Saturday, February 8, 2025
I’m going to start this one by saying that the smart money would have been on me not going out for photos today, and certainly not coming back with nine keepers out of 44 frames shot during only an hour and fifteen minutes. Had you asked me last night about this morning, I would say that I have high hopes of getting some photos though. So, what happened between last night when I went to sleep and now? Well, a lot has happened. Going to sleep was pretty much normal though. I had checked the weather and noted that there was a thunderstorm going on as I was getting my shower. The weather for Saturday was looking to be dry, but cloudy with high and mid-level clouds. While that could just mean a bit of overcast with some strong sunlight, it was looking like the clouds were going to have pretty good coverage. I had a tossup between going back out to Traphill where I had just recently gone in search of a lot of old cars, but failed to have the weather that I wanted and going to Taylorsville and trying to get permission to shoot on a property I have visited for several times now. The clouds were looking better for Taylorsville, but the likelihood of running into the property’s caretaker was kind of slim and would probably end up in driving around looking for other targets of opportunity.
No matter which direction I planned on going, I wasn’t going to have to get serious about being anywhere until about 10am which would give me the best clouds and the best chance of talking to property owners without waking them up. I didn’t have a clock set knowing that Toni would be getting up early and going to work which usually gets me fairly awake before the sun comes up. That would be plenty of time to get on my way in whichever direction I wanted to go.
Toni got up as usual, but for some reason was having a morning of the dropsies and I kept waking up as she would drop things either in the bathroom or the kitchen. By the time she was ready to go, I felt wide awake and had checked the weather. The clouds were still looking promising for the day, and the thickest were still supposed to roll in around 10am or so. I decided to stay in bed as she left to see if maybe I could get a couple more hours of sleep before starting my day.
Well, about the time I got back to sleep, the phone rang and it was Toni. She hadn’t been gone but maybe a half hour or so, which was not nearly long enough for her to get to work, so I was very concerned. I could tell in her voice that something wasn’t right and she got to the point quickly. While driving through Ronda, a deer had run across the road, clearing her path but then decided to turn around and try again. Well, this time he succeeded and found a contact point right in the middle of the bumper. Toni was OK, but a little shaken up. As I was clearing the morning fog from my head I started to get more information. The car seemed to be drivable and wasn’t leaking any fluids, but there was significant damage to the front and driver’s side. I had her call work and tell them that she was going to be late and to call SHP while she was still there. She agreed and I checked the phone to see where she was.
With that information I got up and threw on some clothes before heading downstairs to go to her. About halfway down the stairs I realized that I didn’t have my contacts in, so I went back up and tossed them in my eyes real quick and headed out to her. I figured she would need some comforting and I needed to make sure that she was ok and to check the damage on the car. I actually made it there before SHP go there which kind of surprised me since they were coming from North Wilkesboro according to dispatch. Fortunately, a coworker had seen her pulled off on the side of the road and stopped to check on her. Toni was unhurt, but the car was in pretty bad shape, though still drivable at least.
Once the Trooper got finished with everything, I followed Toni to work to make sure there were no more problems. From there I headed back home to get started with the insurance claim and assorted stuff that was going to have to be done now. Surprisingly, that went fairly quick since it was online only and there were no people to talk to. After I finished up my morning routine and got breakfast, I looked at the clock. It was a little after 10am. Looking outside, the clouds were looking good, but I had no want or desire to go out for photos after the morning’s activities. The next question that came up was what am I going to do until time to go pick her up at work? I could sit and stew about things and just elevate my blood pressure, or I could change gears and go out for some photos. If I found something good, it would take my mind off of things for at least a little while which would be great.
I decided to head out, but had no idea which direction to go in. The decision was left up to the clouds and which way the wind blew me when I left the driveway. This time going out, I had the camera with me and I was hoping to find something good for photos. Within a half mile, I decided to head out to Traphill because at least I had a lead on the property owner for the area I wanted to shoot. It wasn’t much with three partial cars parked next to an old barn which had all been overgrown with trees. There were some other cars that I had seen along the gravel road from the main road as well which I was hoping to photograph as well. For this, I was really going to need a nice cloudy day because I would be inside the woods for most of the time and sunny highlights would ruin any composition that I would shoot.
The weather was looking really good and when I got to the location, I took a quick look at the cars and thought that they were a little too jumbled to make for great compositions, but I was here and needed the mental break. I pulled into the long driveway of whom I thought owned the property based on one of the neighbors pointing it out the last time I was there. There were different vehicles there this time, and I actually saw someone driving through the field in a side by side which told me that folks would be home. The UTV was too far away for me to get their attention, so I just went to the front door. Before I could even get to the door, it opened and a lady came out to greet me. Not wanting to freak her out, I backed away and explained why I was there.
