Wednesday, February 18, 2026
OK, I get it. I’m really kind of hit and miss with my posting here lately. I’ll get on a pretty regular track and then I’ll disappear on you. It isn’t intentional, and there are usually pretty good reasons for the absences. This time, I have been spending a good bit of time recovering from the snow and ice that gave me such great conditions for the last few blogs. That includes a lot of washing of the vehicles to get the salt off, and Toni put her foot down after two weeks of me taking her to and from work. That meant that she is now out of her little sports sedan and now is driving an AWD Honda Passport so she can take herself to and from work in inclement weather. Of course, this means that we will not see another snow day for years. With that new vehicle purchase, there was a full two-day detail to get it presentable looking for her. In the middle of getting the new vehicle, I also had an engagement session to shoot about 20 minutes from the house at an Airbnb rental. Other than some very slick conditions with the ice that was still around, that session went fantastic and I got some wonderful photos of the couple. By “some”, I am talking about fully editing 66 proofs for them to look through. This was from a single hour’s worth of a shoot, and they were all very much keeper worthy.
So, as you can see, I’ve been busy and just haven’t really had the time to get out with the camera for much photography. Now that things are calming down a bit, I really wanted to get out and get back in the swing of things. The warm weather also made me want to get out and about. It was that warm weather and sunshine that prompted me to go out and play with the Miata for a couple of days earlier in the week which allowed me the time to scout areas that I might want to photograph.
I’ll get into more detail about this in the upcoming Behind the Camera, but I’m really looking to become more proficient with my wide-angle lens as well as working on my abstract and detail compositions. Ideally, I wanted to concentrate on locations that would allow me those types of photos. One of the subjects that had been talked about with Toni was some barns that have been popping up on Facebook recently. One of them was a red barn and a road name was given. This gave me an idea of where to scout for the barn which I did with the top down and enjoying the fresh air.
I did find the barn, and it was pretty much like the picture suggested. I was thinking that it might look better in the evening with the sun shining on it while there were some clouds above it to the East. That situation was a possibility for Tuesday according to the weather, so I penciled in a trek around the time of sunset. I’m not a fan of going out late in the day like that because by that point, I am usually ready to settle down and relax some. However, this was a barn that really needed something to make the photo work because the barn was just not that interesting on its own. Because of this, I chose to go out to check it out again, and get some more roadster time in the process.
When I got out there, the sky was flat behind the barn, and the light was not all that flattering. The sky made me think that conditions were not really going to improve much, if at all over the course of the next couple of hours. I started to think that I might not want to go out with the camera later and decided to scout around in the area to see what else might interest me. I found a lot of potential, but nothing that was screaming for me to return that evening. Not feeling compelled to get out with the camera, I chose to stay at home and get the Miata all cleaned up for the upcoming rainy days and to get the last bit of salt dust off of it.
That evening, Toni and I were looking at more of the barns that were popping up on Facebook and she showed me one that I recognized from the town of Lomax. I went through my old photos and found the one that I was after and actually remembered driving really close to this location, though I didn’t stop to look at the barn again. The picture that we were seeing showed it in a similar condition to what I had shot it before, but I had caught it at the beginning of Spring with a bit of color in the trees. It was a very pretty barn and I started to think that I might want to photograph it again since it was pretty close to the other one that I was looking to shoot.
Wednesday was looking to have better clouds and potentially better light through the morning and early afternoon. The clouds weren’t going to start to come in until after sunrise and they would be kind of gradual in their building. There was no reason to get up very early, but I did get my day started after Toni left for work. There was also another location that had come to mind during the evening that I was starting to want to explore. It wasn’t too far beyond the barns, and it was a place that I had shot many times in the past. You will probably recognize the car when you see the photos.
I started to photograph this Pontiac in Yadkin County around a decade ago. It was one of the first true decay treks that I did. I remembered that for the longest time, I thought that this was probably the only rusty classic car out there and I had been lucky to find it. The property is vacant, though there are still a house and several barns standing. I’ve tried multiple times to make contact with the owners but have never managed to succeed. Because of that I have operated in a very gray area in terms of trespassing. There are no fences, or barriers on this side of the property. There are signs posted near where the barns are, but that is clear on the other side of the property. With working on the far edge, I feel comfortable in what I am doing and know that if asked to leave that I will just pack up my stuff and go without a hassle. That being said, I have been out here more times than I can count and have never had an issue. Neighbors will wave at me, and nobody has ever bothered to stop and ask what I am up to. I don’t recommend doing things this way unless you can articulate very well why you are standing where you are.
The reason that this spot popped into my head late in the evening was because I am so familiar with it. Because I am wanting to work on my abstracts and detail shots, I wanted to spend a bit of time with this car trying to get some interesting views. What makes this car unique is the fact that it is covered with vines at this point which makes any composition a bit more difficult to work through. I hadn’t done much in the way of detail shots with this car, though to be fair, one of my first automotive detail shots was done on the trunk lid. I saw this car as a challenge, and it was full of views that I just couldn’t get anywhere else. I was also thinking that there were some detail shots that I could do with the wide-angle lens that would be very different from what I had done in the past with this car.
With all that in mind, I decided to go out to the Pontiac just to see if I could get something to work. I wasn’t really looking to get a lot of photos from this car but figured that it would be good for a few different compositions allowing me to experiment with some things. From there, I could head back out to Ronda and Lomax to shoot some barns. It would be a good day, and I should be able to be done by lunch and be working on the photos in time to get a blog out there by the end of the day.
I had all good intentions for a quick trek with maybe a half dozen keepers by the end of the day. We know how that tends to work….
