Monday, August 11, 2025
No, really….I was a good boy today. I know I said yesterday that I was going to be taking some time off from photography to get ready for the portrait shoot coming up on Thursday. I had all intentions of doing that. It even helped that it was going to be raining through the day today, and actually the rain was in the forecast for the rest of the week. No better time than to work out lighting and start to get in the mindset of doing a style of lighting that I love, but don’t have much practice with. I even started out resting by going out in the Miata for a while after finishing up the final part to what most certainly wasn’t a multi-part blog entry. Everything was lining up to give me some restful days leading up to the portrait session.
I’m also sure that you all were looking forward to a few days without getting email notifications from me about a new blog entry and new photos. You are subscribed aren’t you? If you are, I really appreciate the support and the desire to see the new photos as I release them. If you aren’t subscribed, it costs nothing and is the best way to stay on top of the newest images. All you have to do is enter your email here and then confirm the subscription when you get the automated response email. After that, you just have to sit back and you will get a direct link to these blogs as I finish them. if you are one that would prefer to see the photos when they are posted on social media, that is great, and I appreciate that as well. Just know that currently, I’m looking at a backlog of images so long that I’m betting that the last trek will probably take us into 2026 as I have right around 290 photos lined up and ready to be posted.
At any rate, I really was looking forward to having a kind of light day and maybe watching some television, or reading a book about how to get more performance out of my Miata. Oh yeah, I got sidetracked for a moment. There I was driving the Miata yesterday through Traphill and down into Roaring River. I had taken a route less traveled, but knew roughly where I was…until I didn’t. I could recognize some of the buildings that I was driving past, but without a compass being displayed, I was starting to lose my bearings because the sun was pretty high in the sky and was being obscured by clouds making it very difficult to navigate by shadows. When I found myself in Shephard’s Crossing, I decided that I needed to dig my phone out and get the GPS running to get me in the direction from home as I was getting myself really quite turned around. I was about 40 minutes from home when I had a route showing. It also looked like I was only two turns away from being in very familiar territory. I would have seen this on the map had it been displayed, which is how I can navigate so easily when I am in the truck.
I was driving down the road and was still in areas that I recognized, but it had been a while. Up ahead I spotted what looked to be a large rusty truck parked on the side of the road. I slowed and took note of what I was seeing. It appeared to be an old Dodge with just the cab and frame. It was beautifully rusty, and I could see that it was parked near a building that was missing some walls and showing the rafters under the shabby roof. The scene looked really nice, and I could remember seeing the truck possibly two years ago and deciding that it wasn’t worth photographing. However, with just a single pass by this location, I didn’t have time to look critically at it. Instead, I started reviewing what my mind had seen through the filter that it provided between my eyes and brain. I know that this can be dangerous, but the scene really looked great, and I was considering coming back at another time to photograph it. Of course, I wasn’t thinking any time soon, just sometime in the future.
When I got home, I told Toni about it and I just couldn’t shake the scene out of my head. I went back to look at it through Google Street View, but things didn’t look the same. There was a shelter between the truck and the remains of the building. I didn’t recall seeing that before, but that was enough to make me dismiss this scene if that is how it appeared the first time I saw it. Looking at the capture date, it was done eleven months ago. It would appear that the truck had been moved closer to the building and the shelter had been torn down. This made me even more excited about capturing this scene because the truck was obviously in a much better position than it had been the last time I was out there. I still wasn’t considering going out because I needed to stay at home and get ready for this portrait shoot.
With Toni leaving early this morning, I ended up getting up about 6:30. It wasn’t raining like it was supposed to be. In fact, looking at the forecast the rain was starting in the afternoon which gave me some time this morning to go and possibly get that photo. I got breakfast taken care of and took care of my morning routine before coming back upstairs to get ready to go and get this quick picture. It wouldn’t take long and I would likely be done with the whole thing in just a few hours, still leaving me time to center my mind for a different kind of photography. The only problem was things looked kind of wet outside when I got upstairs. Sure enough, it was raining, not just a little bit either. I could see the rain streaming off of the gutter guards. I checked the weather and it was looking like this cell was going to be overhead for the next hour or so. It was too much rain for me to go out in. That was good though, it would keep me in the house doing exactly what I had planned on doing.
