 70-200mm telephoto which would give me the reach that I needed. I tried to find a place close to the road where I could get a decent composition. Sadly, nothing that I did would work. The truck was just too far away, and the barn wasn’t a good complimenting element at this distance with that lens. I was about to go back and swap lenses again to wait on the sky to change when an SUV rolled into the driveway. I went over to hopefully find out that this was the owner. There was a quick greeting followed by a gruff “what are you doing?” and “who are you?” From the tone I was certain that my time here was finished, but I answered the questions and explained what I had been doing. In much less time that I would have imagined, his demeanor changed, and we ended up having a great conversation about the history of the area and how this used to be the gathering spot for all the farmers in the area years ago. Of course, that really got my creativity revved up and I was seeing the location in a different light. As we talked, he gladly gave me permission to “make myself at home” and get the photos that I was interested in. He also pointed out that there was another car in one of the buildings that I had no idea about. Figuring that it was fully in the building, I didn’t get too excited about that bit of information since I doubted that there was anything that I could do with it, but I had it in my mind just in case I saw an opportunity.
Charles had to head back to his house, so we parted company and I went back to work. I went back to the truck and swapped out the unused 70-200mm for the 24-70mm once again as I was going to be able to get in closer than I had thought I would. The sky still wasn’t all that great, so I started off with the truck under the cover of the barn. I had thought that this would be an easy composition, but it was much harder than I had expected. It took me every bit of 15 minutes to work through all of the angles and to get the camera positioned correctly to get the perspective that I was after as well as the bits of the barn that helped to tell the story. All through this process the sun kept going in and out forcing hot spots to develop across the scene that I would have to wait to fade. It was a slow process, but one that I was very happy to have gone through because the first photo that I had in the bag was one that I was pretty happy with.
For this one, it wasn’t so much the subject as it was the colors that were present. The warm orange/brown of the wood surrounding the truck contrasted nicely with the blueish/teal of the truck. I knew that in post I would be tweaking the colors slightly to really fall into that teal and orange color scheme that works so well. The other part that I really liked about this photo was that the grill was a series of horizontal lines which matched up beautifully with the lines of the barn siding. As an added benefit, there were also repeating lines in the ceiling above making all elements of this scene linked together through that common feature. The best was still left to come though.
While I was working on the truck, I was noticing the barn to the left where there was a cracked door. Could this be where the other car was stored. I went over to look into the door and sure enough there was a Ford sedan sitting just inside of the barn. The door was open just over a foot or so. The other door was blocked by a cinder block and the open door had been like this for quite some time as the leaves and such were well packed down around the door. This is where I do things differently than other photographers might. I had permission to be here and had been told about this car. I could probably justify opening the door a bit further or moving the block that blocked access to the other door. That would be pressing my luck, but I can see how it would be a tempting option. For me though, I choose to shoot a scene as I find it every time. I pride myself on leaving no trace that I was ever there so I pondered my options.
The car was much too close to the door to be able to stick the camera in through the opening for the shot. I didn’t see any way of getting a pleasing angle on the car from this open door and everything was extremely tight on the inside as well. The only thing that I could come up with was to shoot a rather comedic interpretation of the scene. Something else that I often do in my automotive photography is to find human qualities in these vehicles. In this situation, that was actually pretty easy to do as the car looked as if it was peeking through the cracked door to see who was there. If I played my cards right, I would be able to get just the eye looking around the corner, while I used the cinder block to balance the composition. It called for a vertical orientation, so I flipped the camera on the side mount of the L-bracket and started to form my composition.
Everything came together really nicely and the only part that I had to fiddle with was the altitude of the camera. I had to pay particular attention to the relative position between the cinder block and the headlight because I wanted them at opposing thirds in the composition. I also knew that I was going to be cropping this to either a 4:5 or 5:7 ratio to make it more pleasing on the eyes which meant that I had to make sure I had enough room at the top and bottom to make that crop. Something else that I assumed on this one was that I would be making it a black and white image. I even dialed in the monochrome setting on the camera to make sure how the tones were looking. It all looked great, and I shot the scene a little overexposed because I wanted the wood to go brighter than it would have normally. this would allow more exposure on the car, and give a better contrast between the two parts of the scene.
