Wednesday, March 4, 2026
Nope, this still isn’t the blog dealing with the property full of old cars in the area of Lomax. I still haven’t heard from him at all. This blog is going to be slightly different, though possibly just as involved. While I find most of my subjects by driving around aimlessly in areas where I think I might get lucky, there is also a small portion of the time that I work off of tips from folks just like you. Not all tips will pan out because there are just times that the best subject isn’t in a situation where it can be photographed well. I’ll still go and check them out to verify, and many times will go back several times to see if things change. There is one source where I have been getting a good many tips that usually pan out, and that is a gentleman that I met one day while photographing an old tractor in Lomax. Don has sent me on more chases of rust than I can count. He is usually pretty good at spotting things that I might want to photograph, and many of those times have resulted in some of my favorite photos. Of course, he doesn’t always get the drop on me and will occasionally suggest places that I have been and photographed before. Those are the moments that I hold my head up a little higher because I found it before he did.
That is kind of the setup for today’s trek. At some point between the winter weather events last month, he sent me a message about an MG, possibly an MGB that he spotted out in Avery County. He went through the rough details of what the scene was like and gave me some directions to get there. He was upfront in that the car wasn’t rusted which he knew that I would prefer. He also knew that this car was a bit rare to find in any condition these days. From the description, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to do anything with it or not, but I kept it on my list of places to go and check out.
While I was sitting in the house pretty well snowed in and not wanting to risk the truck just to get some photos, I started researching the area that Don had pointed me to. I was familiar with the area and decided to look at the Google Maps satellite view to find the spot. When I was in the area where he was talking about, I switched to the street view and began walking it down the street. Eventually I found the spot and I was quite surprised. I knew this spot and remembered photographing it several years ago when I spotted a Corvette under a shelter that interested me. If you happen to follow that link to check out that blog, you will see the MG that Don was referring to sitting beside the Corvette in the photo titled Different Approaches.
The MG had caught my eye then, but it was in too good a condition to photograph, and it was relegated to a supporting character in a photo of the Vette. I messaged Don back to tell him that I was familiar with the spot and the car. His response was that things had changed there and the shelter had fallen down and the car was now out in the open. Of course, this grabbed my attention because I don’t like photographing cars under shelters because there are always distractions with the supports that are always around the vehicle. I had hopes for this spot now, but it wasn’t anything that I was jumping at the chance to get out there for. I certainly didn’t want to try and get out there with all the snow and ice on the ground. Climbing the mountain into Ashe County is not the easiest thing to do in the snow.
Now that the weather is warming and we have had some nice rain to clean the streets off, I started thinking about heading up there to scout the car out. In fact, I had thought about heading out there when the property in Lomax fell through, but it was just as far away in the opposite direction from home which made very little sense to me when I could more easily find something closer to where I was at. I’m glad that I stuck to where I was at and dug a little deeper because I ended up getting some great photos during that trek. It was also the last fully cloudy day that we were expecting for a while, and I wanted to maximize that time with photos that would benefit from the diffused lighting.
By the time I was done processing the photos and writing the blog, I was feeling pretty worn out from photography. I’m sure you understand just after reading about all that I have been doing since the end of February. My plan was to take it easy and go out for a ride in the Miata on Wednesday because it was going to be in the 70’s for a high. That is great roadster weather! The thought of taking a little time off from photography was appealing after all that I had been doing with it, and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about that at all. However, when I woke up Wednesday morning, I was struck by this desire to go and check the MG out to see what I was going to be dealing with. I don’t know where that came from, and it wasn’t going to be a Miata drive up the mountain just in case there was still salt on the roads. The idea stuck with me while I was reading the news about things going on in Iran, and when I was finished with my morning routine I decided to head up there and give it a look.
Now, keep in mind, I am only talking about going on a scouting mission for this car. I was leaving just before lunch time in the middle of the day when the clouds were kind of hit and miss. This was not the idea situation for going out for photography, though I did take the camera with me. If I was really lucky, I might be able to get a photo or two of the car, and I was hoping to get some abstract compositions with it as well which could benefit from the sunlight. That was not the goal because I had no idea what I was going to find when I got there. I just needed to know what it looked like so that I could pick the best day to get out there for serious.
The trip took right at 45 minutes from the house, and I knew exactly how to get there which was nice. When I got there, I slowed down and started to look. Don was correct about the shelter that had been over the two cars before. It was crumpled up and discarded beside the main building. I didn’t see the MG anywhere as I thought that Don was saying that it was still in the same spot, just with the shelter moved. I saw nothing at all interesting in the cars that were parked around the shop and started to think that the MG was gone. This happens more times than I can count and it wasn’t a surprise to see it gone. About the time I started to direct my focus back on the road, I spotted the Corvette that I had photographed before. It was sitting packed in with other cars on the side of the building. It looked pretty much the same but was a bit worse for the wear. There was no chance of getting a better shot of it than I had already, so I was happy bypassing that one.
