Monday, July 6, 2026
Time seems to be getting away from me here. I really feel like I was just out to get some photos, but that was several days before July started. That day started out with landscapes and ended up with a nice old house to work with. Surprisingly, there were no rusted cars and no patina that showed up that day. In fact, it has been a while since I’ve had any old iron in front of the camera. That day was almost accidental in many respects but turned out pretty successful despite the lack of planning. I guess you can say that today’s trek had very little planning involved as well, and as you will see it turned out pretty successful by the end of the day.
It all started this morning when I got up. I was expecting to see sunshine coming down until later this afternoon when the sun was going to transition over to clouds and storms. Needless to say, I wasn’t looking to go out for any photos. However, I did need to go to the bank and take care of some business and when I looked outside, I could see that the light was really nice and that there appeared to be a good many clouds in the sky. It looked like a great day for photos, but I hadn’t given it any thought at all. There I was needing to go out and had no idea what direction to go once I was done with the bank.
As it turned out, I had set the studio up on Sunday for a headshot session that I had scheduled for Tuesday which meant that my day was largely free which wasn’t originally the case. I was going to be setting things up and getting the lights worked out during the day today, but since I had some time to kill yesterday afternoon, I decided to get that done. This left me with the perfect excuse to go out and try to find something to photograph. I also could use a bit of time with the camera to get the creative juices flowing again for tomorrow’s session. Even though it will be something completely different from my decay photography, it would still do me a lot of good to think like a photographer again. I mean it has been a couple of weeks since I’ve really worked through the process.
I threw the camera in the back of the truck as I headed out to the bank still having no idea where I was going to go after I was done with the business stuff. The clouds were looking pretty good all around and I was seeing that quality of light that I love to work with. I figured that if the weather held until I was done at the bank, I would go out and try to find something simple that I could work with. The hourly forecast was still showing mostly sunny through the morning and even the cloud forecast was showing very thin coverage until the storms started to kick up later in the day. The smart money was that when I was done with the bank the sun would be out once again and I would just head home.
That wasn’t quite the case though. When I walked out of the bank the clouds and the light were pretty much the same as they had been since I woke up. I had the camera, I had the time, so I had to find something to photograph. I just got in the truck and started driving around to see which direction would pique my interest. Before long I was headed to the Eastern part of the county on a road that I had just recently driven in the Miata. This is a road that I have spent a lot of time on through the years of living out here and there are a lot of great scenes and locations to photograph. I was just still not sure what I felt like working with today.
One spot came to mind which was in Ronda. This spot is one that I have passed by many times over the years and had seen a number of different potential subjects there but had never really been motivated to try for any photos. There was also the matter of needing permission as most of the interesting vehicles were tucked away behind the building. When I had driven by in the Miata, I had seen that the Falcon that had been parked out front was now gone. There were two other cars in the back in a shelter. I could make out that one was a Fairlane or a Galaxie and the other looked like an early 50’s Ford sedan. There was a lot of clutter around the cars which would make photos kind of difficult which was why I had avoided this location for so long. At best, I was thinking that I could get a few detail shots, but even those were going to be difficult with objects in front of the cars and having them tightly packed in the shelter.
I had spent some time over the years trying to figure out how to get in touch with the owner since this was not a residence and there was nothing attached to it that I could reasonably assume would be the owner’s property. There was a dealership across the street that could have been associated with the storage building, but I had never stopped to talk with them since I hadn’t really been motivated to photograph the cars in the previous times that I had been out this way.
Things were a little different today. I had no real plan, and the light was really good for what I would want to do with the cars. I was headed that way and figured that I could stop at the dealership and see if that would turn up any luck. If not, I wasn’t going to worry about it because I had passed by here probably a hundred times or more in the past six years. One more time of not photographing it wouldn’t bother me. In fact, I was worried that even if I got permission that I would end up not being able to do anything at all with the cars because of the location and the surroundings. My personal rule of not moving anything or manipulating the scene was going to be a hinderance for me I feared.
