Monday, June 16, 2025
Today was kind of an exercise in frustration for me. It seems that for the past three weeks or more, the weather has either been clear and sunny, or storming. There is rarely an in-between which makes is kind of difficult for a photographer that likes to work with cloudy days. In order to have clouds, I would need an umbrella. At least that is what it seems like every time I go out. As I was looking at the weather last night, I was happy to see that the rains weren’t going to start until the middle of the day and starting around sunrise, there would be some high clouds which would gradually build up. With that basic information, I started to consider where I might want to go with the camera and what types of photos I might be looking at creating.
I ended up deciding to head out to Thunder Hill on the Blue Ridge Parkway for a sunrise session because there was the potential of some good color during those early moments of sunlight. My alternate plan was to take advantage of the building clouds and head to Stone Mountain and work some of the lower trails along the stream where there are some nice little cascades leading up to the base of Stone Mountain Falls. Between those two options, I was pretty sure that I was going to have something that I could photograph during the day. The only downside was that I was going to have to be ready to leave around 4:45 or so to make the sunrise on the Parkway. Since Toni had to go to work this morning, it was easy enough to plan to get up with her at 4am to get rolling and prepared to head up the mountain.
At 4am, our alarms rang and I started wondering why mine was going off. I then remembered that I was planning on going out for photos. I pulled the phone over and looked at the weather forecast. What had been high clouds had started to thicken up and were showing a continual 100% coverage over Blowing Rock which would more than likely snuff out any color that was possible from the sunrise. I looked at the current conditions to verify that my cloud app was on the right track and it seemed to be. The rain was also looking to come in a few hours earlier than expected. Since sunrise was out, there was no sense in waking up quite that early, so I rolled over and went back to sleep.
I did wake up when Toni left for work at 6am and looked at the weather once again. Out of curiosity, I checked the weather around Thunder Hill and it was showing clouds and rain so I had chosen right about not going there. However, Toni let me know that the sunrise was really nice on her way to work. I just didn’t have any locations to shoot in that direction. I was now looking at going to Stone Mountain, but I also looked into Elk River Falls which I haven’t been to in quite some time. It was still closed up from the damage from Helene from what I could tell. To confirm that, I got a notification from the Waterfall Keepers of NC saying that there were clean-up efforts underway and they were looking for volunteers. I might join in and help get it cleaned up and ready to open once again.
As I was deciding on which location to go to, I was looking outside and it seemed that the sun was starting to come out a little more than I was expecting. The hourly forecast and the cloud app that I use were not quite showing the same thing, and neither was showing what I was seeing out of the house. I decided to head out and see if I could find something that would look good under whatever clouds I could find.
Once I got out of the driveway, I could tell that the clouds were just about gone overhead and that there was a nice bank of them to the South over the Brushy Mountains. That was the direction that I started to head in, but as I drove past 421, the clouds were starting to spread out and looked to be clearing. The clouds were now over what looked to be Lenoir, so I altered my direction out that way and went down a couple of back roads that I had not been down in a very long time that would get me down to 268.
On one of the back roads, I spotted a barn on the side of the road behind a fence. It was an interesting looking barn and I don’t recall seeing it before. I slowed down and started to look critically at the scene. The barn definitely fit into my decay theme as there was roofing missing and there was a pretty thick area of vegetation that was growing over a portion of the back side and roof of the barn. Everything looked great except that it was very close to the road and situated right next to a very white house. The sky overhead wasn’t exactly great, but there were clouds to add some interest and the sunlight was looking pretty good on the barn since it was still pretty low in the sky.
I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get a good angle on it with the house on the side, but I felt good enough about it that I got turned around to give it a second look. I crept past it once more and looked at things and thought that I would be able to get a good angle on it, so I pulled off the road and grabbed the camera. Since I was going to be working kind of close to the barn, I selected the standard zoom lens which would give me all the flexibility that I needed for this subject. As I started walking along the side of the road looking for the precise spot where the bright white house would disappear from the frame, I realized that there was another house further in the background. To keep one out of the frame, the other would be in the frame. This was not looking promising at all.
Had it not been for the light on the barn and the sky holding some interest, I probably would have passed on this location in favor of finding something a bit better in regard to distractions. There was something that kept me here looking at compositional ideas. Nothing was working and I was about to head back to the truck until I started to do some mental math with focal lengths. Based on the positions of the two houses, I was running into problems with the wider focal lengths that I was looking at. If I could narrow the focal length, I would have a chance of getting the barn isolated from the two houses. I didn’t think that I had enough room to work with to allow for the telephoto lens, I was just hoping that the standard zoom would work from directly across the street. There was a slight embankment that dropped below the road which I needed to stay at the top of so I could get the fence moved as low on the barn as possible.
When I got over to the other side and started to position the camera, I was around 60mm, so that was going to be as tight a focal length as I could muster. I found the spot where the fence posts lined up with the supports on the roof to simplify the composition and then I raised the camera as high as I could get it. It was about a foot above eye level which was just barely enough to get the fence separated from the barn well enough.
