January 1, 202X…4
Dang it!!! Every year I have a hard time remembering to write the new year with the date. At least I’m not writing checks like I once did back in ancient times. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I want to wish you all a very Happy New Year, and I hope that it is filled with promise and happiness for each of you. If you missed my review of 2023, be sure to check it out as a lot happened considering it was a rather calm year for me photographically. As I mentioned in that review, I like to start the year off with a quick trek just to get the year going in a creative direction. If I’m being honest, I really wasn’t chomping at the bit to go out and do any photography for some reason. It has been kind of hard for me to get motivation to go out here lately and that was carrying on into the new year it seemed. However, this is a good tradition and I felt that I really should get out and try to get a photo or two as I have over the past years.
The question was what did I want to shoot? The weather was looking like thin clouds during the morning hours with the skies clearing up by late morning and through the afternoon. That was going to limit what I shot in many ways, but I have become less and less bothered by sunny days thanks to some of my treks during the Summer months. I was still trying to take advantage of the clouds during the morning though if at all possible. I thought about the possible locations I could go for much of New Year’s Eve and decided that I would probably have the best luck going out to East Bend to try and shoot an old Dodge pickup that I have attempted in the past. I seemed to be having a hard time finding somebody at home to get the needed permission to access the property but figured that with it being a holiday there was a decent chance that I might get somebody there. The clouds were going to linger just long enough for me to wait for a decent hour to knock on the door. I knew that there weren’t going to be a lot of photos from this location, but only wanted to get a couple. Just something to put in the can for the new year, to have something to edit, and a trek to blog about. It was the perfect setup, as I didn’t have terribly high expectations. I also knew that if the location didn’t work out, I could find something else out that way without too much of a problem.
There was no need for an alarm Monday morning because there was no need to get out there earlier than say 9:30. I woke up at my normal time and got breakfast taken care of and a few little morning tasks before deciding it was time to head out. I had come up with an alternate location of Outlawed Restorations where I have been more times than I can count. It is also going to be the location for my newest decay workshop in the Spring. Since it wasn’t too far down the road from where the Dodge was, I kind of figured that I would end up there anyway. There was no better time to really look at the location in the same way that I will be during the workshop. I knew that I needed to work out some different compositions there so that I could more effectively guide the participants. It was settled enough that I contacted Dean who owns the shop to make sure that it was OK if I dropped by for a little while. He had no problems with it, and just like that I had two different locations to go shoot. I still wasn’t looking for a very productive day behind the camera, just a few new images were all that I wanted.
When I arrived at the first location, I slowed down to see if anything had changed as far as cars in the driveway from the last time I was there and knocked. I saw no difference and decided that even though the sky was looking good in the direction that I would need for the Dodge, that I wouldn’t bother stopping since I was likely to get the same lack of response as last time. It wasn’t that much of a problem to bypass as I had my alternate location already planned out. This would be an easier location to shoot as well since I was already familiar with it and had an idea what I might want to try. I knew that for 2024, I wanted to do more black and white photographs and I had a few ideas in mind for that challenge. Hopefully, this was going to be the springboard that I needed to get myself motivated to shoot some photos.
When I arrived, I noticed that Dean wasn’t there, so I just parked and grabbed my gear. I started walking around the property looking for my first composition. Much to my surprise, nothing was catching my eye or my imagination. This was a first, because every time I’ve come here, I’ve always found something that caught my eye which is why I keep coming back here time after time. This time, however, I felt detached and uninspired. As I walked around, I realized that I am not usually here during the Winter when the vegetation is completely dormant. That reminded me that there was a Ford sedan tucked in the woods which one of my workshop participants had spotted years ago and had worked their way back to. It was too grown up for a photo, but I did put the car into my memory in case I was out here at a time when I could access it. Today was likely the day, and to find something new out here would undoubtedly spark my interest and creativity.