She was very nice and extremely helpful. However, with the conversation, I determined that this was not the right location for the property owner for where I wanted to shoot. There had been some old cars on their property before, but they had been hauled off to the scrap yard just recently. She did tell me who owned the portion of land that was in question, and told me how to get to his house. Before ending the conversation, she also informed me that she had an aunt that was nearby in Traphill that had a bunch of old cars on her property. I am thinking that I am familiar with the spot, but have never been able to make contact to ask permission before. I left one of my cards and was assured that she would be in touch about granting permission.
This is one thing about Traphill that I absolutely love. All it takes is one visit out there and the next thing I know, I have contacts and other spots to work that can keep me occupied for a month or more before it dies down. The charm of the little community was showing itself once again. It was putting me in a better mood at least. After thanking them for their time and apologizing for interrupting their morning, I was off to find the correct property owner for the spot that I had decided to shoot this morning.
When I got to the house about a mile or so down the road, I pulled into the driveway and started to go up to the front door. I wasn’t sure which door to use, so I picked the more formal one and rang the bell. I could hear movement inside and a side door open which I recognized as being on the other entrance. I backed away from the front door fully expecting to be greeted with a pistol as this is what normally happens when the owner comes out of the side door to talk with me. I just remained calm and kept my hands visible while I explained why I was there, and how I figured out where to stop.
Tensions started to calm at this point and we started talking about the old cars. She went in to contact her husband to make sure that he didn’t have any issues with me going and photographing the cars. When she returned, she advised that it was fine and that they only requested that I be careful because of how grown up the area had become. She also mentioned that these cars were all going to be hauled off for scrap in the next couple of days. That hit me like a hammer when she said that. Had I stayed at home and worked through more details on the crash, the chances of making it out here on another cloudy day while they were still here just became infinitesimally small. Had I gone to Taylorsville instead, I would have missed out on this opportunity. There was some measure of luck with me at this point and I was very thankful for it.
After thanking her for the permission, I headed back out to the spot and pulled off the road. I grabbed my camera with the standard zoom attached as well as my polarizer and started working compositions. The first ones that I shot were the low hanging fruit that included the one car that was out of the woods, but partially covered by vegetation and the barn that was within the trees. It was an awkward composition but enough to get something in the bag to start with.
I moved on to working isolations with that same car and eventually worked my way into the woods and started working more difficult compositions with the shells of the cars that were placed there. I really wasn’t seeming to have much luck getting photos, but I did land on a very strong interior shot of one of the sedans sitting there without a front clip. It was more of an experiment to see if I could make something work and it actually worked out better than I had hoped.
There were a few more compositions that I shot while I was in the woods with these cars, but most of them didn’t really turn out. It was taking me a while to really get in the creative mindset which was causing me some additional stress. Eventually, I decided to go down the road to see what else was there to shoot. As I was walking, there were about three cars well in the brush off of the side of the road. I didn’t seen any reason to bushwhack my way to them as none of them were complete cars and I saw no isolations that could be done with everything grown up around them. I took the defeat and kept walking.
The next car that I wanted to check out was across a small field in the woods. I had seen this one the other day before I had spotted the others that I had just walked past, and I had hopes since it was a little more visible. When I got closer, I could see about a half dozen cars in the woods. They were much more accessible than what I had just seen so, that had me feeling pretty good about my chances. I took a quick walk around to see what the different cars were that I had to work with and to get an idea of the compositions that might work with them.
Before long, I was setting the tripod up, and had starting to make some exposures. I kind of went into auto-pilot for a bit because I had gone in thinking that overall establishing compositions were not going to be possible because of all the trees that were in the way. I had been looking at isolations more than anything, but when I was starting to shoot the images, I found that I was getting some really nice overall shots of the cars. In fact, I was liking these better than the isolations that I had started to come up with.
I shot one car and then moved to another, and then another. Each composition felt like a solid choice and there wasn’t a lot of fine tuning of the compositions going on. In most cases, I would just shoot two frames just to make sure that I had one with the leaves sharp. This usually meant one at ISO 100 and another at ISO 200 so that I had options for movement in the frame. I didn’t feel like I was working fast, but I certainly wasn’t lingering on any particular composition. I just worked through all of the variables that I had control over before making the exposure and with the very steady light, that was all it took.