It really didn’t take all that long to get out to the location and just to make sure I wasn’t going to waste an ask, I pulled into the front driveway to the building and looked at the lighting. The light was great, but the cars were still very much obscured by different objects. I could see a lawnmower and a backboard for a basketball hoop in front of the cars. Of course, there was also the fact that the support posts for the shelter were also close to the sides of the cars. It was as good as I had seen it before and I figured that I was motivated to capture them currently, so it was worth the ask.
I went over to the dealership across the street and saw two guys out talking by the office. I walked up to them and said that I had a stupid question for them. They said that I was in the right place, so I asked if they had any connection with the property across the street. They didn’t; but knew who owned it. OK, this was a good start. As they conversed quickly about the owner, they determined that he worked an odd shift and hardly ever answered his phone. OK, this wasn’t ideal. I saw a phone come out of a pocket and I figured that they were going to try and give him a call. Instead, I was given the number so I could try and call him. I’ll give it a try, but I was fully expecting to be sent to voicemail since spam calls are still all the rage these days.
While I was dialing, the general consensus was that he wouldn’t answer. However, the other end of the phone picked up, and I was talking to the owner. I think we were all surprised, but here I was explaining how I had gotten his number, who I was, and what I was wanting to do. He agreed so quickly that I almost missed what he said. We spoke for a few more moments, but I had the permission that I needed to get the photos. It had been so easy that I still wasn’t quite sure what had happened.
I grabbed my camera bag and tripod from the truck and left the truck on the dealer’s lot. I felt odd parking it near the storage building because I didn’t want anyone thinking that I was going to be taking anything at all. It was only a couple hundred feet away, so it was a simple walk to get there.
Once I was behind the storage building I was finally able to see what I had to work with up close and personal. The closest that I had been before was on the front of the storage building which blocked much of the view of the shelters behind it. There was a Geo Tracker which I wasn’t interested in next to the black and white Ford Galaxie which was my primary interest. Next to the Ford was a sedan that I realized was actually a Dodge Coronet. Beside that was the cab shell for a ’50’s pickup truck. There was a good deal of other property between all the cars and there was a riding lawnmower in front of the Ford. The Doge was more hidden behind the backboard and other things leaning up against the front of the car. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get to the back of the cars or not, but I was happy to see what I could do with the fronts of the cars for now.
There was no question that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything at all with the cars in their entirety. That would just make for a much too complex composition with too much going on. Details and abstracts were going to be the flavor of the day, and I was up to the task. Based on how tight the area was to work in; I decided to fit the telephoto lens which would allow me to really pick out the details and avoid much of the clutter around the cars.
Even though the camera had been in the bed of the truck for roughly an hour, it was still cold to the touch and when I pulled the lens cap off of the lens, the front element started to fog from the humidity that was heavy in the air. Fortunately, it only took a few minutes for the lens to clear off and I was ready to start shooting. Since it had been a while since I had really worked a scene in terms of details, I took it slow and went for the low hanging fruit first just to get in the swing of things.
What made the most sense was focusing on the headlights of the Ford which I had a good angle for access on the passenger side. I went with a slightly different composition that didn’t include the wheels or the grill. I was more interested in the twin headlights and the bombsight ornament on the leading edge of the fender. I liked that ornament by itself, but since the hood was propped up, I really liked how I could place the main detail of the trim in the opening of the hood for a bit of extra visual excitement thanks to the diagonals. The black paint on the side of the car really set off the composition as the contrast provided by the white paint and chrome really added to the interest.
With that initial composition captured, I moved to a closer position and changed my angle. I was still working with the fender ornament and the headlights but was going about it from a completely different frame of mind. The composition seemed to come together quite well, and it was one that I had planned on making black and white while I was shooting it. By the time I was looking at it on the computer at home, I liked the hints of the rust tones and felt that I wanted to leave it in color. I chose a color profile that I really like in this kind of situation that desaturates the entire image a good deal and leans to the cooler tones which changed the whole feel of the image for a bit more grit. The hint of color was just what I wanted for this and the final image came out very solid as did the first composition.
