Sunday, August 3, 2025
Just so we understand each other better, I’m not completely sure that I am totally awake as I am starting to type this entry. I posted the first part of this blog at something like 11pm last night. By the time I was done doing the associated work with the post including the portfolio here on the website and the social media posting, it was nearly midnight. The thoughts that I had during the writing kept haunting me in regard to the first barn that I photographed during the day. I had started out with some similar compositions to what I had shot several years before but ended up with something that included a rather large tree to the left of the frame which I thought really balanced out the composition nicely. I had written that I still hadn’t done a second run through the images like I would normally do before writing the blog and figured that there might be one of those that I would want to do in black and white. To be fair, I wasn’t considering this because converting to black and white is a way of rescuing a bad photo. In fact, black and white photos change the focus and mood of a photograph, and I just hadn’t really looked seriously at doing much black and white on this trek. I knew that it was a chance to pull out some more detail out of the sky and the soft clouds would probably lend themselves to a nice black and white presentation. I just hadn’t really gone through to see if there was a good candidate since I was focusing on the color aspect for most of what I shot during the day.
I figured while it was fresh in my mind, I would go back into Lightroom and see if there was a good candidate for a monochromatic image. As luck would have it, one of my three-star picks which had been trashed during the culling process looked promising. The issue that I had with it was that the upper half of the composition was kind of a bland sky which put all of the visual “action” in the lower half of the frame. Knowing that I was looking at this as a black and white image, I felt confident that I could bring some interest to the sky. I went ahead and pulled it into the develop module, removed the two power lines that were draping across the upper right corner and then changed the aspect ratio to 16:10 which allowed me to remove a bit of the grassy foreground. This put more emphasis on the sky, and I knew that I was going to have to do something special with that.
After picking a black and white color profile that suited the tones of the image, I set to work on the sky. It slowly came together, and I was really happy with what I was seeing. Knowing that I had something worthwhile, I started to work on the lower half of the image and tweaked it as a whole frame to finish it up. I was pretty happy with how it turned out and exported the master file and digital upload files. I went ahead and got the skeleton for this blog started by uploading all of the photos and adding the gear links along with some tags for the blog. It was now about midnight-thirty, and I still wasn’t quite ready to go to bed.
After having such good luck with what became the nineteenth keeper from the day, I decided to go back through the images in Lightroom and see if there were any others that I overlooked. I had picked one from just about every composition that I had worked for the last two locations of the day so there wasn’t much left to go through in terms of my three-star selections, so I bumped it down to the two-star options and looked at those. There were two compositions that I had dismissed early on for a lack of overall interest, but I was seeing some potential in them now that I had seen how the editing had been going with the subjects. One of which was an isolation of the fender and wheel on a yellow MG and the other was a shot of the hood latch on the purple Triumph. I ended up doing a full processing on both image files and found that they worked quite well. I now had keeper numbers twenty and twenty-one added. I exported the master files and got the digital upload files ready to roll as well. Now, it was time to go to bed.
It was a little after 1am, if memory serves when I was in the shower. When I got into bed, I couldn’t help but think about the black and white photo that I had just worked and thought that the sky wasn’t quite where it needed to be. It felt too soft considering how the lower portion of the frame had turned out. I wanted more contrast in it, and I was thinking about how best to accomplish that. This kept me up until at least 2am. After that, I was thinking about the fact that I was probably going to break this blog up into four parts rather than the original three. I had just added three more images to the mix and the second and third parts were going to be pretty image heavy with the last one including eleven photos. As if that wasn’t enough to think about, I was also inspired to take the Miata out if the roads were dry after thinking about the three roadsters that I had photographed towards the end of the trek.
It goes without saying that I was still awake at 3am.