From time to time, I would try an isolation, but I never really liked what I came up with and rarely even fired off a frame when I landed on something. It seemed that the calling I was getting here was for the entire vehicle which suited me just fine. I was finding that establishing a setting for these photos was easier than I expected and I thought presented a much more interesting story when compared to just some isolations which felt rather tame and boring in this setting.
It was the setting here that really had caught my attention. It was so much better than the original spot that I had stopped to photograph. However, recalling my Police training, the “Plus 1” rule was in full effect here. I had spotted something relatively interesting which caused me to stop. That location prompted me to dig a bit further, and I ended up finding all these great examples tucked into the woods. Had I not seen the marginal subjects and decided to stop, I never would have spotted these cars along what would have seemed like a driveway at first glance.
It was this location that got me thinking about one of those places that I get asked about all the time. I’ve mentioned “Old Car City” here a time or two, but have never been there before. This is where folks go when they want to photograph old rusted cars, and to be fair, there are a lot of them there. However, it is more or less a tourist location and they even sell tickets to get in. I’ve mentioned this parallel before, but to me, this seems like going to the zoo to see wild animals. The beauty of the rust gets lost when you realize that thousands of people have been through this property, workshops have been done here, and there is no signs of it stopping. Why would I want to go out there and stand in line to take a photo of a 1956 Chevy that has been captured so many times over the years by so many different photographers…professional, amateur, and hobbyist alike. Nope, when I want to photograph rust, I want to find it in its natural habitat and in situations that haven’t been recorded many different times.
What I want is some thing unique, the thrill of the chase. I want to go on a safari in rural areas and find these cars where they were left many years ago to be forgotten. Occasionally, I figure out that I have been the last one to ever photograph them as will likely be the case here. When I was tracking the property owner down, there was no indication that other photographers had been out here before, and the responses that I got would support that assumption. Could it be that I am the only photographer ever to capture these cars at this location? Man, if that is the case, I really lucked out today, despite the overall lousy luck of the draw that we got first thing this morning.
All of a sudden, I’m sure you can see why finding these subjects is so much more satisfying than entering in a destination on your GPS, and buying tickets online while arriving at your scheduled time to walk around the photograph the “exhibits.” I’m certainly not minimizing those who choose to do that because I think that any chance to photograph rust is worth taking, and I’m glad that there are those out there that enjoy it as much as I do, but I want the hunt. Through the hunt, I get supreme satisfaction and the photos mean so much more to me than if they are delivered on a map.
To be fair though, one thing that you can find many times over at “Old Car City” is the tree growing through the engine bay of a car. While I’ve found that a few times here and there, I actually saw a car that fit that description quite well out here. It wasn’t the normal sapling that I have found growing through other cars. No, this was a fully matured tree that has been growing here for probably 20 years or more. The old Ford was worse for the wear, but had a really nice slant to the body that indicated that it had given up. I spent a lot of time with this subject as I photographed it from a distance vertically and got in closer to eliminate some of the other trees in the frame.
There was a lot to this scene and I was really trying to simplify it while including enough to tell the story behind it. I needed enough of the surroundings to make sense, but no so much that the car got lost. That meant that I had to get an angle where the car was dominant in the frame while showing the tree that I found so interesting. I finally landed on an angle from the passenger side front quarter view, but there were trees on both sides of the car which necessitated me playing that game of inches back and forth while I adjusted the focal length to get the entire car in the frame while keeping the two trees from blocking the view. I managed to get there, and ended up using the larger tree to the left as a framing element in the foreground while I cropped the smaller tree out of the frame to the right.
This composition was the only one that I did in black and white because I felt that it further simplified the scene while also allowing me to boost the exposure on the fender and the top of the door. This helped to direct the eyes to the car since the sky was a brighter element originally. After the color was gone, I used the color information to change the contrast of the scene and worked out a nice visual pathway based on luminosity which would not have been nearly as possible with the color remaining in the photo. In the end, I really like how this photo turned out and I’m glad that I stuck with it for as long as I did.
If you will recall, I had been trying the occasional isolation with the different cars, but hadn’t been overly excited about any of them. You will surely notice that there have been none included in this blog until now. One thing that I will do, almost without fail is to share the photos chronologically as they happen during the time there. This is part of the storytelling that I like to do, and it will also show the progression of the day in terms of light and creativity. As you can see here, there is now an isolation that has been included, and it is the first one that worked for me.
I had shot many different angles with this Galaxie, and had decided that I really liked how the vegetation was slowly growing over the front end. I suspect that during the summer, this car is very nearly buried in vines. Fortunately, winter brings dormant vegetation and it is usually much easier to get clearer views of these kinds of subjects. I still liked the vines and other bits that were obscuring the headlights of the old car and decided that I would work out a quick isolation here.