As I was having that conversation with myself, I happened to see what looked like the front of an MG at the very end of the parked cars. There was no mistaking the color of it, but it was too late to get stopped, so I had to go and get turned around in order to come back to the spot and get out of the road. Once I was in a position to really look at the car, I started to see all the issues with the setting that I was going to have. The tall grasses were blocking much of the view of the car, though that could be a nice touch to the compositions. More troubling was the flatbed trailer that was parked feet away from the passenger side of the car. As if that wasn’t enough of a problem, there was a Grand Cherokee that was parked on the driver’s side, maybe five feet away. There was enough room that I might be able to get some compositions worked out to show the car, but I wasn’t quite sure I could get the angles.
When it came to abstracts, I wasn’t sure if there would be areas that I could use for those kinds of photos since much of the detail work of the car was covered by brush. There was no real rust to speak of that would give me abstract textures to work with. It was a cool little car, but I wasn’t sure if I would be able to really do it justice. However, I was here and I had my camera with me. The clouds were going in and out, so the sun was quite varied in intensity on the car. I would have my choice of how I wanted things lit on a day like today which made things a little more appealing to me. I had driven all the way out here, and the car was so far away from the actual shop that I knew I wouldn’t be in the way to get a few photos. It was worth a try, even if I just found out that it wouldn’t work out.
Since I was just playing around, I started off by using the wide-angle lens which is something I am wanting to get better with. I added a polarizer, but that was it. I wanted to keep this one pretty simple. I mean it was only a small MG, how complex did it need to be? Well, the first composition that I started with was a pretty basic horizontal shot that featured the car filling the frame from a high angle. It was the postcard shot with everything pretty well centered. What I did like about the composition was that the textures were what defined the elements more than anything else. The entire scene was essentially a warm tone between the color of the car and the color of the tall grass. By stripping that color, I would be able to focus the attention on the smooth car against the high frequency texture of the surrounding vegetation. That would also give it a more interesting appearance to keep the attention a bit longer than if I had shot it in true color.
The sides of the frame were pretty much dictated by the flatbed trailer and the Jeep to the other side. Those two elements defined the boundaries of my composition which did limit me more than I cared to admit. Where I did have much more control was in the up and down direction of the frame. I could stretch those as much as I needed to within the confines of the side barriers. I flipped the camera and moved to a vertical orientation. I had to keep the camera elevated to keep it above the brush and to limit how much was blurred in the foreground. There were a few bits of grass that were distracting which I had broken off for the previous composition. There were just a couple more that I needed to remove for the vertical to work well.
What I liked about this composition was that I could see the background and the mountain that was in the distance. Above that was the blue sky which was a fantastic element to balance the color palette in the image. The soft clouds gave a really nice texture that seemed to match up with the smooth surfaces of the car which all worked together to contrast with the fine details of the landscape. This vertical composition was very well balanced, and I thought that I was going to like it better than the horizontal one, but after living with them both for a while, I have decided that they are both good at telling their own visual stories. Because of that, I have kept them both to see how they age over time.
It was a great exercise in working with the wide-angle lens because I know for 100% certainty, I would have reached for the standard zoom to start with a couple of months ago. I’m enjoying forcing myself to use that lens and I’m getting used to grabbing it more and more as the year rolls on. That is what I have been hoping for, and it is happening quicker than I could have anticipated. In addition to using that wide-angle lens, I am also wanting to get better at seeing details and abstracts within the broader scene. Much like the Pontiac that I photographed a couple of weeks ago, the brush was throwing me off of my game slightly. However, I had learned some valuable lessons with shooting that Pontiac that I was going to put to use with this little MG. The first thing that I had to do was switch out my lens to get the telephoto lens in action.
Once I had the telephoto lens mounted, I started to get in close to the car. I had already shot the establishing views of it and didn’t worry about trampling the brush down at this point. It was important that I didn’t bother it too much for those overall shots because that was part of the story. Now that I was looking for details, the brush was still going to be a part of that story, but I didn’t want it to be overbearing in the frame and block important details.
The part of the car that really interested me was the grill and the emblem. I recalled how I had captured the emblem on another MG back in the last Summer of last year. As I looked back through the blogs to find that link, it occurred to me that I had been on a scouting trip for that trek as well. I guess I am just really good at scouting! Anyway, I started to look through the camera to see how the long lens was seeing the different angles. I paused on a composition that looked pretty good. It was kind of centered on the grill between the two bumperettes. I was at a slight angle to the driver’s side that allowed the hood to be introduced as a triangle of sorts with the MG badge just slightly off center to the left of the frame. The grill gave great textures to the composition that balanced out with the smooth hood. The tag holder on the bumper provided some nice rusty tones that matched up with the brush.
I liked the composition and dropped the tripod legs to get the camera locked into position. From here, I fine-tuned the composition until it was what I wanted to see. I decided that I liked it as a 16:9 crop and did that in camera so that I could make sure that the edges of the frame all made sense. From there, it was just a matter of finding the right depth of field to keep all of the car in focus while letting the brush go a little soft.
I didn’t linger with this long because I felt like I had gotten what I wanted after the second frame. From here, I moved to my typical view of the car which is the corner view centered on the headlight while including the front wheel. I shot another two frames of that corner and then started to slap myself for rehashing the same old composition that I always go to. I have tons of similar photos available, and this car wasn’t in the condition to be any better than the other ones. I needed to see this shot differently and have it make more sense with the car itself.
