Monday, March 2, 2026
Yeah, I know, this is starting to be a daily routine with the blogs coming out. I’m not complaining by any stretch because I spent quite a bit of February dealing with difficult driving conditions which made it rather hard to get out and scout for different scenes. Now that I am able to get out and that the bitter cold is just about done, I am having a good time finding scenes to shoot. The trek that happened today wasn’t really a planned one and actually took several odd turns before I landed on the subject that I was going to photograph. Let’s back up just a bit and get caught up. If you are paying attention to the details in this blog, you will notice that the trek took place on Monday, but you are actually reading about it on Tuesday. That is because I am trying to avoid double publishing and spread out the blogs a bit. Because my last trek ended up with two very different subject matters, I broke that blog entry up into two parts with the first part being a couple of rural scenes in Wilkes County. The second part to that day was spending a few minutes with an Oldsmobile Toronado that wasn’t too far from home. As it turned out, the first of the month happened in between those two entries which meant that I needed to get the newest Behind the Camera published before releasing the second part of that trek from Sunday.
That should get us all caught up with things and explain why this blog entry is a day later than it should have been. I am starting to write it around 3:15 on the day of the trek, so there is no reason I won’t be done by the end of the day. I do prefer spreading the blog entries out so that you aren’t getting several emails in a single day from me. You are subscribed and getting email notifications, aren’t you? If you aren’t, just click here and enter your email. Once you confirm the subscription email that is sent, you will get notified with every new blog release. It is the easiest way to keep up with my adventures, thoughts, and newest photos.
At any rate, I did a print for a client yesterday morning to be shipped out to Texas. After giving it enough time to cure before packing, I was able to get it all ready to go when the shippers opened up this morning. The forecast was for clouds and rain all day and I really was planning on staying at home and just relaxing for a bit, but I was still feeling creative and thought that I might as well bring my camera along just in case the rain stayed away. Well, the hourly forecast was calling for rain pretty much all day, but the current weather was indicating showers in the area. It was dry so far at home when I left to take the package to get in the mail. When I was finished with that, I checked the weather and it was still looking like rain was going to be an issue even though it was still dry except for a few small drops on my windshield.
Of course, when I left the house, I had a plan of action in case the photography thing might work out. My first idea was to visit a Dodge on the outskirts of town in North Wilkesboro and do some abstract detail shots. This is a spot I have been to several times and shot several different ways over the years. As we have found, this is a great way of trying to teach myself different ways of seeing. The problem is, the Dodge is not the most interesting subject to shoot isolations on, but I knew of another spot that might offer some better options. There is a VW Bug that I have been contemplating shooting for a while now, but have not found anyone at home, or I’ve found too many cars parked around it to be workable. I figured that the light was great for that subject and I might want to photograph that as well. As I was driving, I also thought about the remains of an old store that is close to the house that might look good in the rain if the clouds were interesting above. That gave me three options on what to potentially shoot which was probably way more than I would have time for before the rain started.
Even with all of these little spots picked out to try and shoot, I was also thinking about that property out in Lomax that I have been trying to shoot for a while now. The light was great for doing that spot, but I wasn’t quite sure that the rain would hold off. It was also going to press me for time as it was around mid-morning, and I knew that the owner would leave for lunch a little before noon. I needed plenty of time to work the area because there appears to be a good number of potential subjects on the property to work with. The weather for Tuesday was looking a bit more stable with similar clouds and that was probably going to be a better option.
I got rolling again and went back towards the VW figuring I would rather shoot that than the Dodge which was just up the road from where I was dropping the package off at. As I passed the Bug it was surrounded on two sides by other cars and there were pink trash cans in front of the car, right up to the bumper. This was less than ideal, and I figured it wasn’t even worth stopping to ask permission because I would be inclined to ask them to move the trans cans. There was also very little room for me to park out of the road which is always a concern of mine. Since that was no longer an option, I continued down the road until I got to the old store remains. This is one of those spots that has vexed me for a while now as I’ve tried to figure out the best way to shoot it. I’ve yet to really find the right conditions, though Toni had driven by it in the late Spring last year with the morning sun shining through the tall grasses that looked pretty good. This might be what I end up doing with it because I can’t find another set of circumstances that works and have yet to witness those conditions at a time when I had the camera handy.