It was the first one that I felt worked out and that is probably largely because even though I am just showing a portion of the scene, there is still a lot of information about what the setting looks like which I had determined was a big motivator for me in this location. The hood which had been placed on the car left a large gap that helped isolate that fender which I was most interested in getting to establish the framing of the image. The hood just gave me a nice big triangle that pointed back into the scene and worked as its own element I thought. The headlights and the marker light formed yet another triangle, while the lights made another one with the fender ornament above them. Visually, I thought that this composition was striking and the fact that this isolation told the story of the area was a really nice added benefit.
Shortly after shooting that isolation, I looked around and decided that I had gotten all that I would be able to get here, or at least all that I felt I needed to get. I asked myself many times if I was sure because it sounded like by the end of next week, all of this would be gone. I was comfortable that I had several photos that I really liked, and I was ready to move on. In fact, I started to head back to the truck after just a little over an hour. I walked along the driveway once again, though I could have just gone through the field back to the truck. As I walked, I was looking at the remains of the cars that were parked below. Only one of them was calling out to me though.
This car was the only one that was complete enough to be recognized and was only missing a fender and hood. It was tucked in some pretty deep brush and I still didn’t want to hike through all of that. However, I saw a chance for a composition I wanted to try. To make sure that it would work, I zoomed the lens out to 70mm and looked through it. It showed promise, but I was definitely going to need the telephoto lens in order to really isolate the car among the brush.
I swapped out the lenses and set up the composition. Once I had the very simple composition figured out, I decided what depth of field would be the best. I ended up choosing f/2.8 and really wanted to go wider than that, but didn’t have the ability the lens. The car was just too far away for f/2.8 to really blur as much as it could up close. It was enough to make the car pop though, and that was all I needed it to do. I shot just a couple of frames like this to make sure that I didn’t get any odd motion blur and I picked it all up and moved on to the truck.
I did stop by the first scene that I had shot now that I had the longer lens attached. I knew that I would be able to get less sky and trees with this lens, and possibly make the barn a bit more dominant in the scene. I ended up having to stand pretty much at the road, and still wasn’t able to get the whole barn in the photo. When I had shot this same composition with the standard lens, I was shooting at around 30mm to make the car bigger in the frame, which it did. However, the barn had gotten insignificantly small and I had a lot of the trees overhead with lots of white sky showing through. With the longer lens set to 70mm, I had a much better ratio between the two elements and this just seemed to work so much better.
I’ll chalk it up to listening to the landscape and figuring out how it wanted to be photographed. I had spent enough time with this location that I understood it much better than I had before. I think that the photos that I have chosen as keepers represent this spot quite well and will serve as a memorial to it when it is all gone in the next couple of days. I’ve heard it said many times when I post these images on social media, and there is no doubt that these scenes are disappearing from our view. Sure, there will be some that are glad to see the “junk” gone and development happening, but for me, this is a living part of our history that should mean something. It does to me, and I take being a decay photographer very seriously because in the blink of an eye, all of this will be gone.
There are no words to describe how fortunate I am that I made it out here today. It would have been a chance lost had I opted to stay home and stew over Toni’s crash this morning. Now, not only has my mind been redirected through much of the day, I have captured some really great images of a scene that just won’t be here in a matter of days. I can’t complain about that, and we are a day closer to Monday when we can start making headway in getting the damages assessed and decisions made.
Thank you for joining me on this trek and putting up with the back story. These blogs serve, first and foremost, as my own diary for these treks. For that reason alone, I wanted to add that bit of information to set the stage for where my head was at at the time. If you get any entertainment or knowledge from these blog entries, that is just icing on top for the experience. I’m always happy to have you along for the ride, and hope that you enjoy the images as much as I do.
Should you wish to purchase a print, I would love to talk with you about special sizes and media, or you can select some of the basic sizes and print media through the gallery store. No matter which direction you choose for getting a print, know that you will be purchasing a very high quality piece of art that is designed to last longer than…well, either of us will. You will have a one of a kind piece of art to hang on your wall whether it is at your home, or in your office. How about that man cave, or she shed? You need art that you identify with, and if you are into old cars, this is a unique way of showing it. Let me know, and I’ll get your order started.
Don’t forget that I have another decay workshop coming up this spring that still has spots available. Click here to get signed up and reserve your spot for the workshop that has always been one of the best learning experiences that I have offered. If you would rather go for a shorter experience, I am also offering a photo walk in downtown North Wilkesboro in the Spring as well. Get the information here and get signed up to reserve your spot.
Until next time….