I went over to that side of the property and found the back of the car well within the tree line. It looked to be in pretty good shape, but it was surrounded by trees and branches. I spotted a way that I could very likely access it and started to make my way through the trees to see if there was a vantage point that I could shoot it from. The whole area was tight, but there was a section of the woods on the front driver’s side where I had room to work out a composition. I went there and started to look at the angles to see what I could realistically do with the car from that point. The first thing that jumped out at me was the front driver’s side section of the car. It was not unlike many that I had photographed in the past, but there were several tires laying up next to the fender that added a little bit of interest and story to the scene.
With the primary colors being the browns of the fallen leaves with the main points of interest being the black tires and the slightly bluish chrome, I decided that this would make for a great opportunity for a black and white composition to avoid the overall warm tones of the leaves and wood. I pulled out the camera and fitted the standard zoom on it since I was going to be working from close in. I added a polarizer and then changed the picture style to black and white to help me visualize how the composition was going to look. I tried a few different variations on the composition and finally landed on one shot from the middle of the car. This didn’t allow me to see the side of the car, but it made the stacked tires relate better to the car which made for a better composition. I really did like how this photo was looking on the back of the camera and felt that black and white was definitely the right choice considering the colors that were so dominant in the scene.
There it was…the first image of 2024 was in the bag. It was a black and white photo, and an artistic representation of decay. I had accomplished all of my goals with this one photo and could have easily called it a day at this point. That wouldn’t be quite my style though as I rarely stop with just a single composition unless I’m working a specific view or subject. I could do better than this photo, and I was feeling motivated to give it a try.
I looked around to see what else I might be able to do with the old Ford and found a view off to the side that kind of minimized some of the other vehicles in the background. This view would also let me use the tires as a foreground interest which again would help to tell the story of this car. I pushed my way into the trees so that I could get the right angle and get enough room to let the 24mm end work on the lens. Well, I had the right angle, but there was just no way to get the car to fit in the frame no matter how far back I pushed into the trees. My only solution was to swap lenses and get my wide-angle which I hadn’t used in quite a while now.
With that lens, I was able to get the entire car in the shot but was needing to rack it out to 18mm which shows how far off I was with the 24mm. Now that I had the car in the frame, I needed to find a way to creatively place it. Now that I was shooting so wide, the foreground tires were larger than I really wanted them to be. My original thought was going to have them occupying a large section of the foreground, but with the scaling of the lens, that was just too much visual area which caused the foreground to compete for the attention over the car. I ultimately chose to crop through the tires at the widest part and have them roughly point into the composition. This reduced their size significantly, but still allowed them to play the part that I wanted them to. The adjustment to the composition also allowed me to include more of the sky which worked out very well as there was a large section that was turning blue. That blue was a much-needed source of cool color tone to balance with the overly warm palette that I was seeing.
As I was looking at this composition, I felt that while black and white was a viable option, there would be a bit more visual impact with a full color image now that I had the color balance in place. I changed the picture style back to the one that I usually work in and used that to get the exposure set. There was a point where I thought that I might need to use a grad filter to bring the sky down a bit but looking at the histogram with my custom picture style, I could tell that there was plenty of information in the photo to pull out shadows and recover the highlights of the sky. My only real concern was the breeze which was starting to kick up. This was causing a leaf held by a spider web to move around a lot. I had to make some adjustments so that I could get a faster shutter speed and then I played the waiting game for the wind to calm long enough to grab the shot.
The outcome was better than I had hoped considering the very crowded location that I was forced to shoot in for this subject. Never in a million years would I have imagined shooting an overall photo of this car so deep in the woods. That is the real benefit of working in the Winter though. It is much easier to move around in the woods, and there is less in the way visually when the vegetation has died down like this. This was the perfect time to photograph this car, and while it has been here since the first time I visited in 2018, I had never been able to get a good view of it up close. The old Ford had done its job for the day. I was finally in the right mindset to continue with the photography and was feeling pretty good about things. Now that I had a new subject captured, I could go to the more familiar ones and start to really get creative with them.