The store wasn’t looking all that great in the flat light with the blank sky above. I thought about doing it as a black and white which would allow me to add a good deal of contrasts to some key areas, but I just wasn’t able to see the photo turning out. I did look at both sides to check for compositions as I am still working on which way I would prefer to shoot it. As I said, this is one of those spots that is just really hard for me to work out. It is a good subject, but the compositions that I am seeing are rather boring, and the light has yet to be interesting. Going on the fact that I need at least two of those three aspects to work in my favor for a strong photo, I’m stuck at just having one of those attributes which isn’t good enough.
I wasn’t really getting anywhere with my photography it would seem. This wasn’t a problem since I wasn’t desperate to get out. I still had a fresh blog published just a few hours before and had a plan for a trek for tomorrow. Today was a great day to just rest and relax at home, but I was still feeling creative and wanted to try something new and different with the camera. I’m still looking for opportunities to use my wide-angle lens as well as working on new ways of seeing the intimate details of my subjects. I just needed something simple to shoot that I could knock out in a few minutes and then get the processing done quickly. If I drove around enough, I would certainly find something.
Since I had been out yesterday in the Miata going out to the town of Lenoir, I had spotted some potential photos along that route, but they were all behind houses and would require permission. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get that permission, but it was enough to give me a direction to start off in. The first thing I was going to have to do was cross US421 and I started heading that way. I took a route that I don’t normally go which was the most direct from where I was. I spotted the turn that I normally take to get to the highway and opted to go the other direction which would also take me to the highway, but down a road that I don’t think I’ve traveled before.
Almost the minute that I turned down the road I started seeing lots of potential. It was like I had just entered another county or something. This was a really cool area with lots of rural decay that spoke to me. I wasn’t seeing anything at the moment that was looking like a photograph, but I knew that there was a huge chance that I would eventually find something. Off to the left, something blue caught my eye. It was an old bus that was beside of a vacant house. The bus was very cool, but not in a great location to photograph. I wasn’t sure about doing abstracts with it, but there were several signs warning of trespassing. There was no indication of where I might find a property owner, so I just kept on driving.
Just beyond that bus, an old Ford dump truck caught my eye on the opposite side of the road. It was parked in front of what was left of a cement block building and there was another barn off in the distance behind it all. There was also a small building to the left. There was a lot going on here, but it seemed to call my name, and it spoke to my decay photography eye. I got the truck turned around and went back for another look. Everything that I wanted to shoot could be done from the road which made this simple. I would try to find the owner, but if not, I was going to be in good shape to get at least a shot or two of it.
As it turned out, right after I parked my truck on the side of the road, I saw a guy coming out of the house and going to his truck in the driveway that I had just turned around in. I walked over to get his attention and asked if he owned the property next door as I pointed to the old Ford. He said that he didn’t and that it was owned by the guy that lived across the street. I confirmed that he was referring to the trailer that was sitting just over the ridge and walked over there to knock on the door. I had a brief conversation with a voice on the other side of the door that said that he didn’t have any claim to the property across the street. I expressed my confusion and he finally opened the door so that we could talk easier.
Through a bit of conversation, I found out that he was renting here and that the person that owned the property with the Ford was the lady that lived in the house that I had just been to. I explained that the guy that came out of that house had said that this was where the owner was. He confirmed that the lady that lived there owned the property but wouldn’t mind if I was photographing it from the street. Since he said that she was 97 years old, I decided not to go and knock on the door to disturb anyone. I felt comfortable enough to work from the side of the road at this point.
I thanked the man and walked back to the truck to get the camera put together. I started out with my 16-35mm lens because I wanted to get better with the wide-angle. The scene that I was seeing should work with the lens as I was trying to get the entire scene into a single photograph. Once the camera was built, I moved over to the other side of the road and started to frame up the composition. The first photo seemed like a snapshot which is always a risk with a wide-angle lens. It just lacked presence, so I moved around and changed up the elements that I wanted in the shot. That was better but still suffered from the same problem that I had before.
In an attempt to make the old truck stand out in the frame, I moved in closer and used the perspective distortion to my advantage. This made the truck stand out but the sky above was lacking detail which detracted from the overall composition. With the wide-angle, I was also having a hard time fitting the barn into the frame or eliminating it totally. This is the issue with a wide-angle lens and why they are kind of quirky to work with. They are great at accentuating elements that are nearer to the camera, but that comes at an expense of including too much in the background which makes the photographer have to really pay attention to the framing. I was doing everything that I could, but nothing at all was making the photos look the way I wanted them to.