I was on a roll at this point and had only shot five frames on this car. The compositions were coming naturally to me and that made me feel really good. I was fully expecting to struggle with this scene and really have to work through a lot of compromises. Instead, I was almost on autopilot and in that flow state right from the beginning. It was as if I had been out every day for the past month with the camera.
While I was spending time with the headlights and the fender emblem, I had been getting more and more interested in the hood emblem and the design of the grill. Even from the angle that I was working, these elements just seemed to be perfect for a photograph. I changed my position and started to work on a composition that included those elements. Once again, I was thinking black and white, but as with the other one, I really liked the subtle hints of the rust tones in the photo and thought that they helped to tell the story.
Before long, I had that composition figured out and shot three more frames of it with slightly different depths of field. It was the last one that I preferred the most out of that short series. I think it was at this point that I really started to think about how quickly I was moving here. I had only shot eight frames and I was pretty sure that I had three keeper images already in the bag. With no wind, and a very consistent light source, there was just no reason to take a lot of multiple frames for a composition. The hit rate was going to be up there for this trek.
Not wanting to get locked into working only from the passenger side, I moved over to the driver’s side and started to look for other compositions. There were tires and other things propped up against the side of the car which limited what I was able to do with it. However, this side also had the trim on the front of the fender, and the open hood was still a consideration. I started to look through the camera to see what the shapes would look like with the background blurred out. While I wasn’t able to get the trim in the dark wedge, I was still able to create some nice shapes with the shadows in the engine bay.
Once I had a rough composition figured out, I dropped the tripod legs and started to fine tune how it would all come together. I liked it as a vertical to show more of the hood and the shadows which turned into a structured negative space in a manner of speaking. After I got the basic composition worked out, I started to see how the depth of field influenced the feeling of it. I knew that I didn’t want it all in focus, but how much blur was the question that I was asking.
It was another series of three frames as I played with the aperture and focus point before I landed on the result that I was after. This was getting to be the norm of the day. I would shoot three images, and the last one would end up being the keeper. These are usually the ones that I feel are the strongest in the field, but looking at the small LCD screen is sometimes very deceptive, especially when it comes to things like depth of field.
By this point, I had shot eleven frames and all of the Ford. It was time to look at the Dodge for a bit. The color on the car was a very dirty mint green and there wasn’t really that much rust on it. I wasn’t all that excited about the color, and this car was in a location that was very difficult to get a clear line on for a photograph. There was very little that I could do from the front of the car, but I did notice the ram hood ornament sitting atop the V8 emblem which did catch my eye. This was the area that I started to look closer at. The hood was only partially connected and was skewed off to the side which made it look odd on the car. By getting down low, I was able to eliminate that aspect of the scene and really focus on the parts that I was interested in.
By shooting low to the ground, I was forced to include the top of the shelter that the car was in, but even from the beginning of that thought process, I wasn’t all that upset about that proposition. It would give me a chance for a dark background with just enough detail to keep it from being empty space. The green would really show up well against it and the chrome on the trim would stand out nicely as well. I’ve done plenty of compositions that included the shadowed ceiling of a barn or shelter, and I usually like them quite a bit. I had no reason to think that that wouldn’t be the case with this subject as well.
It was the last of three images that I shot of this concept that made the keeper list and that you see here. When I shot it, I was doing it as an attempt at the easy photo of this car, and I didn’t put a whole lot of stock in how well it would turn out. I was hopeful but figured that it would just be another photo that was there among the other from the day. I was actually quite surprised at how much I liked the final result. The green really worked well with the dark background and I think that it succeeded because of it. Had the background been a blue sky, or even a cloudy sky, I don’t think that this would have worked out nearly as well. That extreme contrast just really pushed the image into a new realm that I really enjoyed. The subtle lines of the supports to the shelter helped to give it some visual drama with some extra diagonals that are very much a part of the scene. I think that this was one of those cases when the restrictions that I was looking at with the surroundings actually helped to form a better photograph through the compromises that I had to work through.