I packed things back up so that nothing would get damaged when exiting the woods and made it back out to the wide-open part of the property. I was back in the land of familiarity at this point and was looking for the next subject to work. Most of the vehicles on this side of the property I had worked quite a bit over the years, but there was one that was a recent addition that I haven’t really done much with. The ’30’s model Chevy was parked next to the barn and beside it was a replacement frame for it with a working motor. This truck had baffled me for a while now, and it took me a year before I even tried to photograph it. I did like the end result with the yellow tarp wrapped around it, but I felt that there was more to capture with it. I spent some time walking around it to see what caught my eye. The first thing that I liked was the cracked window on the driver’s door. I love the cracked glass on these old cars since there was no such thing as safety glass back then. The glass just had a tendency of making the most unique shapes when it was damaged.
I could see into the cab through the broken glass and liked how the dash looked with the steering wheel. I felt that this was going to make an interesting composition, so I pulled the camera back out and fitted the telephoto lens with polarizer. I worked out the right angle and focal length for the shot that I had in mind. I tried to pay attention to how things were lining up with the steering wheel and what the light was doing since I was shooting this from the shaded side.
That was another issue that I was starting to run into that I usually don’t have to worry with when I’m doing this type of photography. Since I gravitate to cloudy days, I don’t typically have to worry about the direction of the light, but I knew going into this that the sky was going to clear, and I was going to have the sun to worry with. It wasn’t all bad though because the bright sun will make for better black and white photos because of the added contrast. I was actually looking forward to working with this kind of light since I had mentally prepared for it. This was going to be a good opportunity to make use of the light since the sun was making the interior bits brighter than the door or window. This helped to push the attention into the cab where I wanted it to be.
Because the focal point of the photo was the interior, I chose to focus on the steering wheel rather than the crack in the glass. I just added to the sharpness of the crack through increasing the depth of field so that the structure of the break was still visible, just not the primary focus. I had switched the picture style back to black and white for this one since I knew that I was going to be presenting it without color. There was nothing added to the story through the use of color, and the image kind of fell flat with the colors that were present. By going black and white, the focus was back on the contrasts, textures, and shapes within the frame. That was where the story was, and what I wanted to concentrate on.
Having successfully captured the image that I was going for with the interior of the truck, I turned my attention to the exterior once again to look for more compositions. I have always been interested in the front of the truck since the whole grill was missing as well as the lights. It left a very interesting opening with fascinating shapes that I have yet to be able to photograph well. Now that I had the sun and shadows on my side, I saw the opportunity to add some interest to this as well as some much-needed depth for the image.
I started to look at the nose critically and began to form up a composition that was using the shadowed side as a bit of a separator between elements. My idea for this one was to make it kind of an abstract shot as the visual clues were limited unless you were familiar with the shapes of these trucks. The more I tried to get the composition right, the more I realized that I had the wrong lens to make it work. Eventually, I gave it and swapped back out to the standard zoom. It was at this point that I realized that on this first day of the year, I had already used each of my trinity zooms which usually indicates a good day shooting. I was back full circle with the lens that I had started with, and it was the right choice for this composition.
I was able to get the elements in the right place thanks to the wider focal length and the photo was coming together nicely. I was still using the black and white picture style to help me visualize the image as a monochrome photo. It worked well as I could see the contrasts more clearly and there was less visual confusion this way. I ended up shooting several variations of this concept to make sure that I had what I needed for a final image when I got home and started to edit the photos.
While working on the nose of the truck, I started to wonder what it would look like from the other side since that would be shooting against the light which would potentially make it a good deal more interesting to look at. I didn’t like the similar composition from the opposite side, but I did like what the hood ornament was doing with the shadow repeating the shape on the hood. The texture of the rust was also much more visible thanks to the sunlight raking across the surface. It was this bit of conversation that I was having with myself that prompted this composition focusing on the hood ornament. I used a very shallow depth of field here to really direct the eyes and to show the depth of the scene which helped to establish the shapes we were seeing. Seeing the scene without color convinced me that this was certainly the way to go for the photo.
