Saturday, April 4, 2026
And just like that we are back! In case you missed it, I started this adventure in a blog that was published yesterday, so if you haven’t had a chance to go through that one, give it a quick read. Now that you are all caught up, you will know that when I last left off, I was pretty much done for the day and very happy with what I had captured. However, I had gotten word that there were more cars that might be of interest to me around the back of the business. According to the guy that I was talking with, there was another Galaxie and possibly a Dodge sitting back there. While I was excited to see them, the clouds clearing off and the now strong sunshine that was bathing everything took some of the wind out of my sails. The light was still good, but it was very directional which meant that I was going to have to adjust my compositions to how the light was looking rather than being able to shoot in nearly any direction which the clouds allow me to do.
It wasn’t difficult to get to the rear of the building, but when I did, I saw nothing but newer vehicles that didn’t interest me at all. It wasn’t until I was fully around the building that I spotted a red Galaxie that was in slightly worse shape than the one that I had just photographed. It was kind of isolated and to itself while being parked next to a Chevy truck. Looking back, I saw the other car that I didn’t recognize right off, but it was black and seemed to be in pretty good shape. The closer I got; I saw the Edsel badge on the side of it which really excited me. This is one of those cars that I just don’t get much chance to photograph. In fact, I don’t believe that I have ever been able to photograph an entire Edsel before because of the locations that I had found them in. I’ve only gotten a few isolations which usually center around the unique and iconic grill that they had.
It was another black car which was less than exciting because I just don’t usually care for photographing black cars. The fact that it was an Edsel kind of overshadowed that aspect of the equation though. It was largely complete which meant that I was more than likely going to be able to get a lot of good isolations of it. I wasn’t thinking that I would be able to get an overall though because of where it sat right behind the building and surrounded by clutter. The front was wide open though and that was good enough for me to get started with the process.
I knew that I didn’t want to get the straight on shot of the grill as I had done in the past. I wanted something with more dimension and that meant photographing it from the side and getting some angles to the composition. Looking at the light, the sun was coming from the right and usually that would have meant that I would have worked from that side to get everything in the light. However, the more I do with portraits, the more I am recognizing the benefits of strong side light in the photos when it comes to establishing depth and dimension. This thought prompted me to work from the shadowed side and to shoot almost into the sunlight.
The composition was going to be very simple with the camera being in portrait orientation to accentuate the shape of the grill while putting it over to the left of the frame. I framed the center section of the grill with a small snippet of the passenger side bumper while the right side of the frame had a larger portion of the bumper as well as the molding strip above the grill. This gave me a trio of framing elements that formed a triangle which I liked quite a lot.
The vertical framing allowed me to easily include the lettering above the grill, but the last letter was missing which I regretted. However, the missing letter helps to identify the decay of the car which is supported by other clues in terms of rust. That rust provided the much needed warmer tones to the image since the chrome was reflecting the blue of the sky and the black was doing pretty much the same thing. Without the rust, the whole image would have been much too cool. Even the grass was on the cooler side of the spectrum since it was in the shadows.
Green is an interesting color. It can be cool or warm depending on what is around it and what kind of light is on it. When working on color balances within an image, this is something that has to be kept in mind. Had it not been for the intense reds of the rust, this would have had to be a black and white photo because of how cool the entire scene was. Thanks to the rust, and the amount of it, I was able to arrive at a very nice balance for the image in terms of colors.
The next composition wasn’t quite as fortunate. The concept actually started on the driver’s side which was in full sun. I thought that I would like the contrast on that side but found it very difficult to get an exposure that I liked. The idea behind the photo was to have it introduced with the whitewall tire showing just an arch that grew into the fender arch. This framed the EDSEL badge which was also framed above by the molding which had a very nice shape to it which kept the eyes from escaping the frame. The issue that I was running into was that the tire was blowing out no matter what I was doing with the exposure and the only way to keep the highlights from clipping was to lose the entirety of the black paint.
The only option that I had was to go to the other side of the car and work with the shadowed side. I did the same composition, though it was reversed with the tire to the right. This is one of those times when flipping the image from left to right would not work because of the lettering that would then show backwards. This composition didn’t read as well as the other side did, but the exposure was much easier to deal with. I captured a few frames from this side and moved on figuring that I would work it out in during the culling later on.
I had one from each side that made it through the initial culling, and I found that the exposure was just within what I could work with in terms of highlights and shadows on the sunny side. The shaded side, of course, was much less contrasty. I felt that the sunny side was going to work better, but something about the angle didn’t quite feel right. I ended up going with the shaded side for the processing. I decided that it needed to be done in black and white because the overall scene was very cool thanks to the shadows. Even the greens were showing cooler tones. When I was done with this image, I liked it a lot and was glad that I had given it a shot. I didn’t think much else about the other side until I was starting this blog entry. That caused me to go back and give it another look.