When 4 o’clock rolled around and Toni got up to go to work, I was again awake. It wasn’t that she woke me up or anything, but I wasn’t sleeping soundly at all. I was still worried about the sky on that photo and how I was going to get all the blogs written in a reasonable time. I never did get back to sleep and when she left at 6, I went ahead and got up. I don’t know how much actual sleep I got, but my health monitor app said that my sleep needed attention, and if possible, I needed to go back to sleep. Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
I went downstairs and fired the computer up once again and opened up Lightroom to look at the barn photo. The sky was too muddy, and I needed to fix it. I spent about 10 minutes working out the contrasts and then exported a new master file and digital upload file. This was then replaced in my cloud storage and backed up across my five external hard drives before I swapped out the photo here on the website. I was much happier with it now and was happy that I had that opportunity to reconsider my editing choices before publishing the photo.
Once that was done, I was ready to start typing and here we are, yet again. I have a love hate relationship with these multi-part blogs. On one hand, they mean that I have gotten a bunch of great images and I’m able to break it up into more digestible pieces for you to read through. On the other, that means that I have several days’ worth of work ahead of me when it comes to typing out all of these blogs. My hope had been to go out again today and take advantage of the clouds with no rain, but that is not looking likely since I will be working on the blog entries for a while.
If you will recall, when I was nearing the second barn that I had shot towards the far West side of Wilkes County, I had spotted an orange truck down a long driveway. I had thought it was a Jeep pickup, but when I came back by and looked closer, it appeared to be a Ford truck. As it turned out, while I was looking at the truck and determining if it was something that I could shoot, I could see the taillights of a car that had just pulled up to the house. This was an opportunity if I ever saw one. Without thinking too much about it, I got turned around and pulled into the driveway. Only at this point did I notice how badly the driveway had been rutted from the heavy rains. I was glad that I use my truck for these treks as there would be no way to get the Miata up this driveway without getting it stuck.
I pulled to a stop at the top of the driveway as the owner of the house was walking between a couple of the vehicles. I got out and was kind of surprised that he greeted me happily. I’m so used to the suspicious salutations if the owners speak first. I introduced myself and got right to the point as to why I was there. He was happy to let me photograph the truck and anything else that I saw that grabbed my attention. Oddly enough, I saw that he had a shirt from one of the dealer networks that I am familiar with and asked if he worked for them. He worked at the body shop in Boone, and that prompted me to share that I had worked at a body shop for a time before I was a police officer. He said that he worked with someone that I might know. He mentioned the name and I immediately knew who he was talking about. We had a whole conversation about Brian and shared some funny stories about our interactions with him. After that, I was on my way to start photographing the truck.
What I liked most about the truck was the color. The orange really looked great with the greens that surrounded it. For me, it was all about the color balance of the scene along with the foreboding clouds above. During our conversation, Nathan had expressed regret that the truck was missing a fender. It was someone else’s truck and had been damaged when a tree jumped out in front of it. I assured him that I didn’t mind that the fender was gone and that just added to the personality of the truck. When doing decay photography, it is those little imperfections that make the photo. As it turned out, the best angles were from the side with the fender still attached because the background was much stronger in that direction.
I knew that I wanted to get an overall and establishing shot of the truck to start with. I also wanted to have it project into the sky to add a sense of dominance to the main subject. For this to happen, I felt that going wide was the best option. The 16-35mm lens was fitted along with the polarizer and I got in really close to the truck. I was loving how the composition was looking, but the sky was looking really bright in the LCD. There was just too much exposure latitude for me to feel good about capturing this in a single frame while keeping detail in the truck. I could have done this as an HDR image, but the clouds were moving enough that I felt that was going to cause issues with the detail. My best option was to get a grad filter which I did.
After slipping in the 3-stop soft filter, I shot a test exposure and found that there was still a bit of clipping in the sky while the truck was just barely exposed where I wanted it. The solution was to stack another 2-stop soft grad and stagger them to create a bit more bite to the exposure. I was now shooting through three different filters, and I was very happy that I had invested in my Singh-Ray filters because I didn’t have to worry about any degradation to the image which can happen with lesser filters. The exposure was now correct, and I was able to tweak the composition to get exactly what I was looking for.