Not really seeing anything else that I could do with the front of the car, I started to see if I could make my way around to the rear of the two cars. It wasn’t bad at all getting behind the Dodge, but the Ford was another matter completely. There was a bramble that was in my way and the only clear path was going to be through the shelter supports and over the personal property that was propped up against it. I wasn’t really thinking that there was going to be any need to get to the rear of the Ford because it was actually in too good a shape for me to really find that much of interest. I decided to put my attention on the Dodge instead which really had a very nice patina to it and the rust that showing through was balancing out with the green colors quite nicely. There were also a lot of spiderwebs around the Dodge which added to the visual interest quite a bit.
The first thing that caught my eye was the Coronet emblem on the quarter panel. As you well know, I do love an emblem as the visual anchor for a photograph. It wasn’t showing up all that well because the back end of the car was well in the shade and since the light levels were kind of dim outside, there just wasn’t much light there to bring out the chrome. There was just enough light to really see what I was doing in terms of a composition and that was what I focused on more than anything.
The biggest hurdle for me to get through was the fact that the trunk, like the hood had been popped which left a dark void right next to the taillight. I didn’t like this in a photograph because it seemed to alter the balance of the composition too much and made it feel too heavy on the left side whether I placed the light at the edge or gave the dark void the honor of framing the image.
My solution was one that I don’t recall ever doing before, but it seemed to work out quite well. I used the corner of the trunk right at the upper left of the frame to essentially frame the shadowed portion and create some negative space out of that shadow. This allowed me to push the taillight further into the frame which brought the emblem into a much more appropriate location within the frame. With the trunk edge in the photo, the overall balance seemed to come together perfectly, and I really liked how the composition was looking.
What I wasn’t liking was the muddy appearance of everything thanks to the low light levels. My shutter speeds were nearly 30 seconds which wasn’t a problem, but that tells you the amount of light that I was working with. There just wasn’t that much contrast in the scene and everything seemed to have a green color cast to it which I found to be rather revolting. My gut was that this was going to be a black and white image and I was going to have to really work the contrasts out in post.
When I got the images home, it was the first of only two photos that I shot here that worked the best. It was still very flat and uninteresting, but the composition was really quite strong I thought. That was the thing that I held onto when I was starting the edit on the photo. Of course, I started with working this one in black and white, but without the contrast added in, that was looking too muddy and flat as well. I needed something to get me in a direction that felt right for the photo. Because of the colors and the age of the car, I decided to go and check out some of the film profiles to see if there was one there that I might like. Sure enough, one of them did the trick by rendering the green a more of a blue tone while adding some contrast. I took that as a starting point and worked the edit out completely from that starting point.
The end result was a photo that I felt really worked for the composition and the car. In fact, it was one of the favorites early on in the process because of how the composition had come together so well off of basically an experiment. The processing really fit the subject and composition and I don’t think that I could have come up with anything better had I started off with a solid plan for how the photo was going to look. I think that the biggest key to the success was the way that I added contrast to each individual aspect of the composition so that it had a natural look and not one that looked overly processed. The saturation levels were also brought down a good bit because of all the added contrast in the frame.
While I was working on that rear corner of the Coronet, I had been paying some attention to the side of the Galaxie which was on the other side of the supporting posts for the shelter. I loved the design of the side molding and remembered photographing similar moldings with great success in the past. There was something about this one that really called out to me, but this was one of those situations where it wasn’t going to be easy to capture.
There were a lot of aspects of this shot that were going to be difficult. The angle that I needed to capture the shapes that I wanted forced me to shoot through two posts that were maybe eight inches apart. To get to that spot, I was going to have to straddle a push mower while dodging other items that were under the leaves. There was also a fallen branch that was just touching the door that I thought was going to be a distraction.
I ended up doing some straight up gymnastic moves to get the camera perfectly positioned between the posts, but far enough away that I was able to compose the image correctly. I was straddling the mower while keeping my foot off of the panels which the tripod was also sitting on. The last thing that I wanted was for my movement to cause the ground to move and shake the camera during the exposure. The exposure times were still quite long as all of this was in the shade. Once I got the composition all figured out, I shot the photo and checked it all out in the image review. I was really liking it, but the branch was causing a distraction on the left side of the image. To take care of that I decided to break off two of the limbs which were encroaching into the frame. That cleaned up the photo quite nicely and kept me from having to clone out elements that took up a fair amount of room. It was that second image that turned into the keeper from this composition and it was one that I was quite happy with.