That composition didn’t take long at all, and it was actually quite straight forward. I was happy that I had looked this way and seen this car watching me from its cover. I noticed that the sky was finally starting to get some interest moving in over the house. It was time to go back to my original shooting location which showcased the large tree to the left of the house and put the house itself in the lower right third with a second bare tree just behind to balance out the relative heights of the different sides. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be a black and white at this point because I really liked the pale yellow of the house under the bluish clouds above. I was still considering black and white, but I decided to leave my final decision until I got home to look at the files. As you can see, the color version won out here if for no other reason than I didn’t have to push the sky to get the detail out of it that filled the negative space. The colors all worked very well together in this frame as well which will usually dictate a color image for me.
This scene was the one that I photographed the most during the day as I did two complete sessions with it. Each time I set up to photograph it, I worked the composition until I had it down perfect, and then waited for the light and the sky to change. This scene represented what would become 30 of 94 frames shot during the day. The one that you see here is the last one that I captured, and I knew I had the image when I pressed the button because I had a cloud moving into the scene that finished the natural arch of the limb which gave the house a nice framework to exist under. These are the little details that I wait for which forces me to take so long to get just a single photograph captured. However, it is those little details that I am convinced make these images successful when I am finished with them. What do you think?
I knew that I had finally captured the picture of the house that I had seen in my head when I first drove by here over an hour before. I was feeling pretty good because I had gotten the two scenes photographed that I had wanted, and I had a bonus composition through the cracked barn door. It was that door that pulled me back in. I went back over to it to see if there was anything else that I might be able to do with that car. I have had good luck with old cars found in barns before and thought that I might be able to do something like that here. Since I had permission from the owner (vitally important for this kind of work by the way), I slid in the doorway without moving either door. The car was beautiful sitting in the barn, and I could see the sunlight streaming through in places which added to the awesomeness of it all. The ceiling had great lines and color tones to it, and the patina of the car gave it this wonderful texture that I just couldn’t leave without trying to capture. The question was how in the world could I do it?
Well, I could tell that there was no way to get my 24-70mm lens into position on this car because the walls were just a few feet away from the corner of the car. I was going to have to try something wider, so I went back to the truck and grabbed my camera bag because I just didn’t know how far this was going to get. When I got back to the car, I slid back into the barn and swapped out my lens with the 16-35mm that I thought would be able to get the scene captured. I started moving the tripod all along the corner and sides to try and get a good angle on the car. This was harder than normal because I was looking through the viewfinder upside down because I realized pretty quickly that I was going to have to get the camera low in order to capture that ceiling details that I wanted to get. With the camera pretty much touching the wall, there was no room to stand behind it, and I could just get my head to fit to look in. No matter where I moved the camera, I wasn’t able to get the whole car in the frame the way I wanted it to be. The widest 16mm focal length wasn’t going to cut it here, so I needed to bring out the big gun. I went back out to the bag which was left outside of the barn and grabbed the Rokinon 14mm and came back to switch them out.
This lens is a remarkable piece of kit and one that I love working with when the situation calls for it. It is a fully manual lens that even has an aperture ring to set the aperture along with the manual focus. It doesn’t play well with my live view unfortunately, but I had already established a correct exposure with the 16-35mm lens, so I just dialed in the same aperture on the 14mm and that gave me the exact same exposure with the shutter speed I had set with the other lens. Focusing was not the easiest task though because this lens has such an extreme depth of field that I really can’t tell when something goes soft. Looking through the viewfinder upside down in terrible lighting made the issue even worse. The only way that I could know that I had the focus right was to look at the actual distance between the camera and the headlight. I dialed in that focus distance with the focus ring and knew that at my current f/14 aperture that it would all be in sharp focus.