Looking at the scene that I had just shot, I realized that the part that I was most interested in was the wheel. It had the original four-lug cross style wheels on it and the rust on the blue tinted steel really interested me. As I looked around to see how I wanted the framing to look, I realized that I liked the wheel arch showing the body color which was another warm tone and I could use the marker light for a different tone of warm colors while matching the size of the center cap on the wheel. The text on the tire completed the shot as you could clearly make out the word “Performer” in white lettering. What had started out as a corner shot, had been dialed back to be a detail shot of the wheel.
This is the kind of thing that I am talking about when it comes to being better at my detail shots and striving to do more abstract work. You might think that my detail shots are already picking out specific details and eliminating extraneous elements within the frame. Yes, I do that with my isolations, but it has started to dawn on me that I am including too much context at times and creating an overly complicated image. It is kind of like taking a photo of a person and including the entire building that is beside them as well as the sky and a creek that runs alongside the property. It is a great establishing photo, but the main subject can tend to get lost in the entirety of the photo. I’m needing to get better at pairing the compositions down to just the elemental parts that interest me. Instead of writing a book, I am just penning a very descriptive paragraph.
That was what I felt like I was doing with the wheel. It is a more direct interpretation of the composition that I started out with. It is also a different composition from what I would normally shoot. I’ve done compositions similar to this before, but not for the same reasons. This time, I was really wanting to reduce the broader scope down to a more definitive approach to the story at hand.
I still wasn’t in the realm of abstraction which is where I really wanted to get to. I started to look around the car in hopes that I would see something that I could represent in an abstract manner. There just wasn’t anything that really jumped out at me, and something that I had come to realize is that I want to do more abstracts with things on different focal planes so that I could create relationships between objects and elements that never really existed.
The closest I could find to this goal was at the rear of the car. I did need to spend some time with that part because this was an MGB GT which as Don pointed out is quite rare to find. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to capture the rear of the car in a full-on composition because it was parked right up against a drop-off down to a stream. That didn’t matter too much because everything in front of the car was going to be a distraction in any shot that I could make. There would have been no way to avoid the Jeep or the trailer, and I am pretty sure that the buildings across the street would get in the way as well. What was left on the rear of the car was detail shots.
The part of the rear that really interested me was the MG badge with the additional BGT affixed to it. I didn’t want to just get a boring shot of that badge which I might have been inclined to do years ago. I wanted to do something special with it, and that meant angles and introducing other elements. Thinking about how I wanted to do my abstracts, I wanted to involve two different plains in a single image. The opportunity came up because of how the emblem was positioned close to the taillight. I liked the colors of the taillight in relation to the paint on the car. I could see this working well as a color harmony, so I started to create a composition that would work with the taillight and the emblem. Of course, I really wanted more than just those two elements, so I found the fuel filler cap that would complete the composition in the lower left.
The only issue was that the reverse light was sticking out like a sore thumb. It was right between the light and the cap which created too much visual weight and seemed to rob the attention from the badge that I wanted to be my main subject. Since I was working with two different plains, I could correct that simple enough by moving to the right just a hair which caused the taillight to block the reverse light leaving just the three main elements in the frame. This is the rule of odds at work, and it is one of the rules that I do follow more often than not. I love having odd numbers of elements in my frame as it creates more visual interest than a single element or only two.
Now that I had that composition figured out, I shot a single frame and verified that it was as I was hoping for. It was close, but it was a little bright for my tastes since the car was so dark here in the shadows. I dropped the exposure and tried again. It was closer but still needed another click less exposure to really work. I knew that this one was going to be a very dark image when I was done with it and figured I would get it as close to right in the field as I could.
I was feeling pretty good at this point and had shot a total of 19 frames in as many minutes. I was working faster than I had expected. I suspect that having all of the practice with photography here in the last few weeks has helped with the speed at which I can operate. I’ve noticed that when I go out regularly, I can find compositions quicker and dial in the settings quicker than when I go out after an extended time away from the camera. The way that I was operating during this trek was very much like the camera just being an extension of myself. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing, I was just doing it all on instinct and it was feeling quite good. I think that they refer to this as the “flow state”, only I’ve just started hearing that phrase and I’m not positive I understand the meaning of it just yet.
Keep in mind that I started this out as a scouting trip thinking that if I was really lucky, I would get a few images from the time with the MG. You have already seen five keepers from the day which blows my estimate out of the water. You have also probably seen that this is a part 1 of a series which indicates that there will likely be more photos to come. You aren’t wrong, and the additional photos are still of this same car. It is not often that I get a multi-part blog series from a single car, but it does happen occasionally, like when I shot this Ford last year.
I’ll be back here tomorrow with the conclusion to this trek and the remaining keepers from this MG. I’m sure that Don is on the edge of his seat waiting to see what else I came up with. He was just hoping that the tip would work out and that I could get a few photos from the car. I guess he got his wish!
Until tomorrow….