I had a few videos on YouTube that I had saved to watch, so got those running for a bit and that helped gear my brain towards working with hard light in the studio. I did keep looking out the window and watching the rain falling harder and harder. I would even pull up the hourly forecast which was now showing rain for the next two hours. That kept getting pushed back further and further until it was saying rain ending around 1pm. The weather was trying to tell me to stay home, but there was this very strong pull for me to go out and get the photo that I had seen yesterday. It is rare that I get the kind of drive for a photo where I am willing to work in the rain. I could see the rain and the associated clouds being a great starting point for the mood of the scene though.
At noon, it was looking like the rain was going to be slacking off for about an hour before coming back with a vengeance in the afternoon. I decided to throw in the towel of debating back and forth and just going out there. If nothing else, I would be able to look at the scene critically to determine a composition. I knew that it was on a business property, but well off to the side so I would be out of the way. I just needed a few minutes to work it out and get the photo, so I doubted that there would be any problem at all with the business opened until 2pm according to Google.
When I opened up the garage, I heard the rain falling harder than it had appeared to be just a few minutes earlier. That did remind me to grab my rain kit (lens hoods and the 82mm polarizer) just in case I was going to be working in the rain, which looked like a guarantee of sorts. It was a nice drive out to Roaring River, and I knew just how to get back to that spot after having been a little turned around the day before. It was much easier looking at the map on the screen of the truck.
When I got out there, I could see the truck in plenty of time to slow and pull into the lot where I had planned to park. That was when I was reminded how my brain works just like everyone else’s if I’m not actively seeing a scene. What I thought had been evidence that the truck had moved wasn’t the case at all. It was still where I remembered it being when I first saw it, and where Google Maps showed it to be from eleven months ago. That shelter was still there, but I had seen right through it from the Miata, and it had not registered. There was not as much tree cover in the background either which might possibly be causing a problem because the sky looked very overcast without a lot of detail in the clouds.
Now, honestly, had I rolled up on this scene fresh while hunting, I might have been inclined to pass it up and look for something better. However, I had created a story in my mind between the truck and the ruins of the building to the left of the scene. I really liked the idea, and the rain set the mood just right for what I wanted to convey with the photo. The shelter wasn’t terrible because it was high enough that it didn’t block the building, and if I were to get the tops of the trees for a sense of scale, I would get the full roof of the shelter to allow the support beams to make sense in the composition. It was kind of a clumsy idea for a composition, but it was something at least. It was enough to get me out of the truck in a light drizzle which was a good start to the session.
I opened up the tailgate and set the tripod up. I built the camera under the cover of the tonneau so that I could get the filter and lens hood on before bringing it out in the rain. This is the best way to avoid rain drops on the filter short of the rain blowing sideways. I mounted it to the tripod and started to frame up the composition. The first one that I worked out was not all that good. I had a good angle on the truck and building, but the entire upper right of the frame was nothing but clouds. After dialing in the exposure which wasn’t all that easy without the help of grad filters, I started to really look at the composition. My eyes were being pulled to strongly to the upper right corner where they left the frame. I never even saw the truck which was largely in the shadows of the scene. I’m sure that a grad filter would have helped my eyes find the main subject, but to use that would mean having two filters attached without any protection from the rain unless I were to use the umbrella which really makes things overly cumbersome unless it was raining much harder than this. The histogram was telling me that the exposure latitude was such that I could deal with it in post. This is where knowing your gear and your skill level comes in handy because I was going to really be pushing this file to get all the tonality that I wanted out of it.
Feeling OK about the exposure, but not the composition, I decided to move the camera around to change the relationships between the elements. By moving over to the left a good bit, I was able to introduce a large tree along the right side of the frame which worked much better. There was more separation between the truck and the building than I would have preferred, but it all flowed well. The large expanse of sky that had been pulling my eyes out of the frame to the right was now right above the cab which directed my eyes to the cab. This helped to establish the main subject and also minimized the lack of a bed on this truck. I got things al dialed in and shot a test frame to see if the exposure was still the same. This time, it was a little overexposed so I dropped it down a tad. That worked, and I fine tuned the depth of field before shooting another one that was supposed to be a solid image. There was a bit of the sky that was clipping with that shot, so I dropped the exposure one more click and got a good return on the sky. The truck was in total darkness at this exposure, but the histogram was showing enough usable detail that I was sure that I could recover the shadow detail.
A quick look around showed me that nothing was moving because of any breeze which made me consider doing an HDR blend. I would have preferred using a grad filter, but the rain was preventing that from being a viable option at the moment. I shot a frame of my hind to let me know that the next string of frames were going to be done for blending, and then fired off a series of four frames with a stop difference between each one. This had been the composition that I was committed to, and felt that if the single frame didn’t work, I would have an HDR image to fall back on so that I could ensure that I had the right raw material for the photo that I envisioned.
