Tuesday, July 22, 2025
I was really expecting to be done with this trek by this point in the day. For conversation purposes, it is 2:12pm, and I started this trek shortly after 8 this morning. There was no need to find anything all that involved as I was just wanting to get some new photos under my belt after what seems like a very long time away. That isn’t quite accurate as I do have a lot of new photos in the works right now, but they are portraiture photographs from a session that I did over the weekend. It was really nice to get the studio up and running for something a bit different from my norm, and to actually do some portraiture after a very long hiatus away from it. The only issue is that when I am working with clients for a special portrait session, that tends to occupy my mind pretty completely and there is not enough creative energy left to go out and do my personal work when it comes to photography.
This past portrait session has pretty much occupied my mind for the last two weeks as I have been gearing up for an anniversary session, celebrating a year of marriage. The session was basically filling in the places that their wedding photographer missed on the wedding day. There were a lot of bridal portraits done, and formal wedding attire with the husband and wife. We then switched gears and went for a more relaxed theme for some more portraits while using their wedding colors. It was a lot of fun to shoot, and the session took four hours on Saturday, after I had spent about six hours setting up the studio. When it was all finished, I spent the rest of Saturday and a good bit into the night breaking down the sets and starting the editing process on the photos. That continued through most of Sunday, and I finalized the edits on Monday to submit a total of 40 fully edited and retouched proofs to the clients for their review.
With that pretty much behind me except for the print options which will come later, I was ready to get back in the swing of doing my regular personal work with the camera. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot though because it really had been a while since I had been able to put any thought into what I would like to shoot. Looking at the weather, Tuesday was looking cloudy, but there had been some pretty good chances of rain showing up earlier. Those rain chances were dropping quickly, and it was looking like any rain would be in the afternoon. I had agreed to refresh Sierra’s memory on how to change her own oil when she got off from work which would be in the early evening which gave me plenty of time to work with in the morning.
As I mentioned, I wasn’t looking for anything major to photograph, I just wanted to get out there and get a few new photos for the portfolio. I thought about doing some landscapes, but I wasn’t really feeling like working landscapes as much as I was still really wanting to work rust. I’ve been really impressed this year at how much rust I’ve been able to find and work through the Spring and Summer months as those are usually my prime landscape months. It just so happens that I have been more inspired by decay this year than in previous ones and I am not wanting to fight that since I spent most of last year in a really bad slump where I didn’t feel like creating anything.
As I was getting ready to head to bed last night, I was trying to think of where I could go for something quick and easy to photograph. Nothing was really coming to mind except for a barn in Kernersville, but that was over an hour away and seemed like a bit counterproductive to spend that much time driving for just a single photo. The more I thought about it, the more I figured I would be better off waiting for another day after I had an idea of what to shoot. It didn’t hit me until I was in the shower and recalled one of the recent trips that I had taken in the Miata. I had taken a wrong turn and had to correct my path by using a road that would get me back on track with where I wanted to go. On this road, I had spotted a mint green Ford sedan in a driveway. I had seen this car before, and it had actually been pointed out by a friend of mine through a message on Facebook several years ago.
This car was up on ramps by an old house that didn’t look lived in. It was parked right next to a Honda Pilot and there appeared to be a lot of personal items scattered around the car. It wasn’t something that I had been overly excited about photographing in the past, but on this recent drive-by, it struck me a little different. Maybe it was because I have been having such good luck with the isolations when faced with difficult settings like this one. I would most certainly have to focus on isolations with this car, but I was sure that I could get a frame or two even though most of the chrome was missing from the car. I had filed it away in my head as a potential spot for a future trek.
The more I thought about it, the more I figured that this would be the perfect place to go in the morning. I was going to need some clouds in the sky, and the more interesting the better so that I could have some flexibility with how to capture the car. There wasn’t much to work with there, so it should be a pretty quick visit, and I could be back home by 10 or 11 o’clock giving me plenty of time to process a couple of images and write the blog before going under Sierra’s car later in the day. That was it; that was what I was going to shoot…as long as the rain stayed away.