As I had suspected, the range of tones was within the realm of what I could deal with, so that wasn’t a problem. The angle still felt odd, and I tried several different crops in order to have the composition make sense. I kept chipping away at things and realized that I was tossing too many pixels and was still not coming up with an image that I liked. I paused for a minute and looked at it. I liked this side in color because the grass was a warm tone to balance out the cooler tones of the car. However, what I had thought would read better left to right turned out to be the stumbling block. That was why I wasn’t able to get a cleaner crop that made more sense. It was off balance and it was the reading direction that caused it.
In the end, I stuck with my original choice with the shaded side done in black and white. It read better than I had suspected, and the entire photo was just stronger than the one in full sun. I completely blew it in the field with my initial thinking. I’m just glad that I did versions from both sides just in case. Looking back, there was no other way to do this concept and have it feel right. Even though I almost missed out on this photo, I was still going really strong and was very much in the groove considering that minutes before, I was ready to call it a day and head home.
The lighting on the Edsel was causing me some grief, so I turned my attention to the Ford on the other side of the clearing. I looked to see if there was a way that I could get an overall capture of it. The Chevy truck was parked kind of close to it, but I could shoot down the alleyway between them easy enough. The problem was the cars behind the Ford as well as the ones that would be in the background on the other side. I didn’t like how that was looking because the other cars were just too new in comparison. I also didn’t care for the angle on the car which would be nearly a straight on shot.
It was the front quarter view that I much rather wanted to capture. The car was sticking out just enough from the truck that I thought that I could get a front clip shot easy enough. If I got down low enough, I should be able to mask all of the cars in the background as well. I started doing the composition dance as I played with the distance to the subject and the focal lengths. By doing this, I was able to figure out a decent compromise of a composition that would allow the interesting parts of the car to be in the frame while the background was simplified. I almost had it all cleaned up with the exception of one SUV with a broken window that showed just in front of the car right at the end of the yard.
In the field, I chose to handle that with limiting the depth of field causing it to go blurry hoping that would pull enough of the emphasis off of it and allow the Ford to remain the main point of interest. This worked well enough in the camera as I was looking at the image review, but when I got it on the bigger screen, I just didn’t like the SUV at all. There was only a portion of it showing, but with it right at the edge, I felt that it was a distraction and something to pull the eyes of the viewer out of the frame. I didn’t like this, and I considered all the normal tricks of darkening it, reducing the saturation, and clarity adjustments. That might have worked, but it would have been a bandaid that would look like a bandaid. This was one of those times when I chose to remove an element of a scene to simplify the overall composition. I remained in Lightroom to do this and used the remove tool with AI, though I didn’t send it off to Adobe to generate anything, I just let it remove the distraction and use context around it to fill in the void. It worked better than I thought it would, but I did have to go through a dozen variations before I found one that I thought looked seamless.
I don’t like doing this, but in this particular situation, I felt that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks of the choice. I was very glad that I had chosen to use a shallow depth of field for this one because I’ve found that doing any object removal is much easier and more convincing when done on a blurry canvas. The remove tools are terrible at generating find details that match what the camera has captured. Those are the times when I have better luck doing it the old school way of cloning and healing. This actually worked out very good and even I have a hard time finding where the problem had been. It made for a much stronger image in the long run and therefore it was worth doing.
Once I figured out how difficult it was going to be to get an overall image of the Ford, I turned my attention to the details. There were several areas of the car that had suffered from damage and there were straps holding some parts on which I didn’t want to photograph. Ironically, as I walked around the car, it was the interior that really caught my eye. The car was red and the interior had a reddish orange dash which I liked. That made for a lot of red and in this situation, I would have typically wanted to do this as a black and white because having a frame full of red is generally not a good thing. However, there were a couple of things working with me in terms of color.
The steering wheel was wrapped with black electrical tape which was showing blue in the sunlight. The vent window had a similarly cool shade to it, as did the seat that was pushed up to the dash on the passenger side. The instruments also showed to be slightly cool as well. It was enough to make me think that I could get away with this one being in color as well. It would not have the same contrast as the earlier Galaxie from the front of the business, but it seemed to have a style all its own with the warm tones being contrasted by the touches of cool tones.
I only needed a couple of frames to get this right thanks to spending a good bit of time working out the composition before pressing the button. I had to knock down the exposure by 1/3 of a stop because the dash was clipping slightly. That second exposure turned into the keeper that you see above. As you can see, this one has a completely different feel to it when compared with the red interior and black exterior that was showing as a cyan/blue. They are very similar in composition, but wildly different in execution which is why I have no problems including both of them into my collection.
I was still really wanting to get an overall shot of a car which had so far eluded me. None of the three cars were in a position to be captured in an isolated situation which was kind of disappointing to me. While I am wanting to work on my isolations and detail shots, I do like telling a story with a more all-inclusive “establishing” shot. Now obviously, this was not going to be the time for a wide-angle lens because the background was far too complex to work with. However, there might be a chance to get a bit of a story-telling composition with the Edsel sitting there behind the business.