I made the decision based on the distance that I was from the subject that I needed to go with the telephoto lens to have the chance to control the background a bit better. Now with a new way of seeing the scene, I was starting to find much better luck. The first composition that I tried was a cropped image of the truck using the block building as a simplified background for it. This seemed to work out quite a bit better than the wide-angle attempts from earlier. This was feeling much more natural for me, and I was really liking the directness of it all.
When I got the images home and started to look through them in the culling stage, I did lean more heavily on the compositions done with the telephoto lens. In fact, after the culling was all done, none of the wide-angle shots made it into the mix of keepers. It wasn’t until I started writing this blog that I decided to go back and look at the wide-angle photos once again. There was one that had managed to make it through two rounds of culling before getting cut. I looked at it once again and found it to be too background intensive with too much sky showing. However, I hadn’t really considered changing the aspect ratio which would change the visual weight of all of the elements within the scene. I went with a 16:9 crop on it and that brought the attention right back to the truck which is where I really wanted it in the first place. The barn in the background also gained importance while the sky started to fade away.
The colors were not really working together for this composition, so I decided to use a black and white profile that further pushed the attention where I wanted it to go. This was how I ended up processing that image which was originally culled out, and you can see it as the opening image to the blog entry. Once again, I am very happy that I took the time to go back through the photos as I was talking about the process that I used to make them.
The telephoto compositions were more direct and there is no doubt that I had better overall luck with that lens over the wide-angle. It is worth mentioning that after I worked on the more direct composition of the truck with the telephoto lens, I turned my attention to the small building that might have been a house to the left of the truck. I wanted to try and get a solid composition of that structure while I was here and felt that the long lens was the way to go. It worked well, but gave me a postcard shot horizontally, and didn’t have quite the range to get the tree in a vertical composition. With that in mind, I went to the truck and swapped the lenses yet again to the standard zoom. This allowed me to fit the tree in the composition, and I thought that I had found something that worked out well. It wasn’t until I got home that I found that the composition didn’t work at all. That was a real shame since I didn’t do many variations on it while I was in the field.
I did use the standard lens for a few other compositions of the truck that I felt were better than the ones that I had done with the wide-angle before. As it turned out, all of the ones with the standard lens were booted out of the list during the early culling. Have I altered how I see things so much that now I don’t even like the photos shot with the standard lens anymore? That is a risk because that lens gets credited with being a range of boring focal lengths by many photographers. I still say that it is a very good walking around lens and I’ll continue to use it, but I do like using the lenses that work in the ranges on either end of the standard lens spectrum.
Eventually, I went back to the telephoto lens to get some isolations. I still hadn’t been questioned about being where I was and had even see an older lady come out of the house and check the mail where the owner may or may not be. She saw me and didn’t seem to care, so I didn’t go out of my way to go and bother her. I just kept on doing what I was doing and felt a little better about being there. I was still very respectful of the distance that I moved into the property and stayed pretty much at 10ft from the roadway at all times. The long lens was going to give me the reach that I needed to get the detail shots I was seeing of this truck.
The first area that I wanted to work with was right at the line between the fender and the hood. The top of the fender was pretty well bleached out with the primer showing through rather brightly. This contrasted to the deep red and rust of the hood which was just above the fender. The brightwork was still present on the hood which linked the tonalities between the two body panels. Even more than that was the link between the turn signal and the F6 emblem on the hood which formed two circles that I could arrange diagonally from each other. The chrome trim just provided a nice diagonal element for a bit of visual excitement within the frame.
I only needed to fire off two shots of that composition with a slight reposition to spread out the two circles a bit more. That was all that it took and I was happy with that composition. Things were working much quicker with the telephoto lens because this was an area where I would have defaulted to using that lens to start with had I not been trying to get better with the wide-angle lens. I was more or less in my element at this point, and things were going quite well.
There was another area of the truck that I wanted to spend some time with and that was the grill and bumper area. I really liked how the colors were looking, and I saw a chance to work with a repeating pattern with the grill. I wasn’t quite sure how the composition was going to come together, but I knew that I wanted to incorporate the brush that was growing up against the grill. Normally when I am photographing this section of similar Fords, I have a clear view of the grill and prefer it that way…usually. This time, I really liked how the tall brush added to the story of this old truck and told a little more about how long it had been sitting here. The only question was just how I wanted to go about composing the image.