Having worked myself into position next to the car, I was starting to pay attention to the rear wheel which was covered in spider webs. These are some of the same webs that I had found interesting on the Dodge and figured that I could do something with them here because the light was better right at the rear wheel. Once again, I was dealing with a lot of ground clutter that was kind of forcing my had in terms of composition. I opted for a very tight crop that focused on the wheel itself with the swoop of the quarter panel providing some shape to the image. The basic setup was similar to one that I had done with a Fairlane several years ago that turned into one of my most significant images from that year.
The fundamental differences that I was seeing with this one was that the leaves on the ground were providing some texture where it was the lines on the pavement that brought the interest before. I also had a bit of molding that had its own texture and shape for some added interest. The colors were subtle, but I was really thinking that this needed to be done in full color thanks to the warm tones of the leaves.
The last part of the photo that really appealed to me was the way that the center cap was being partially obscured by the quarter panel. Looking through the camera, I could see “FO” clearly on one side before the text went behind the panel. On the other side, I could make out “RD” clearly, but it was obviously in the wrong order with the other letters. The tire was also showing only two letters clearly which completed the pattern in my mind. I thought it was a very good concept for a photo, and I was liking the composition that I had come up with. I only needed to shoot two frames with slightly different depths of field before I got the one that I really liked which you see here.
Working with the spiderwebs on the Ford inspired me to go back to the Dodge once again to look at the webs. I was liking how the backlight was showing the webs a bit more than they could be seen otherwise. The light was looking better on the driver’s side as there was more bounced light coming in from the outside on that side of the car. One of the better examples of a web in an area of good light was right behind the back door. This is an area that I have made many a strong composition with on cars from the ’60’s and ’70’s, but not so many from the ’50’s. I started to look at what I had to work with around that C pillar and tried to pull things that had worked in the past like including the door handle. I started to see the composition coming together but wanted to really make it work as well as possible.
It all came down to the angles that I was shooting which meant that I needed to elevate the camera so that the belt molding was at a steep diagonal as was the door handle. The created a situation where the arch in the rear window and the quarter window were similar but scaled differently. The mirror image of the arch appealed to me and made for a wonderful element to balance out with the handle. The open door gave a strong shadow and deep blacks to define the panels while the web was just sitting there linked to just about everything in the photo.
What I was seeing was largely green and I felt that this was going to be a good time to do another black and white presentation. I actually switched the camera over to black and white so that I could really see how the contrasts were working within the scene. It was another three frames shot with slightly different framing and depth of field before I had the winner which was that last frame. I really liked how it looked in the image review and was happy with the black and white presentation.
This is where the story gets interesting though. After importing it into Lightroom and starting to do the processing, I went down a rabbit hole that changed much of how I saw the image originally. I did go with a black and white profile and started to work all the tonal relationships which were done through the color channels that were still present because I had shot the image in RAW. I changed things like the white balance, tint, the color calibration, and the overall contrast and exposure. This got me closer to what I was wanting out of the black and white image, but it was still not looking all that great. It seemed to lack something that was responsible for the mood of the image. Even after a full processing in black and white, I wasn’t able to achieve the feeling that I was going for.
I wanted to explore the image as a color one to see if that would be any different, but before I started all over fresh, I wanted to see where it sat as a color image. Now remember that I had shifted a lot of the color values rather wildly in order to get the tonal variations that I wanted out of a largely green image. I had done all of this while looking at the image as a black and white photo having no idea what the results would be on the actual colors. When I pulled up the color profiles again to see where it had landed in the realm of color, things were a bit odd looking to start with. However, after a few seconds, the adaptive color profile popped up and changed the whole look of the image. All of a sudden, the colors were not garish at all, and there was so much more contrast in the colors than had been there before. The way that the adaptive profile read the edits that I had done already was actually really cool. I went ahead and applied the profile and did just a few tweaks to the colors to get them dialed in where I wanted them. That was all it took, and I had officially decided that I liked the color version better than the original black and white that I had in mind when I started out.