After a lot of moving around and contorting my back like a gymnast, I finally found the sweet spot for the composition. It was going to be heavy on the perspective distortion, but I was fine with that since I had no room to work with at all. It would also give a lot of the surrounding story of the car. I wanted the photo to feel a bit crowded, but at the same time give the eyes a chance to explore the wonderful textures around the scene. It was a generally uniform color, so I was expecting to do this one as a black and white image from the start. I knew that there was going to be a lot of shadowed places in the frame, so I wanted to expose for the sunlight on the headlight of the car more than anything else. I was content letting the other values fall where they would within the photo.
I started to make exposures and shifted the composition slightly with each one until I was happy with how things were looking. As part of my evaluation of the image I started to look for details that I might have missed while working on the overall composition. One detail that had escaped me was the fact that I was situated right next to the chrome bezel of the headlight. For anyone that has photographed shiny objects before, you know all too well that these objects can pick up your reflection quite easily. I couldn’t see anything in the image review, but that was mainly because my eyes were starting to go dark from an overabundance of blood rushing to my brain. Looking at the car though, I could see my white shirt and blue jeans quite well in the chrome. This was not good, and there was really no place for me to hide since I had to be completely in the corner of the barn to avoid making a real-life cameo in the photo as opposed to just a reflection. My only option was to run out of the barn before the shutter released.
I had been using a 2-second timer in lieu of a remote release for simplicity, so I just moved that to a 10-second timer. I then positioned myself between the door and the camera before pressing the button. As the camera was beeping the countdown, I would run out of the barn and wait for the beeping to stop. I had the exposure for 1.3 seconds, so I just waited a couple of seconds after the beep before going back in and waiting for the next time the sun came out. This composition was all about the sunlight hitting the car, so I did several different exposures with the hopes of getting the right combination of light on the car. I was just happy that I had noticed that I was showing up in the trim on the car before I moved the camera because all of the ones that I had shot before were unusable due to such a large reflection showing up. The last half dozen images were all great and it was just a matter of picking out the best lighting.
This was the image that I was most excited about for the day. It had been a creative journey to get to the point where I had a workable composition. That creative journey brought me to the point where I used a lens that I rarely, if ever, use on automotive subjects. It just had a completely different feel from my normal photographs and those are the ones that I tend to enjoy more than many other images that I shoot. I had great ideas for the editing process of it as well, but none of those ideas made the cut. I actually went a completely different route when I got it home. I changed up the color profile, but instead of doing it as a black and white, I moved into one of the vintage profiles which gave a very nice rendering of the colors on the car as well as in the barn. The change was subtle, but one that really made a grand difference in the image. The black and white just fell on its face when compared to the vintage colors. The loss of a pure black point also intrigued me with this one and helped to open up the shadows a bit more than would otherwise be acceptable. It fit the scene and carried with it the same emotion as a black and white but added the warm tones to the scene that made it much more relaxing. It has started out being the image that I was most excited about and finished out the day being my favorite image.
The barn find was also the last image that I shot on this property. I had worked it very thoroughly and was confident that I had all that I would need from here to produce a few images. I went ahead and packed up my gear and went back to the truck. I had used every one of my lenses in some form or fashion in this one location that I was drawn to because of the bare trees by the old house. Funny how something so simple can turn into something quite multi-layered. Even if the day stopped here, I was quite content with what I had done.
“A Faithful Friend“, Canon 5DS R, 24-70mm f/2.8L Mk2, Singh-Ray Color Combo Polarizer
Well, we all know I am never completely satisfied when it comes to scenes to photograph. I was still on the hunt for something else while the weather was still looking favorable. I was well North of Clingman at this point and found myself in a predominantly farming community. As I was driving along, I saw several barns situated just off of the road. The barns were all way too close together to be able to photograph in a pleasing manner, but I noticed that there was an old Ford tractor sitting beside one of them. It was the typical blue, and there was a red tree behind it as well as a red gate next to it. The colors seemed to work really nice for the image and there was a nice tree just beside the tractor that I could easily use in a composition. It was back pretty far from the road though, and I would havd to shoot through some trees with some low branches. Ideally, I was going to need to get further onto the property.