I wanted to get up kind of early in the morning, so that I could head out there and get an early start, but not too early because I was going to have to knock on neighbor’s doors to try and get permission to access the property which was going to be an absolute requirement to get any photographs of the car. I ended up getting out of bed earlier than I expected. When Toni left for work, I was pretty much awake and already thinking about checking the weather. Once I did, I was convinced that I was more than likely going to head out. I just needed the sun to come up a little more.
In the meantime, I grabbed some breakfast and did my morning things to get the day started. Shortly after eight, I grabbed the camera and some oil that needed to be recycled and headed out. I stopped by Advance Auto to drop off the old oil and make room for the new old oil that would be added to them later in the day. From there, it was out to Hays once again to see what I could make work with the Ford.
Now, for those keeping track of where I have been going, you will know that I have had several very successful treks out to Hays earlier this year. I was hoping for a bit of that luck to spill over to this location because I didn’t want to go out and hunt down a location to shoot since I had a limited amount of time to work with. The weather was looking really good with thick clouds overhead and great lighting across the landscape. So far, things were going very well, but I still needed one crucial piece of the puzzle….permission.
When I arrived at the house where the car was parked, I made a slow pass to check things out. Not much had changed since I had last been out here. I did notice that there were signs up on the house indicating “No Trespassing” and the house was very much unoccupied. The car was right in the middle of a bunch of different items which I am sure was done to keep it from being hauled off in the middle of the night. There were two houses across the street which were really the only ones close by. I had looked at the satellite view to see if the mowing patterns would indicate a shared yard with any different neighbors but that turned up nothing promising.
After I was sure that I wanted to give this car a try, I pulled into the driveway directly across the street. It was right at nine in the morning which is a little earlier than I would like to knock on a door, but I figured I would give it a try. As I approached the door closest to the driveway, I could see that it was basically an extra entry to the garage. I went to the other porch and found what looked to be much more like a front door. I was going to softly knock so as not to disturb anyone sleeping, but as I got up to the porch, the dog inside starting barking. If anyone was asleep, they were awake now. I rang the bell, so they knew why the dog was barking. There were no signs of movement inside and the dog continued to bark. After a minute or two, I left the porch and went back to the truck. I drove over to the other neighbor’s house and went to that front door. There was no barking here, and it appeared like an interactive doorbell, so I rang it. After the chiming went off, there was a pause, and it offered me the ability to leave a message. That was kind of neat, but I opted not to leave a message. Without a lot of context, any message that I left with a doorbell would be confusing. As I turned to walk away, the door opened, and I turned back around.
I introduced myself to the homeowner and explained why I was bothering her this early in the day. She said that the house belonged to her father-in-law who lived next door, but he was out of town at the moment. She didn’t feel comfortable giving me permission without his approval which I totally understood. I was all ready to leave one of my cards in hope that he would call me when he was available to talk, but she volunteered to go back inside and make contact with him while I waited. That was great, and I was very appreciative for her efforts.
Within in a few moments, she returned to the door and let me know that he said it was fine for me to take some photos of the car. I thanked her and left that card with her so that they could see what photos, if any, I might get of the car. I’m always happy to bring back a print to the property owner if they like what I have created. With their blessing, I pulled the truck into the driveway of the house I was wanting to shoot at, and parked. I got out and went to look at the car for the first time close-up.
I was right about the car being in a tight situation. It was at the edge of the driveway parked perpendicular to the Honda Pilot. The Ford was up on ramps and there was a trailer close to it, and lots of personal items strewn about. I could tell why I hadn’t really wanted to photograph the car before. This was going to be rather difficult. There was very little stress on me though since I was honestly only looking for a couple of photos to work with until Sierra showed up with her car. I decided to treat it like a game and just see what I could get to work with the car.