It didn’t take long to get this photo captured because I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish with it. It always helps when you know what you are wanting to capture before you start to make the composition or set the exposure. Once you have a clear picture in your mind, all that other stuff will usually come together quite easily. The end result here was a little abstract which I liked, and it checked the artistic boxes that I was looking to work through with this trek.
I had now shot three compositions of this old Chevy which actually kind of surprised me since I had experienced such a problem getting inspired to shoot this truck nearly three years ago. It just goes to show you the power of shooting these isolations. It really is just that realization that prompted me to change up the decay workshop and go at it with a different angle this year. No longer will I focus on trying to photograph scenes in complex areas, I am going to push the creativity of the photographer to find these little details which capture the essence of what they are working on. It is a bit more challenging, but the reward is you will be able to find countless compositions on each subject and won’t have to worry about avoiding visual distractions from other cars or buildings. This type of photography is perfect to do at junk yards when the cars are stacked on top of each other making full length shots nearly impossible.
I did realize that I had not shot a color composition of this Chevy and felt that I needed to do at least one since the patina was so awesome. The previous compositions would not have worked in color because there wasn’t a good color harmony or balance present in those compositions. Looking around, I saw the barn siding as a really good source of cool tones to balance out the warmer tones of the rust. I just needed to find a composition that would make use of the different elements. As I looked around, I found that I could place the hood ornament into the window of the barn which would frame it very nicely. The composition started to be built from that point and I began to include different elements that I felt added to the story.
When I was done adding elements, I had a similarly sized square of darkness below the hood which matched up with the window. The use of the square was repeated with the differently textured side bit under the hood. This was framed with more of the coarser rust and I made sure to include the three holes that matched up to the same panel on the other side of the grill. The composition was simple, but there were a lot of little details that went into making it look this simple. The next stage of the process was to figure out the depth of field and where to focus. I knew that I wanted to get the barn slightly soft as I wanted the focus on the texture of the truck. Using a telephoto lens, blurring the background is very simple to do, and quite easy to go overboard with. I just needed it to go a little soft while leaving the truck sharp. I found through using my depth of field preview button, f/11 was the right choice to use as the siding went perfectly soft while it appeared that everything on the truck was in focus. The focus point that I used was the base of the hood right at the grill frame about an inch from the center. This allowed me to get everything in focus for the shot that I wanted.
As you can see, what started out as a quick trek for a few new images has turned into something a little more involved. I’ve got a half dozen keepers from 29 frames shot. That is a pretty strong hit rate considering I really wasn’t in the frame of mind to be creating images. Normally, this blog entry would have been finished at some point during the evening and you would have been able to read it first thing this morning. Why has it taken me so long to get this blog written and published? Well, because I shot a few more than 29 frames during day, and there are a few more than six keepers which have been added to the collection. How many you ask? I’m not telling just yet. You will just have to stick around and read the following blogs to see when I actually called it a day. I’ll go on record at this point and say that I think that this was probably the most productive January 1st trek I’ve ever done.
Don’t forget that I do offer prints of all the photos that you see here in the blogs, and you can see the best of the best in the galleries long after the blogs have been pushed to the back. While I hope that these photos look great on your screen, there is no way for me to control how they appear on your monitor or device. The only thing that I have complete control over is a physical print, and because of that, the best way to see exactly what I intended with the photo is to see it in a physical form. I offer prints in almost an endless variety of sizes and several different media types. The basics are offered directly through the website here, while custom orders can be made by contacting me. My goal is to match you up with the perfect print for your space. Not only will you get a piece of art that you will treasure for many years to come, you will also be helping to fund these treks which allow me to add to the collection. It is the best way to support an artist and show them that their work matters.
I look forward to seeing you back here tomorrow for another instalment of the first trek of the year. How many more photos will there be? I’ll just leave it at, we won’t be finished after tomorrow either.
See you soon!