With the long lens still attached, I was happily able to stay right by the road, but I needed to get down rather low to the ground to get the perspective that I was after. I went with an angle off to the driver’s side that provided lots of depth to the scene. The lens was zoomed in and out once I had the distance figured out so that I could determine what elements would be included. I wasn’t sure if I wanted the hood or not when I was setting things up. It didn’t take long before I realized that I needed that hood emblem to create a triangle of sorts between the headlights and it. By also adding the bumper at the bottom, I was able to frame the grill in a way that made it look like the main subject that I wanted it to. The background was also included, though blurred to give more depth while adding some questions for the viewer. The rough shape of the structure behind the truck also played a part in framing the grill in an abstract kind of way.
It really surprised me as to how well this photo came out. I knew that the composition was solid and the light was good, but I wasn’t positive that the subject was going to be strong enough. After doing the processing on it, I can say without a doubt that the subject was perfect, and everything else with the photo supported that subject quite well. The colors were fantastic and really made it all stand out. Oddly enough, this was the first of the images that I chose to process as I wanted to get warmed up to how this truck wanted to be viewed. It started out as a favorite of mine after the final edits were made and it continued as one of my top images from this trek. I would love to hear what you think about it.
While working with the grill, I was looking for other opportunities to find different compositions of it. I am, after all, looking for different ways of seeing things. I’ve photographed similar Fords a number of times and have done different compositions with the grill, but most of the time they are pretty much straight on and symmetrical. I’ve gotten to where I don’t care for this composition as much as I once did. These days, I gravitate toward putting things on an angle by stepping off to the side a bit more. That was what I wanted to do with the grill this time. I found that I needed to get a bit closer to the truck to get this shot the way that I wanted though. Since I still hadn’t been approached or challenged, and still wasn’t sure where the actual owner was, I moved in a bit closer, but just enough to get the framing that I needed for this shot. I was pretty sure that I was done, so even if I did overstay my welcome, I was happy with what I had captured during my short time here.
The photo turned out pretty good, but it read awkwardly from left to right. In an attempt to fix that, I flipped the image in post. This made more of a difference than I would have suspected, and it read much better in this direction. Flipping an image is a very worthwhile trick to use in composition as long as there is nothing in the frame that will betray the manipulation such as writing. With nothing to indicate left from right in this frame, it was a very easy thing to do. It made all the difference as well.
As I mentioned, I was pretty much done at this point. I had shot 26 frames in a very short amount of time considering that I had used three of my lenses to get to this point. Changing glass takes a minute or two which makes it even more impressive that I was able to shoot 26 frames in essentially 26 minutes which was how long I had been engaged in capturing photos. As I always do, I made one last look around to see if there were any shots I might have missed. The only one that I saw was one that I had shot early on with the wide-angle that had just not turned out well at all.
The compromise that I had to make was to get very low so that the truck would mask the barn in the background. This brought about too much sky and just didn’t feel like a good image at all. Would I be able to get a better composition with a different lens and position? I looked around and wasn’t able to really figure out anything better at all. I did like the concept with having the truck and the small house off to the left in a single frame. However, to get the truck in a flattering angle, I was forced to move the house kind of far off to the left which is why I ended up with so much sky in the frame. I thought about doing a cheater pano with an aspect ratio of 16:9 because that would eliminate a lot of the frame’s top and bottom in favor of more width to the composition.
That was when it hit me. I needed a composition that was much wider than it was tall. I was on the right track with a cheater panorama, but there was no reason that I couldn’t do an actual panoramic image while I was here. This is something that I usually don’t do in this kind of situation where I am dealing with subjects so close. There is a real chance of perspective shifts causing issues as I’m capturing the images from left to right. I’ve managed to do several successful panoramas of scenes like this which got me thinking that I might be able to pull it off. The biggest trick was finding the focal length that was going to give me the right perspective and crop to the image. I knew that I could more than likely do it with the standard lens as I had done an old logging truck a few years back. Of course, the chances for success were better with the telephoto lens as I had done with a scene involving a couple of VW Bugs a year ago. I just really needed to see what the right distance from the truck was going to be to make the composition work.