When I was pretty sure that I had enough variations on the composition to ensure that I had a keeper, I moved to shooting details of the truck. The chrome was still in place and that meant that I was going to have a lot of different options to work with. While there wasn’t terribly much rust on the truck, there was a nice patina and evidence of the age and neglect that this truck has endured. I was a fan of how it was looking.
The first area that grabbed my attention was the F-100 badge on the hood. It had a bit of green moss growing around it which really made the orange pop. I had an idea how I wanted to photograph this bit, and I knew that I had the wrong lens attached for that. I swapped it out for the telephoto lens and kept the polarizer mounted. I worked out a pretty simple composition that embraced a strong diagonal component for a bit of visual excitement. It only took a couple of exposures to nail what I was after with this one.
While the badge was the anchor for the image, it was the body seams that formed the real composition for me. Those two lines dividing the frame up into sections with different patina effects just worked so well. The proportions were all just perfect and the seams helped to frame that visual anchor in addition to defining their own shapes. This is the type of photography that I am getting more and more excited about. Photographing a subject is easy enough but creating a meaningful composition while focusing on just shapes takes a little bit more effort and attention. It brings back that thrill of the composition for me.
The next composition that I decided to work on also was primarily made up of shapes and different lines. You know I am all about a good hood emblem and will photograph them just about every time I get the opportunity. I liked this one, and the patina around it made it interesting, but this was one of the few examples where the FORD lettering was still in place on the upper grill. I really liked that aspect and wanted to capture that as well as the hood emblem.
I could have easily worked out a symmetrical and very horizontal composition as I would have done years ago. That was the safe option, and I felt that this truck deserved much more excitement with that orange color coming through. I started to look at the different angles that I could use to add a little visual excitement. I liked a diagonal approach, but that was going to have to include the grill as well as the elements that I was looking for. That gave me the opportunity to include the headlight but when I saw that composition coming together, the headlight was just too much. It also brought in the grass which I didn’t want. I looked for other options and found that I could cut into the grill and avoid all the lights, but that started to look kind of claustrophobic in the viewfinder. I needed a way to get a bit more room to breathe.
By including the turn signal, which was missing the lens, I was able to stretch the photo out on the right side enough to give a more pleasing overall composition. I just had to be very careful of where I cropped that right side of the photo. If I eliminated the headlight housing completely, I would crop a corner of the turn signal housing which would look accidental. To include all of that, I would have to include part of the headlight housing. That was what I did, and because the housing was a bit darker than the grill, it worked to provide a visual barrier to leaving the frame to the right. That sliver of darkness was rather important to the flow of the image, and I like how it turned out.
This composition obviously took a good deal of work to figure out. I shot more of this than I had of the other compositions through the day. Since it was the first time I had really done this, I wanted to have some options when I got home and saw it on the monitor. There were eight attempts at this composition, and it was the very last one that checked all the boxes for me. I am glad that I stuck with this one because I think that it is a very effective composition and I really like how it all came together.
From the front of the truck, I started to look around for other opportunities for isolation shots. It was almost in too good a shape and with very little rust, I wasn’t finding anything that really jumped out at me. There was the fuel filler which I know makes some interesting compositions that I started to look at when all else failed. There was an interesting patina around this area and with the heavy black coloration below the handle, I figured that I could pull something off here.
I tried several different options, some of which included the steering wheel, but in the end, it was the simple composition that won out. Working the diagonal angle which I have started doing with this kind of shot worked well and with the way that the black trailed off at the body line, I ended up with a really nice triangle at the bottom left of the frame. The part that I really liked was that I was able to get the exposure to where very little of the chrome was clipped while still capturing lots of detail in the darker surfaces of the body. This is the benefit to a very cloudy day like I was seeing currently. The highlights are so easy to control, and nothing gets lost in the shadows.