That was the last composition that I shot of the Dodge and from the rear of the cars. I was feeling like I had done pretty much everything that I was going to be able to think of. I had shot what I felt was 30 or 40 frames by this point but was completely surprised to see that I was only on number 23 for the day. I had lost count of the compositions that I had shot and really had no idea that I had only shot two or three frames for each concept that I had been working on. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I had more than two or three keepers out of this group and felt that I was probably double that easy. It had been a great day for such a quick session.
As I was going back to the camera bag, I couldn’t help but look at the front of the Ford once again. There was just something about this car that fascinated me even though I could only see portions of it without something blocking the view. I wasn’t able to help myself and I started looking for one last composition of that front corner where I had started the day. This time, I was going to really capitalize on the fact that the side of the car was in deep shadows. The darkness made the top of the fender really show up and it added to the contrast of the headlights and chrome.
I quickly decided that this was going to be a vertical composition, but I was having a hard time determining where to make the edges of the frame. I don’t care for the 3:2 aspect ratio in vertical format so I was having to guess at what a 5:7 or a 4:5 aspect ratio was going to look like. I worked through those frames and then changed the camera to a 4:3 and a square crop just to cover my bases. What was throwing me was the popped hood and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to include the entire length of the hood or if I wanted to crop into the hood. Looking through the camera wasn’t giving me a good idea either way so I just had to shoot several options.
I ended up with four frames of this composition with the different crops in mind. When I got home, it was the square crop that worked out the best and I felt had the most promise. That was actually the first image that I edited and once I got started, I started to see some issues with the framing that I didn’t really like. What I wanted to see was a little narrower in width and I was actually fine with adding more height to the frame. The 4:3 wasn’t any better with the framing, but it was that second one where I had imagined the crop from a 5:7 that seemed to work slightly better. The crop that I applied to it was a 4:5 which focused more of the attention on the hood rather than beneath the bumper. It kept things a little more intimate with the car and I felt that the overall framing was much better without having to crop extra off of the sides as I was going to have to do with the square crop.
This ended up being the last composition that I had shot for the day and brought my total frames up to 27. That was not a lot of photos captured, but I knew that I had a bunch that were going to work out one way or the other. I didn’t think that I was going to end up with ten keepers from the day, but that is what I had. There were eleven that I looked at for processing that made it through the culling, but that last one just didn’t work out at all. Regardless, I was still very happy with the outcome of the day.
The biggest benefit for the time spent was that I did get the creative juices flowing once again. I’m now mentally ready for the headshot session tomorrow and am actually looking forward to it. With that in mind, now is a good time for a word from our sponsor….Greg Kiser Photography. If you are needing an updated headshot, or possibly looking for a portrait done of you, maybe a family photo, or something a little more personal, I have session times available through the rest of the year and would be happy to put together a studio session or a location session just for you. Maby you are just wanting to do something creative or play dress-up in front of the camera. I can do that as well. Don’t forget that I offer many levels of mentorships if you are trying to learn photography or are ready to take the leap to the next level in photography. Of course, the core of my photography has always been built around creating fine art prints to hang on the wall. As with all of my blog entries, if there are any photos here or in the galleries that speak to you, I would love to match you up with a print to suit your space. There really is no better way to enjoy photography than in the intended print form. You won’t be disappointed.
As always, thank you for joining me on this trek today. I do hope that you have enjoyed the photos as well as my little dear diary entry to talk about the process. This is one of my favorite treks in the recent past and I have to say that it was fate that I was able to do this one today. Think about it…I have passed by here for years and never really researched the owners. Several cars have come and gone during the years, and I picked today of all days to give it a try. There was nothing special about today, and according to the folks that I talked with, the chances of catching the owner on the phone were slim to none. Not only did I get through, I was able to get permission quicker than I think I have ever done over the phone before. I think that it was just meant to be on this day that was supposed to be very sunny but turned into nearly perfect light for this location.
Until next time…
