Saturday, May 30, 2026
I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, at least not yet. It has been a while since we last spoke which is kind of odd in the current rhythm of blog posts. I think it has been something like three full weeks since I’ve made a post or added new photos. That was a studio session with some smoke to get the dust knocked off of the studio equipment that I was going to be using shortly after that session. I said that that blog wasn’t going to get much traction and it really didn’t. My smoke photos never really seem to get that much interest from folks. I do get it, especially because for the most part I am known for decay photos and in particular rusty car photos. Well, for those of you who know what I’m talking about, I’ve got a treat for you today. This will actually happen in a few different blog entries, but I did get out this morning and managed to capture a few pretty decent photos of some old cars and trucks.
The story behind the first subject is kind of interesting, so I’ll go into that for a bit. You see, Toni and I were going to dinner yesterday in Clemmons. There are only so many places to eat in Wilkes County and after a while we want something different. There is a nice little place that we both like that is right on the edge of Clemmons and we headed out that way. Of course, I was paying attention to my driving and trying to navigate to the restaurant that is not the easiest to see from the main road. I saw nothing at all on the sides of the road, and honestly, I wasn’t looking for anything either. Out of nowhere, Toni started to point to the left and tried to get my attention for a car that she had seen. Of course, I looked, and was checking out the passing cars, but nothing really jumped out at me. I had completely missed what she was pointing out.
She said that it was a very small rusty car sitting in front of a building. I had seen nothing of the sort driving by. I didn’t really give it that much thought because this was a pretty congested area and I wasn’t real confident that I could do anything with it anyway. For the moment, it was all about getting food because I was hungry. When we finished eating and started back on the way home, Toni remembered seeing the car and started looking for it again. She spotted it easy enough and pointed it out to be once again. This time I saw the car and immediately recognized what it was.
It was an early Honda that would eventually lead to the first Civic produced. It had a wonderful patina on it and was quite cute sitting there. Toni had spotted a winner of a subject for sure. The only issue was where it was parked. It was backed up to a building and was next to another vehicle that I didn’t really pay that much attention to at the time. I knew that my overall compositions were going to be difficult to come by, but there should be ample opportunity for some isolations and abstracts of the car.
I didn’t take the time to really look at the scene critically because I would really have to get turned around and go back by it to look at it in that kind of detail. Traffic was not all that great with it being Friday at rush hour, so I just figured that I would research it more through Google Street View later on. While I was driving down the highway, Toni was looking at the map to find the cross street for me which made it much easier for me to locate later on.
When I finally got situated at home and got to a point where I could do some research, I found the building on Street View and low and behold the car was sitting right there in front of the building. I had been worried that it might not be there for long, but with it showing up on the Street View, I knew that it had been there for a little while. From this view, I was able to get the business name which I researched to see if they would be open on Saturday which happened to have some clouds in the forecast. The business showed to be permanently closed which was really good for me as I wouldn’t be getting in anyone’s way by taking some photos of the car.
Now that I had some more information about the location and had been able to figure out exactly what I was going to have to work with, I started to really look at the weather forecast for Saturday morning. I chose that because there were some clouds in the forecast, but more importantly, there would be less chance of the parking lot being busy on a Saturday morning. The sun would also come up behind the building creating a nice shadow in case the clouds didn’t diffuse the light enough. It was a plan packed with failsafe elements to ensure that I would be able to get good light and have room to work.
The clouds were going to be short lived in the morning according to one of the weather forecasts with them stretching out a bit longer according to another one. I chose to plan around the more restrictive forecast that had good clouds from 8-9am. With the business roughly an hour away from home, I was going to need to leave around seven or so. I turned in earlier than I would have normally and set the clock for six which would give me time to get up and get ready.
When the clock rang, I checked both forecasts and it appeared as though the clouds had been pushed back in the morning by about an hour or so. What was looking to be the good light was going to happen around 9-10 by all guesses. That meant that I could snooze for a bit longer, though I didn’t sleep. I got out of bed around 6:30 and was ready to get on the road an hour later. The sky was mostly blue overhead as I was leaving, and I was really hoping that those conditions were not the same in Clemmons. It wasn’t until I hit Yadkin County that the clouds started to form overhead which was promising.
When I arrived at the business, I spotted the little Honda sitting there all along in front of the building. There was a Subaru wagon a few spaces over to the right, but nothing directly next to the Honda. This might mean that I could get some overall compositions of the car which would be great. I didn’t really have any preconceived ideas of what I was going to do with this car just yet. Honestly, I was so out of practice for this kind of photography, I was more concerned about just being able to build a photograph that would work well enough. This was not going to be about working towards my goals for the year as much as it was about just getting back in the mindset of being a decay photographer after a month away from it.