There was a house to the right of the scene that I figured was attached to the barns so I pulled into the driveway to see if I could talk with the owner. I knocked on both doors with no success. There were no signs of anyone being home, so I went back to the truck. I pulled back out to the road and pondered my options. I might be able to get a good composition from the fence with my 70-200mm lens and it was worth trying because the scene was just that good. I pulled off on the opposite side of the road where there was a flatter shoulder and I built up the camera. I went back to the fence and started to work on compositions. Everything that I was able to shoot included branches from the trees I was trying to avoid. There was just no clear shot of the tractor that had a pleasing angle. I hadn’t even turned the camera on yet and I was defeated. I went back to the truck and started to take the camera apart. As I was doing that a pickup pulled past me and slowed down. He eventually backed up and pulled off the road. This might be my ticket onto the property, so I was excited.
To make a long story short, this was just a neighbor that thought I was surveying the land. We chatted and he told me a bit about the owner of the property. He didn’t’ feel comfortable giving me permission to get further into the property and when he told me the age of the owner, I didn’t want to press it by trying to knock again. It is never worth upsetting somebody to get a photograph. We finished up our conversation and I went back to the 4Runner to finish taking the camera apart. I climbed up in the truck and started the engine just as a van was coming from the opposite end of the road. They slowed and pulled into the driveway. This might be the daughter of the owner, so I pulled up behind her in the driveway and hopped out. After a quick introduction and promise that I wasn’t dangerous, I told her why I was out there and what I was hoping to do. She ultimately said that it was fine to get some pictures of the tractor which I greatly appreciated. I pulled back out and went into the driveway where the tractor was located.
I got out and pulled out the camera with the standard lens since I wasn’t having to reach out and touch it anymore. I started working out compositions and found that there were a lot of obstacles to work around to get a pleasing composition of this tractor. With all that I had been through, I was determined to make something work though. I worked on a composition for about 15 minutes or so and started to dial in a decent one just as a truck came into the driveway around my 4Runner. Well, I had permission to be here, and he didn’t look overly concerned, but I went over to him just to be sure we were all on the same page. Once again, he thought I might be a surveyor, and when I told him I was taking pictures of the tractor, he thought that the owner was selling the tractor. I got all of that cleared and we started to discuss the area that I was in. I found out a lot of the history of the farmland that was still being worked by the same family and got a great feel for the area. The house that I had knocked on doors to just happened to be the first house registered with the clerk of court in Wilkes County back in the nineteenth century. It had been updated many times and looked very different now than it did then, but it was really cool to know that fact.
When the conversation was over, I went back to the task of locking down a composition on that tractor. I picked up where I left off and finished the fine tuning of the elements. I finally landed on the right balance to the scene and got the composition that worked the best. It was then just a matter of waiting for the clouds to roll into the right positions. That didn’t take too long, and after what was about an hour or so, I finally had the image that I was after from here. I loaded up the truck and started on my way home to see what I had captured over the two scenes.
I hope that you enjoyed this trek, and for those of you who like my decay photography, I’m sure that this was a treat for you since it has been so long since I have been out on a trek like this. It was really nice to get out into the country and explore areas I haven’t been before. I got to meet a bunch of really nice folks and I learned a lot about the area that I didn’t know. This kind of stuff makes the photography only a part of the adventure. I’m honored to have you along with me, even if it is just by reading my little dear diary entries.
Remember, if you are interested in purchasing prints of any of these photographs, all you have to do is let me know what size and which title suits you. I love making prints and that is honestly the best way to enjoy these photographs. If you are interested in my stock sizes, you can order directly from this website, but I can do much larger prints and on different media by special order if you prefer. All you have to do is email me at [email protected] or call at 336-681-0220.
Until next time….
Remember to use the code KISER10 to get 10% off your purchase