The first lens that I selected was the standard zoom because I didn’t have much room to work with and the telephoto, while great at picking out details needs a little room to work. The standard, not only allows me to get in closer, but it also has a decent macro capability which allows it to focus very close in. Since there was really no chrome on the car, I wasn’t worried about cameo appearances with my reflection, so the standard zoom was a great choice for this car.
There were some problems right out of the gate though as I wasn’t sure what to shoot on this car. The colors were amazing with the mint green paint and the orange tones of the rust. The textures interested me as well. I had everything that I could want for abstract work with this car, but nothing was jumping out at me as a composition. To get things started, I decided to get about a 3/4 length shot of the car pointing to the house. The focus of the photo would be the steering wheel and dash with the rest of the photo providing a lot of setting. I was able to get the cloudy sky in the shot as well.
I started out with the camera in a vertical orientation to keep the distractions to a minimum while including a good bit of the sky. This looked good, but the car was filling up too much of the frame with the mint green paint which I didn’t really like all that much for color balance. I flipped the camera to horizontal and lost a good bit of the sky but picked up some more of the scene that worked better with the colors. That felt better still, but I wasn’t really liking that one either. The scene was just too complicated for my liking, and I knew that I needed to get in closer for some detail shots to make this work.
I walked around the rear of the car which was the most accessible part and found that one of the emblems was missing from the trunk lid. It appeared that the emblem had said “Overdrive” from the imprint that it had left. I do love the ghost emblems of these old cars and that did inspire me to start creating an abstract photo. I got the camera in a position that I thought would work using the empty taillight mounts as a foreground. It was an interesting idea, but I wasn’t able to make it work. Instead, I moved inbound and framed up a shot that used the ghost emblem as the foreground. This worked much better, and I found the composition to be rather pleasing. The only tweak I needed to make was to raise the camera a bit to get the angles a little steeper for some visual drama. Now I was cooking and felt that I had the first good image in the can.
Oddly enough, I decided to break from the isolations and started to look at the entire car again. I was determined to get the full car in a photo somehow but hadn’t figured it out just yet. I went around to the other side of the car which meant going around the Pilot because they were parked so close to each other that I wasn’t sure I could get through without rubbing up on the Honda. Once I got around to the front of the car, I tried to figure out a composition. There was a large pickup parked in the background as well as a small building. These didn’t work in the photo at all, but after I looked at it for a few moments, I realized that I could hide all of that behind the car if I got in close enough and low enough.
That was just what I did and found a composition that I really liked of the car. It broke a few of the “rules” that I have set for myself like floating tree branches in the sky, but in this situation, it worked because of the way that there were other branches framing the shot. There was also a large box right to the side of the car that normally I would not have liked, but this time, it seemed to help tell the story of the location. The only issue that I was having was with the exposure. The sky was a little too bright considering the front of the car was in the shadows. I ran back to the truck and grabbed a grad filter to slip into the filter holder. I had to wave it around for a bit first because it was still acclimated to the air conditioning in the studio having been closed up in the filter wallet. Once I got the fog removed as it warmed to the ambient temperature, I slid it in and worked out the exposure of the scene.
I liked what I had shot and decided not to repeat it because there was nothing that I could see that would improve what I had just captured. Instead, I changed up the composition a bit more and got in tighter, but still low. I was recalling a pretty successful composition from my last trek where I shot a Mercury with no hood. This was pretty much the same setup, and I thought that it would work well here too. Since the sky was still in the shot, I kept the grad filter in place and just tweaked the position of it for this composition. There was a little moving around to get the camera into the right position for the proper balance within the scene. Once I got that taken care of, I realized that there was a branch from the bush that I was standing by that was blocking part of the view of the car. I just reached in and pulled it out of the way for the couple of frames that I shot of this composition.