I parked on the other side of the Subaru to make sure that I wasn’t going to cause any problems with any composition that I might choose to work on. I wasn’t thinking that I was going to be able to work with a wide-angle lens, so I started out with the telephoto lens which would keep the background a little more manageable for me. I walked over to the Honda and started to look at what I was going to be able to work with for the first time. The car was in fantastic shape for what I was wanting to see. There was a lot of patina and most of the parts were there which gave me plenty of options. There were tall weeds behind the car that gave some clue to the neglected nature of the building to the rear. That got me thinking about doing an overall composition to get things started. With the long lens, I would be able to keep the building to a minimum in the composition which I felt was going to be beneficial.
The thing with the long lens is that I had to back away a good bit from the car to get the composition to work out. I was relatively happy with what I was seeing in the viewfinder of the camera, but I wasn’t jumping up and down about it. For the sake of getting things started, I fired off a couple of exposures to get something in the can to set the tone. The photos worked but just seemed boring to me more than anything. It did give me a taste of making photographs again which got my gears turning for the next compositions.
With the long lens, it only made sense to start working with isolations and maybe some abstracts. From the road, I had seen the front of the car and knew that I was going to want to do something with that before I was finished. It was more or less the low hanging fruit of the car and that was what I started with. I didn’t want to get the expected composition of the front of the car though. Instead, I looked for a more abstract way of seeing the shapes in the grill. The more I looked, the more it seemed logical to focus my attention on the grill emblem that identified the car. I played around with different camera positions until I found something that I liked.
Once I found the base composition, I fine-tuned things until I was happy with how it was looking. I pressed the button on the remote and fired off frame three for the morning. There was nothing moving and the image review showed that I didn’t have anything clipping in the highlights which meant that there was reason to take any more exposures of that scene. I chose to move on the next one with complete confidence.
It wasn’t until I got home that I saw just how good the photo had turned out. It wasn’t quite there yet though. I needed to do some things in post to get it to really sing and look the way that I had imagined it. While I don’t like selective color in my photographs, I was drawn to the red in the emblem which was surrounded by chrome and more earthy tones with rust and the faded paint. I really wanted the badge to stick out, and I felt that the best way to do that was to really be specific with the color saturations over the entire image. I tried doing all of the heavy lifting in the HSL panel, but that left me with some odd looking rust tones on the grill. What I ended up doing was simply reducing the saturation a good bit over the entire image with the exception of the red in the badge. That gave the entire photo a much more pleasant look in terms of coloration, and that was what I went with. The final result is exactly what I had been hoping for with the composition.
Of course, I also wanted to spend some time with the headlights of the car and started to look to see which side was calling out to me. It was the driver’s side that won out and grabbed my attention. The composition was a little more complex than I was expecting with the bumper overriders being so close to the headlight. I ended up including that chrome tube as well as the turn signal on the bumper to complete the composition. As with the other grill photo, the colors needed a bit of attention in post to really come across as a considered photograph. This time it was not about desaturating portions of the image, it was all about getting a color profile that really brought out the grunge aspects of the car while desaturating and cooling the colors in the scene.
That color profile is one that I have used a lot with my decay photography, and it works great for red and blue colors. The green on this Honda also seemed to fit well with that color profile and it helped to get the colors more analogous across the scene. The more I worked with the photo, the more I was liking it. I guess that even while photographing the image I was pretty confident with it as I only shot a single frame of that headlight. Now, I did shoot three frames of the passenger side light, but never really found the right composition on that side of the car. It was the driver’s side that just came together with very little effort.
Speaking of effort, I had now shot a total of seven frames of this little Honda and was finally starting to feel pretty good about it as a subject. It was now time to move in and look for some abstract compositions. The best part of the car was the hood and the tops of the fenders when it came to finding patina. Looking at the hood, I found that the center of the hood had a bulge which gave some nice visual interest to the overall panel. I started to look for other elements that I could use to balance that bulge out and ended up deciding on the vents at the base of the windshield which gave some nice contrast to the entire scene. I looked at this from both sides before I decided on shooting from the driver’s side. This gave the best visual flow to the scene.
There were no wasted frames in trying to figure out the composition as I decided which I liked the best before even pressing the button. As I had done before, one shot was all it took and that was the one that turned into the keeper. With nothing moving in the frame and the exposure being very simple to figure out, there was just no need in pressing the shutter again. That didn’t mean that I was finished with the hood though.
As I have done several times before, I started to look for an area of the hood with panel lines for structure and patina for interest within the panels. I liked the idea of including just a small bit of the headlight and grill for a bit of contrast without including enough to define the shapes. I just needed a little extra dimension to the composition, and those bits would give me just what I was after. The only question I had was how much to include and which side was going to be the best. I was still uncertain on how much of the contrasting elements to include but found that the passenger side was more visually interesting, though the driver’s side read smoother from left to right. With nothing identifying direction in the frame, I decided that I would flip the image in post to correct for the directional reading aspect of the image while keeping the more interesting patina in the frame.