From here, I started to make exposures to see how the depth of field was looking and to check for clipping in the highlights since I wasn’t really able to see how the histogram was looking at the edges. It took a couple of exposures to narrow in on what worked the best. Then it was a matter of waiting for the sun to light up the barn and bring it out of the shadows. Eventually that happened and the photos started looking surprisingly good. I had found that right combination where the two houses were not in the frame, and yet I still had enough breathing room on either side of the barn to make the photo work without feeling cramped. I ended up shooting seven frames with this composition with the last of those being the keeper that you are seeing at the beginning of this entry.
I felt pretty sure that this was going to be the one and only composition that would work because of the two houses I had to deal with. I knew that the best angle on the barn would overlap with the house to the right and since it was so bright, it would pull too much attention away from the barn. I could have gotten in close with a wide angle lens which would have allowed me to block the house with the barn, but there were two cars in the driveway that would have still shown up in the frame. That was if I could have gotten permission to get inside of the fence. Since I really saw no benefit to getting permission to go in, I chose to look along the side of the road for any other angles that might work out.
My thought was to go with some isolations knowing that I might have to swap out my lens for the telephoto one to get me in closer. However, the more I looked, the less details I saw that I wanted to capture. What I kept coming up with was the open door on the side of the barn which looked like a face. This was also the side that had the thick vegetation growing along the back corner of the barn. That was what interested me the most about the whole structure.
Once I determined that important detail, I had a plan of action for another composition. I didn’t need the entire barn to focus on what I liked about it the most. By cropping a portion of the barn out, I would essentially eliminate the white house completely. By not having to worry about the house to the right, I could get the better angle on the front of the barn which would by its nature push the house in the background far enough to the left to have it exit the frame completely.
I really liked the fence, as well, and chose to flip the camera vertically to use the “V” in the fence as a lower framing element for the barn. This would also help to make sense out of the cropped framing on the barn itself. The composition was looking really good in the camera, but I wasn’t really liking how the sky was looking and the colors were making things look a bit too complex. I set the camera to show me the black and white version and I decided that this was the way to go because I was able to focus on the composition and the lighting more than the colors. This was how I ended up processing the photo and I think that it is my favorite from the morning.
For those keeping track, this was the second of four frames that I shot of this composition. It was the one where the exposure was right, but before I adjusted the focus point to make sure that barn was sharp. As it turned out, the nearer focus point worked just fine to keep everything in focus without having to cheat the focus to the rear of the frame. I wasn’t quite sure based on how close I was to the foreground as I wanted the whole scene to be sharp which it was.
As an alternative, I decided to flip the camera horizontal and try the same type of composition that way. This eliminated most of the fence in the foreground which shifted more of the attention to the barn which I kind of liked. I was able to get a little better relationship with the amount of sky that was in the shot this way as well. This made the composition look better in color than it did in black and white. Since I only changed up my position a little bit and the overall lighting hadn’t really changed, there was no reason to make a lot of exposures here, so I did two with slightly different focus points. I then switched to a square crop and changed the framing slightly for the last shot trying to bring in more of the sky if I decided that was needed when I saw the images on the computer monitor.
It was the initial horizontal frame that worked the best here and it gave better proportions to the frame than the square crop did. It was the second frame of the three that turned into the keeper. That brought my total hit rate to three out of fourteen frames which wasn’t bad at all. I had the first images in the bag and I was feeling pretty good about them. I could tell that the clouds were thinning at this point, so I packed up the camera and started back on my way to Lenoir.
The clouds were looking great miles down the road, but the closer I got to Lenoir, the thinner the clouds became. I explored a bit in town and stopped to see about photographing a Ford Fairlane that I have been after for about two years now, but still was unable to make contact with the property owners. The sky was now completely blue and the only clouds were North of me in Blowing Rock. That was the direction that I decided to go, and by the time I got there, the sun was still shining on me, but there were clouds overhead which was nice. Looking at the lighting, I figured that it might be a good idea to try some landscape shots on the Blue Ridge Parkway, so I entered there and started my way to Thunder Hill.
When I got close, the clouds finally blocked the sun and I was seeing the light that I had been looking for since I left the house. The celebration didn’t last long though, because the rain was now falling and falling hard. My luck continued with the clouds bringing rain just about every time they showed up. I stayed in the rain for the entire time I was on the Parkway and when I exited onto Bamboo Rd, the rain stopped and the sun came out again. It was now very muggy and humid which made the ride not all that fun.
Since I was chasing the clouds away from the mountains, I decided to head home and call it a day. I had a couple of photos that I was looking forward to seeing from the barn, and that was going to have to be enough.
The barn turned into my only subject for the day, but I have to admit that it was a very fruitful subject to find. I’ll always be happy to find something close to home that I haven’t photographed before. This barn has some potential for other types of conditions as well, so I might be back to see it again in the future. For now, I have three photos of it that I enjoy and that makes me pretty happy. I hope that you share my enjoyment of them, and that you have enjoyed the trek as well. Should you be interested in purchasing a print, just let me know, or you can select stock sizes through the gallery store. There really is no better way of enjoying a photograph than being able to hold a print in your hands.
Until next time…