As I had mentioned, this car was surrounded by various clutter and the building itself wasn’t all that photogenic. However, when I started to look at everything in context, it started to make sense. I had been here long enough to start listening to the landscape as it were. What I had seen as clutter was starting to tell the story of the Edsel. There were a couple of axles sitting beside it that had whitewall tires on it. This matched up with the tires that were on the Edsel quite nicely which linked them to the car. There was a small tree to the right that I could use as a framing element and to block out the trucks that were parked beside the building that would have otherwise been visible. The upper level of the business gave another framing element with a different tone to the white wall that was on the lower level. The screened sections gave some visual interest at the top to keep this from being negative or empty space. I just had to figure out how to get the camera to see what I was seeing.
Of course, I wanted to make the car dominant in the scene and with one of my goals being wide-angle photography, I got in close and set the lens around that wide end of the spectrum. This included far too much of the background, so I had to increase my distance while zooming in until I arrived at a good balance. That came at 45mm which was pretty close to that standard 50mm focal length. Pretty much how I was seeing it standing there was how I needed the camera to capture it.
I played around with where in the scene the car needed to be as well as some framing changes. I committed to this concept and really dialed in the composition over the course of seven total frames. It was the last one that turned into the keeper. I had tried to place the car at the top of the composition, I tried centering it with a square crop, I even worked with a 16:9 aspect ratio. In the end it was this simple composition that had the car framed by the tires, the tree, and the upper level that worked out the best. It was another one of those examples of me shooting with strong side light on the subject which gave me plenty of depth to the scene. You can also see that where the sun is shining on the grass, the green is a warm tone as opposed to the cooler tone that I had dealt with earlier when photographing this car.
The composition is still cluttered, and I wished that I could have found a way to simplify it more, but I am satisfied that it tells a story of this car. With a less cluttered setting this would have been a photograph of a car and that would have been it. Now there is a story that goes with it. You can see evidence that this is some type of a shop with spare parts laying around. The parts that are in view appear to be of the same era of the main subject. The unique styling of the Edsel keeps your attention on the car because more than likely this design is of interest to you since you just don’t see this all that often. It might be a complicated photo, but it is one of my favorites from the day.
As I was looking over the area to see if there was anything else I had missed, I found myself looking for something very simple to photograph. After the complexity of the Edsel, I wanted something simple. That was obviously not going to be the Edsel, and I was hoping that I had overlooked something with the Galaxie. That was where I went next and started to look around it. One angle that I hadn’t considered was from the rear. I didn’t care for it in terms of isolations, but I thought that there might be a chance that I could get something like an establishing shot of it from the back.
The first thing that I had to do was drop the camera down to the ground so that I could use the car to mask the background clutter of the dealership lot. This left the truck beside the car and the building itself. The only way that I could deal with those two elements was to crop into the car which eliminated the overall composition that I had been hoping for. What it left me with was a chance to go wide and get close to the car only focusing on the rear of it. This started out with me getting just the corner, but that quickly started to include the lettering on the truck. To bring letters in, I wanted to have enough of them to make some kind of sense. I widened the scope of the composition to include “E”, then “IE”, then “XIE” which none of those made sense. Now I was having to include the 500 badge which forced the letters “LAXIE” which didn’t make any sense. I was going to have to include the entire rear of the car to make the letters make sense. This brought into the damage to the left rear and the missing taillight. I chose to embrace that aspect and have it provide some visual tension in the frame. I even titled it based around that missing light.
While the colors were very punchy and worked well together, the red, blue, and green almost made the image too complicated. By changing this to black and white, I was much happier with where my eyes went in the frame. The various elements that I had determined were important were right where my eyes went without the color. The taillight, bumper, and the lettering were all at the forefront of the image. When it was in color, all I saw was the body of the car, the sky, and the grass. Even the red of the taillight was overpowered by the other colors. Without color, our eyes look to the brighter parts of the scene which is just what I want you looking at.
In just 22 minutes, I had shot another 26 frames for the day and out of those, collected another six keepers for the day. I was actually starting to impress myself considering that I hadn’t been all that impressed with the one Galaxie from the road. Had I not stopped and worked through the many compositions that I did with that one, I would have never known about the cars in the back. What had started out as a pretty simple trek with one main stop had turned into a large-scale trek with now three different subjects. Unfortunately, the sun was out pretty strong at this point, and the clouds seemed to be staying away from the sun. There were still great clouds to the West though and I had hopes that in a couple of hours I might be able to get out to the Chevy that I had scouted a few weeks ago.
In order to stay out for enough time for the clouds and the sun to be in the right positions, I needed to figure out something to fill some time. I wasn’t quite sure what that was going to be. I felt that my best option was going to be photographing some barns which would look good under the clouds that I was seeing to the West. None came to mind, but I was in a good area to look for them.
After packing things up, I loaded up the truck and started to hunt some barns. Whether or not I found any will have to wait until tomorrow for the conclusion of this trek. I’ll be back here again in the morning with that last installment for you, so stay tuned.
Until then…