This plan turned out to be great and left me with shooting two frames with slightly different framing so that I would have choices once I got home. The winner was the first of the two frames that I shot of the hood and fender area. That one just had the most pleasing ratio of contrasting elements with the upper surfaces of the car. The idea did just what I was hoping that it would by providing some depth and dimension to the image which would have been absent without the bit of grill and the shadow of the headlight. In a way, it brings more questions as to what is being viewed which I greatly appreciate.
By this point, I was feeling pretty good about the car and wanted to try some different things with an overall composition before I called it a day. I knew that I was going to need a wider lens, though I didn’t think I had the room in the background to justify the 16-35mm lens. Instead, I swapped out the telephoto for the standard zoom which would give me a little more flexibility with framing of the car. I knew that the easiest side to work with was the passenger side which is how I had started the morning out a short time before. With the different lens, I didn’t have to get nearly as far away from the car and actually found that moving in closer to it gave a more pleasing perspective on it. What had been boring was starting to show the personality of the car.
With that realization in mind, I started to move in closer to the car and zoomed the lens out wider and wider until the car started to look a little cartoony. That was when I backed up again and found that sweet spot for distortion. This was the first composition that I had tried that I really needed to shoot multiple frames as I went. It was the last of five exposures that worked the best with the car. By that point, I had found the right spot to set the camera and had dialed in an exposure that would effectively freeze the vegetation behind the car keeping it from blurring.
The composition worked because of the windows that were present on the front of the building. I made sure to keep things as separated as I could within reason as I had with the telephoto lens before. The difference in composition was very evident looking back on the earlier frames. The concept was the same, but the car was a bit flatter in the frame and there was less of the building included. Originally, I had cropped the frame right at the door which was used as a framing element to the right, but the scaling between that and the car almost made the door a distraction. With the wider focal length, I was able to make the car stand out more dominantly in the frame while the door and windows got comparatively smaller. This worked out so much better that what I had shot to begin with.
I guess you could say that the work that I have done with the wider focal lengths through the first half of the year came in nice for this subject. I hadn’t planned on shooting wide for this car, but that was what worked and it was how I was actually seeing the car without realizing it. Maybe I have taught myself to see differently this year. All I know is that I was really liking this composition of the car which stood out much more than the compressed telephoto shot from earlier.
I was even feeling confident enough about the focal length that I wanted to try a composition from the driver’s side as well. This was only possible with the wider-angle focal length because there was an automotive shop next door with cars in the parking lot. I had to get in close to the Honda so that it would mask about a half dozen or so cars parked to the side of the building. The standard zoom did that with no problem and I was looking at a workable composition from this side now. I liked that there was a tree in the background which helped to give the scene depth as well as giving it a more rural feeling which I felt went better with the car. There were power poles and lines as well as mounts on the storefront which I didn’t really care for at the time of the capture. My thought was that I would remove them in post when I started working on the photo.
When I did get the images home, it was the last of four frames which I decided to keep and process. I liked the depth of field in that one and felt it was the strongest of the four. I started to look at removing the lines, poles, and attachment points, but realized that they kind of added to the photo. The power pole especially worked because it matched up nicely with the antenna that was sticking out of the side of car. The softer background helped to keep the attention on the car enough to where those little elements were no longer distractions in the image.
This was a slightly busier composition than I would have wanted it to be, but it still worked well enough to be a keeper. One of the things that I really liked about this view was that it showed off the brand-new tire which was mounted to the front wheel. You can see the paint lines from the manufacturing process on the tread that shows that these tires have not seen more than a few feet of rolling since the tires were installed. The lack of air also indicates that they have been on a very long time with the car not moving. These are all little hints that tell bits of the story of the car. Those are the things that I love to bring into my photos. I don’t know anything at all about this car, but from looking at the clues, I am pretty sure that I can make up a fairly accurate account of the life of this car.
With that, I had shot 19 frames of this little car that Toni spotted. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it at the time, though I was sure that I had a few decent ones to work with when I got home. I wasn’t quite done for the day as I still wanted to do a little more photography as I was clearing the cobwebs from my brain. My first thought was to head up to Jefferson to photograph a house that Toni had let me know about a few weeks ago. I was needing good clouds for that, and it was looking like the clouds were actually going to hang around for a bit. Before I did that, I needed to get gas though.
I ended up stopping in Yadkinville for gas and could see that the clouds were thinning to the North and to the West. It was looking like the better clouds were to the South. That was where I ended up going as I was now on the hunt for something that was going to look good in the existing lighting. I didn’t really have a destination in mind, but that is part of the fun of doing this kind of photography. I just get to drive around and see what trips my trigger.
I’ll tell you what I found next in tomorrow’s blog entry. For now, just know that I wasn’t done with the day just yet.
Keep your eyes out for the next blog, and I’ll be back here soon enough.
Until then…