Just to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything, I repeated the process on the other side of the truck where I found a composition that I liked and dialed it in. Once I had it all done, I did another HDR blend of four images to make sure that I had plenty of shadow and highlight information in the scene. I now had two different compositions that I liked of the truck, but it was the driver’ side composition with the broken building that I was really leaning towards.
When I got the images home, I did the two HDR blends and found one frame for each composition that I felt would be workable as a solo image just in case I wanted to go that route. I really liked how the HDR image blended together on the first version and chose to edit that one. I resisted the urge to go for a saturated look to the image and chose one of the more muted color profiles. I worked the tones to where I was happy with them, and started to zoom in to look at the details. That was when the image started to fall apart. I could see all kinds of color fringing in the trees where the sky showed through the branches. I toggled between the original and the basic edit that I had done to see if it was something that I had created. It wasn’t. It was areas from the shadow exposure that had blown out the sky and during the blend, those anomalies were showing through. I tried another blend with a bit heavier of a deghost layer, but that didn’t help matters any. This was a hard no for me because it ruined the quality of the image.
that was when I went back to the single shot that I had done before the HDR series. It was very contrasty and the brights were super bright with the main subjects of the scene being in deep shadows. I started doing a similar edit to this file as I had done with the HDR file, and to my surprise, I was actually able to get more detail out of the sky with this single capture which had been exposed to the right, just below the clipping point. Even the shadow areas of the frame recovered nicely and I had an image with the exposure latitude that I was expecting out of the HDR. I knew that I would be able to work this image and had done the HDR for that chance of getting a slightly better range of tones. As it turned out, this was just about an identical experience to one of the last treks of 2024 when I shot the VW Bug during similar conditions. I had done an HDR blend for that one as well, but there were issues with the blending that I didn’t like which forced me to go to the single frame capture. That one turned out just as clean as the HDR was promising to. Occasionally, this now ancient Canon EOS 5DS R camera really surprises me. Here I was getting a workable scene that had so much contrast that I wasn’t able to see detail in the shadows on the back of the camera with my only hopes being based on the spread of pixels on the histogram. You just can’t beat it when things like that happen in photography.
The overall compositions weren’t the only photos that I shot while I was there. Once I was happy that I had the establishing shots done, I moved in closer to the truck for some isolations. I started off with the fender emblem which had “Job Rated” above the letter “H”. I tried a couple of things with this, but nothing that was worth pressing the shutter button. The other aspect that really interested me was the Dodge and V8 emblems on the front of the truck which I started to work with. My first attempt was from the driver’s side shooting into the grill, but the scaling was off with the emblems being very small in relation to the light. I also didn’t like how I had to position things as close to the edge of the frame as I was to avoid background distractions. I decided to try the same concept from the other side which would make the emblems larger in relation to the headlight.
This angle worked out better and I was able to frame the headlight within the grass that was growing up through the pavement cracks. The colors also played quite well together and formed a color palette that I really liked. All I had to do was play around with the depth of field in order to get a shot that I really liked. That didn’t take too long, and I was pretty happy with how things had gone. It was starting to rain harder now, so I figured it was time to pack it in and head back home. I had timed this perfectly for the least amount of rainfall it would appear.
Once again, I used the tonneau cover to shield the camera from the falling rain as I broke it down and got the lens set back up for the slot filters again. It was a bit more difficult this time because the rain was coming down pretty hard at this point. I did get it all done with the camera staying dry except for what had gotten wet while photographing the truck. That didn’t worry me because the camera had been rained on harder than that in the past without issue.
When I got back to the garage, I had been gone for just an hour and a half and had shot 26 frames. This might sound like a lot but remember that eight of those frames were for HDR blends, and two more were my hands indicating that I was starting the series. That leaves me with realistically 16 frames that I shot of this truck and those allowed me two keepers that I am really happy with. Not too bad for a trek in the rain. I might not have stayed home like I said I was going to, but I did keep it simple and didn’t allow myself to get snowed under with hours of editing and several blogs to write. It was just a nice quick outing in response to seeing something that excited me the day before. You just can’t beat that.
Thank you for joining me on this trek today, and I hope that you have enjoyed the photos. Let me know if you would be interested in having a print of either of these. They were both created with the idea that they would end up on a wall somewhere. I would love it if that wall was yours.
Until next time…