That branch kind of gave me the idea for another composition while I was up at the front corner. I really liked the way that the wheels had rusted and noticed that the V8 emblem was still affixed to the fender. The chrome on the mint paint with the orange rust tones was too much to pass up. The bit of greenery that I had pulled out of the way was a perfect little addition to the scene highlighting the points of interest. This composition became a bit more intricate than the others because of a slight breeze. When photographing this close up, any movement becomes a blurring event, so I had to work the shutter speed more here than I had in the previous compositions. I also had to wait for lulls in the breeze. Even still, it was only three exposures before I was certain that I had what I wanted from here.
The compositions were starting to come rather quickly now. I had only shot a dozen frames at this point and was pretty sure that I had two or three keepers which was pretty exciting. I had started to hear from the car how it wanted to be photographed and that always makes it so much easier to work. Essentially, I was vibing with the car at this point and I had a better understanding of it compared to the first times I had seen it in passing.
The next area that I decided to work was back at the trunk again. The difference was that this time, I really felt that the car was wanting the telephoto lens. I went back to the truck and swapped out the lens for the 70-200mm and came back to the trunk. Instead of working with the ghost emblem like I did last time, I decided to focus on the crest that was still attached to the lid. I started off by doing the expected shot with the crest basically centered in the frame. It was fine, but I knew I could do better. I simply moved over to the left side and used a limited depth of field to show the depth in the scene. This worked much better than shooting the emblem straight on. I still got the same subject in the frame, but I was able to do it in a way that added some visual interest beyond the colors and textures of the car.
Now that I had the long lens, I went back to one of the rear quarter windows which I had looked at before. It was opened with a spiderweb between the frame and the glass. The web had caught some stuff falling from the trees and I thought that it looked really interesting. This became the basis for my next composition that I decided would be largely abstract focusing on the shapes and colors present around the web.
As I was working on the web in the open window, I was forced to look inside the car and started to get inspired by the dash. I’ve said it before, but I am really starting to appreciate the dashes of these old cars now that new cars have the same dash as my microwave. There is just something purpose-driven behind the dials and buttons of these old dashes and they are starting to look like works of art to me. I moved up to the driver’s window and started to work out some compositions of the dash which had been the inspiration for the first couple of compositions that started out the day. The difference here was that I wasn’t making the image overly complex with a good portion of the car as well as the house included in the frame. This was just the dash, and I even minimized the steering wheel which is something that I have found works very well with interior photos.
When I had finally finished with this dash shot, I had an additional dozen images on the memory card for a total of 24 frames. Looking at my history, those 24 frames should be good for two to three keeper photos based on my typical hit rate. I remember thinking that I had enough photos to give me plenty to work on until Sierra came by. However, this car that I just knew would only produce a couple of workable images was still calling out to me for more. I wasn’t able to call it quits and decided that I needed to stick around and work it some more.
Looking back now and realizing that I have seven keepers out of the first 24 frames, I probably should have called it day at this point. This is way more than I wanted to get into today with photos. However, I didn’t know that I had been quite as lucky with my compositions at the time and stuck around for a while longer capturing a good many additional frames which I will talk about in the next blog entry. For now, I am going to take a quick break and let you enjoy these photos for a while before I share the last half of the trek with you.
I’ll be back tomorrow morning with the next part to this blog which I will link here when it is done. I’ve got an appointment with a potential mentorship client in the afternoon, so I hope to be done with it by that time. If you are interested in doing a mentorship, get in touch so we can do a quick consultation to determine if I can offer what you are needing and make sure that we are a good match for the learning process. I have a lot of different tiers of mentoring available, so let’s put together a program that fits your needs.
Also, if you are interested in purchasing any prints of the images that I shoot, I am always happy to talk with you about that. I have many options available for sizes and different media to match your decorating needs. There truly is no better way to enjoy a photograph than to see it in a physical form hanging on a wall for all to enjoy. It takes all the inconsistencies between viewing devices out of the equation, and you are left with the exact colors and contrast that the photographer (in this case, me) intended for you to enjoy. Let me know the title that you are interested int and I will get things started to match you up with your very own print.
Thanks for joining me on this first part of what should have been a very quick trek. I’ll be back here soon with the second part and the remaining photographs tomorrow.
Until then….