The biggest concern that I had was the barn in the background. I either needed to block it all with the truck or embrace it as part of the background. In order to block it completely I was going to have to shoot wide and down low. I knew that this was going to be very problematic for the stitching process between frames. I also didn’t care for the perspective as I had tried it at the beginning of the session. I wanted a more relaxed perspective to the scene and that meant that I was going to include the barn. For it to make sense, I was going to need to have it appear large enough so as not to look like an accident. That was going to mean that I needed to get further away from the truck so that the barn was larger in relation.
I simply went back across the road to where I had parked. I found the angle that made the most sense where the barn and the block building would provide a background for the truck to make it stand out better than if it were just sitting in front of the trees. I planted the tripod and leveled the head on it to make sure that I could sweep through the frame without skewing the series of images. When that was all done, I made a dry run through the scene in order to check the exposure through all portions. Once that was situated, I locked the focus on the hood of the Ford and swung the camera past the house on the left.
It was just a matter of cranking off a number of images from left to right as I captured the scene one frame at a time. When I was at the edge of the block building, I had a total of eight overlapping frames. Each one was properly exposed, and I didn’t see any issues with them. Normally, I would have repeated the procedure to make sure that I had a good string of images but didn’t really feel that it was necessary at all. I wasn’t even sold on the fact that the composition was going to work. That is the thing with these panoramic images, it is all just a guessing game until you get the images stitched together. I can scroll quickly through them in the image review, but that just gives me an idea of what it will look like. Until I stitch them and decide on an aspect ratio, I am just speculating. I did feel good about this one though and thought that it just might work out.
Instead of reshooting the panorama, I decided to simplify the composition and focus my attention more on just the truck and the barn. I felt that this was a better angle but would not work with the house included in the frame. In order to get the angle, I moved to the left about 15 feet or so. I looked through the lens of the camera to see how the truck was looking in comparison to the building and the barn. When I was happy with things I started to drop the legs of the tripod. On the third leg, it found a hole in the ground and perfectly fell in. That was my sign that I was in the right spot, so I didn’t bother to move the tripod at all. I just leveled it and did the test sweeps to set the exposure and find the focus point on the nose of the truck.
Once that was set up, I started the series of shots just at the house and continued until I was clear of the block building. From this angle, I was getting a good bit of the road at the bottom right but figured that by the time I cropped the image down to the right aspect ratio that the road would be of very little concern. I reviewed the images real quick in the camera and saw no issues that needed to be addressed. That was the second panoramic series that consisted of eight images that I had shot. The last two photos that I tried before leaving counted for a total of 16 frames bringing the day’s total to 42 images in only 38 minutes.
If you look at the math, my normal hit rate of 10% would suggest that I would end up with four keepers. My more recent record might suggest 20% and possibly eight keepers, but 16 of those only counted for two photos. My real base number would be more accurately 28 frames that would dictate three keepers. As you go back through the images here in this blog, you will see that there are seven keepers that I have shared with you. That is a 25% hit rate which is really quite excellent considering the difficulties that I had to start with using the wide-angle to find good compositions. Even more surprising, at least to me, is that I managed to get that many images from a scene that not that long ago I would have deemed too complex to be photogenic. While I didn’t have the luck with the wide-angle that I was hoping for and didn’t really do much in the realm of abstract work, I can certainly see a change in how I am viewing the world.
This was a fantastic trek and a very happy surprise after not really counting on finding much at all to shoot. My main focus for photography had been that property in Lomax, but I think that I might have found a more visually interesting spot with this location that wasn’t even on my radar prior to finding it. I still think that I will be able to do a lot of great images at that other property, but there is something about this spot when it comes to visual storytelling that I don’t think that I can touch at the other location. The mood and feeling that these images capture say a lot about the area where I live and seems to sum it up quite nicely in a series of photos.
Thank you for joining me on this trek and I do hope that you have enjoyed the photos as much as I have enjoyed capturing them. If my luck holds, while you are reading this entry, I will be out in Lomax working my way around all the rusty cars that I have only seen from the road. I suspect that there will be a number of abstracts being captured through the day, and there is a pretty good chance that this will be another multi-part blog entry. There is also the possibility that I won’t find the owner at home, or the property turns out to be a bust and just not work out at all. It is just too early to tell, but I do have plans on giving it a good try sooner than later.
Until next time…