Even though there wasn’t much rust on this truck, the orange and black contrasted just as well as rust with the chrome. The age of the truck was very evident with these photos even though there wasn’t any appreciable rust showing. It was just a different kind of decay which I was perfectly fine with. After a few more minutes of looking around to see if there were any other areas that I could work with, I decided to move on to see what else was on the property. I knew that there was a F Body Camaro not too far as well as a fairly nice looking square body Chevy truck that I wanted to check out.
The Camaro didn’t really work out for photos even though it had sat in a junkyard for 20 years with no glass in it. The interior was stripped out, but the car itself was in really good shape, and it had been cranked up while I was working on the Ford truck. The motor sounded strong, and apparently the only issue with it was that the fuel tank had rusted and filled the fuel system with debris after the tank was replaced. I wished that I could have done something with the Camaro, but it was just too nice an example for what I like to photograph.
The Chevy truck was a slightly different story though. It was in pretty good shape as well, but it was not in a shelter like the Camaro was. Being parked in the grass, there was a lot of growth around it which indicated how long it had been sitting there. There wasn’t much rust to it at all. In fact, all I saw was the rust on the leading edges of the hood and the driver’s bedside. None of it was all that bad. I was told that this truck actually waxes up really nice with a good shine to the original paint. I could see that shine even though the paint had faded out again. It was very evident on the driver’s door where there were some wildflowers growing right next to the cab.
It was this scene that captured my imagination, and I wanted to capture the reflection of the flowers in the faded paint to show that leftover shine. The trick was to figure out how I wanted to make that happen. I could have done a very simple composition that showed the flowers with the reflection behind them, but the reflection would not be impressive if you didn’t know what the surface belonged to. If I captured an overall photo of the truck, the flowers would be lost, not to mention I would have to find a way to deal with the enclosed trailer that the truck was parked next to. I needed to get an isolation figured out that would identify enough of the truck to make it add to the story.
The scope of this photo was one that I wasn’t quite sure of, and to be honest, I still am not positive that I like. What I decided to do was incorporate the side molding as a strong diagonal component to the composition while squaring up the frame with the marker light on the front of the fender. I cropped through the wheel, just below the hub to make it look like I did it on purpose. The wheels were used as bookends to frame the flowers which were positioned in the upper right area of the photo. I used the green grass vegetation to balance out the colors in the frame while everything anchored on the yellow flowers. I had enough room at the top of the frame to include the fender badge which identified the truck and gave me one more point of interest in the frame.
It was an odd composition coming from me, but it did accomplish what I set out for it to do. I remember asking Toni her opinion on it and she simply replied, “black and white.” I had considered it because the red of the truck just didn’t really sit well with me for as much room as it took up. Without the textures and tonal variations of the rust, there was just a lot of blocked color thanks to the truck. Black and white would have been a good solution except for the fact that the flowers would get lost without the color cues provided. I went ahead and took the risk on this one and kept it as it was. I felt confident that it was the right choice as far as presentation, I just didn’t know if it was as good a photo as I wanted it to be since I just didn’t have much experience with this kind of compositional layout. After I live with it for a while, I’ll be better able to decide, but in the meantime, let me know what you think about it.
After working through trying to photograph the flowers and the truck, I moved deeper into the property. I spotted a tractor with a Chevy truck cab rusting right behind it. I wasn’t interested in the cab, but the tractor showed a lot of promise. It had some great patina to it and plenty of signs of use over the years. There was also a very large bush growing by the rear wheel which added to the story it was telling. I really liked this scene and started to figure out how to photograph it.
The rusty cab behind it dictated the scale of the scene because I had to keep the crop close on the right side of the frame. This gave me only a little wiggle room on how far to stretch the left side which then dictated how much room top and bottom I would have to work with. I tried this as both horizontal and vertical framings. In the camera, I liked the vertical orientation much better because I was able to get a branch of leaves in the light that framed the top of the image quite well. The issue developed when I looked at it on the computer monitor because the tractor lost all of the visual impact within the scene due to the scope of the image. The horizontal one worked out better because it focused the attention on the tractor much more effectively. In essence, this was all about filling the frame with what you like rather than getting all fancy with framing elements and such.
I actually like this simple composition quite a lot. The large bush forms a solid foreground with the vibrant greens that were found in the unshaded light. The tractor occupies the midgound with a color that grabs your attention as well as complimenting the greens in the scene. The background is made up of tree trunks that are largely in the shade causing them to go darker, providing a natural vignette for the scene. I’ll always love a good tractor photo, and this is one of my favorites in recent times. I was glad that I went walking a bit deeper in the property before calling it a day. I was getting about ready to wrap it up by this point and started walking back down towards my truck with thoughts of heading home. I had plenty of photos to go through and knew that I had more than I had anticipated when I left the house earlier.
As I walked past the Chevy truck, I was again struck by the scene that it was in. The grown-up vegetation told a story that the body didn’t tell. This is a very classic bodystyle and I decided that I wanted to try photographing it one more time. I had the red and green colors that worked well together and the awning of the building off to the side was well in the shadows which meant that the truck was going to stand out nicely in the frame. My biggest concern was figuring out how to frame this shot from the passenger side which was my only option considering it was parked next to a large trailer. There was also a bicycle leaning up against the trailer which had a handlebar poking into the frame which meant really getting the frame close to the truck to avoid it. Yeah, I could have removed it in post, but the less I have to remove the happier I am for the most part.
After some fiddling, I had the composition figured out and started to make some exposures. I ended up doing a total of four here with a slight difference in elevation of the camera to get the perspective the way that I wanted it. It was that last shot that turned into the keeper, but it is another one that I am not completely confident that it is as strong as I think it is. I started out processing this as a color image, but the red (faded to kind of a salmon pink) paint was just too overbearing in the frame with no more green than was visible. I played with the saturation levels but couldn’t find anything that really worked for me. I eventually transitioned it to a black and white which I liked better, but I was still wanting some texture and detail to be visible on the body panels. The truck was just in too good a shape to really fit my definition of decay. Even so, I still felt compelled to capture the photo, so there was something to be said for it.
This will be another one that I will have to live with for a while to determine if I really like it, or if I was just wanting to get a photo of a square body truck because there aren’t that many that I run into. Let me know what you think about it. If fact, let me know what you think about all of the photos that I’ve featured in this blog. I love to get the feedback, and if you really love any of them, I would be thrilled to match you with your very own print. I really enjoy making prints and I’m currently working with two different clients for some print orders that I’m looking forward to seeing when they are done. Seeing my photographs take physical form is the last step in the creative process for me, and it is the one that I have to wait on the clients to see happen. I just don’t have the room to display any more prints which means that I’m pretty much a “print on demand” kind of guy at this point. That isn’t a terrible way to be, but I would like to see many more of my images take that physical form. If you have ordered a print, you know what I am talking about. There is just something satisfying about holding the fine art rag in your hand and seeing all the detail that is lost when the image is compressed for screen resolution. A photographic print is a piece of art when it is done right. I go to great lengths to make sure that my prints rise to that expectation, and I take much pride in them. See what the fuss is all about and get your print ordered today!
I’m going to call it here and take a break before starting the next blog. The next stop was kind of failsafe in the event that I didn’t find anything else during the day or just needed to get another couple of photos. I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for it which is why it has taken me so long to get out there. I remember the last time I stopped here to photograph an El Camino on the side of the building. It resulted in just a single photo where I grabbed an isolation shot of the headlight. I wasn’t really expecting much different to happen this time even though there were now three vehicles that I was interested int capturing. I knew that everything was very tight which would make compositions very difficult to form.
I had no idea what I was in for.
Stay tuned to see what happened and how many photographs I ended up with. I’ll give you a hint that the ones to come are probably my favorites of the day. When that entry is published, I’ll link it here.
I’ll see you soon….