Around 8:30, I was on the road headed to the Pontiac with a moderate level of hope. I knew that the car was going to be covered by vines but really didn’t know how thick they would be. When I went out to it last year, I really thought that it was going to be the last time I would be able to see it. It wasn’t a long trip at all to get there, and it was pretty much a straight shot down US 421 from home. When I arrived, I parked on the shoulder of the road where I always park, and I grabbed my gear to go up alongside the corn field.
As I was out here for wide-angle shots and detail shots, I first fitted the 16-35mm lens on the camera and moved in close to the hood to see if I could get the composition that I wanted with the hood ornament. Sadly, the vines were too thick for that lens to work in the way I was wanting. I still had the ability to capture an overall composition of the car as I had done many times before. The difference was that I was using a different lens that would include a lot more of the background in the shot. This was going to require a bit more care and consideration in composing the shot. This was what I needed the practice with more than anything. Wide-angle photography isn’t just about the main subject; it is about all of the other elements that creep into the frame filling the background.
For the first time that I could remember, I was including the barns well in the background and I actually kind of liked how it all fit together. There was an interesting tree between the car and the barns that was used as the framing element. I allowed all of that part of the frame to go a little out of focus so as not to overly complicate the scene. Even though I was bringing in more elements, I still wanted the Pontiac to be the main subject to the photo. It was easier than I thought it would be to arrive at a working composition and I really liked what I was seeing. There was a much stronger sense of scale with more sky present than in previous compositions done with narrower focal lengths. Fortunately, the sky had a bit of detail and was working for this composition.
The front of the car was pretty well covered with vines, but the rear of the car didn’t have that same problem. As I walked around the car, I noticed that it was largely uncovered and visible. The problem was there was a lot more distractions visible from this angle. There was the clothesline to the right and some power poles to the left. Beyond the car was the highway and my truck. I had usually chosen a longer focal length from this angle to avoid some of those pitfalls, but this time, I really wanted to get the wide-angle involved to show off the rear of the car. I started to play with the camera position to figure out how best to place the camera. By getting in close, I was able to block the view of my truck and the highway with the Pontiac. I dropped down low to the ground to give the car some separation from the trees, and I cropped in close on the left side to avoid the power pole. There were still the support lines and the yellow sheathes that were visible to the left, but I figured I could deal with them in post. To the right, I had the large trees that helped the photo translate into the sky. The clothesline was right in the dark part of the tree which made it more visible.
I had the composition figured out and I shot a couple of frames as I timed when there was no traffic passing by. I was still able to see vehicles passing by through the trees to the left, which meant that I had to time the exposures when I wasn’t hearing the traffic. I still had those two yellow covers off to the left that I didn’t care for, and I wasn’t quite sure that they would clone out easily with the other details around them. It wasn’t until I got home that the thought of black and white hit me.
That was the solution that I was looking for as it greatly simplified the image while giving the car more presence than when it was in color. A nice side benefit was that the yellow covers on the lines were no longer visible at all, and they just looked like more brush in the distance. I didn’t have to clone out anything at all, and I had a striking photograph in front of my eyes. The lessons that I learned when I decided to really learn black and white were paying off with this one because I was able to recognize the opportunity to make this a stronger photograph and knew just now to go about doing it.
The wide-angle thing was still causing me some stumbling moments with this car. Everything that I wanted to do with the wide lens was running into problems because of the covering vines. Because that lens includes so much, it is a problem to shoot a scene that has a lot of confusion in it. This is one of those times when a wide-angle lens is just not a smart choice. Part of learning to use this lens at a level that I haven’t achieved yet, is knowing when it is the wrong tool for the job. It was not the right piece of kit for doing detail shots of this car, but at the other end of the spectrum was a lens that was much more suited for the task.
The telephoto lens is one that I have grown very fond of over the last couple of years. I’ve taught myself how to work this lens in a variety of situations and have really increased my proficiency with it. This was the time to pull that lens out as it would greatly simplify the scenes that I was seeing. It only took a second to get the lenses swapped out and now I was looking at a way to pick out details that I was much more comfortable with. I wasn’t going for the simple compositions though. That would be cheating. I wanted to “see” things differently and I wanted to experiment with the different views.
I knew that I wanted to spend some time with the hood ornament because I had shot that on a whim the last time I was out here and felt that I might be able to do it better now that I know that the concept works. The first thing that I had to do was move one of the vines from in front of the face to below the chin. This opened up the view much better and allowed me to tell a more compelling story without disrupting the scene.
The first composition that I tried was a vertical one as it felt the most balanced and focused. Because of the vines, I had to shoot this from the driver’s side, but I knew that it would read better had I been able to grab the shot from the passenger side. I looked through the composition and found no indicators of direction which meant that I could flip this one in post so that it would read better from left to right. That is a trick that I love doing when I can because it will strengthen many images that can only be shot in one direction.
Now that I was feeling pretty good about the detail shots, I moved to the rear of the car and started to look at the trunk trim which had been the subject of my first automotive detail shot around a decade ago. The last thing that I wanted to do was repeat the same shot which was a straight on composition with the chrome and text centered in the frame. I wanted something more dramatic for this attempt and knew that diagonals were my best bet. I started to look at things from the driver’s side because I’ve found that when words are involved, they tend to look better when the start of the word it closest to the camera. This also allowed me to angle the image in a way that went up from left to right. This added to the visual energy which I really liked.
My first attempt was pretty well focused on the main chrome emblems which I thought was the way to go. I found that to be a little boring to look at and decided to enlarge the scope of the composition to include a bit more of the area under the trunk. I liked including the tag light to the right, but that brought with it the needed inclusion of the bumper. This took a bit of working on to get the right scale in the frame with the bumper because I didn’t want the bright chrome to pull the attention away from the main subject. Including just a sliver of the bumper from a slightly elevated position seemed to work the best for the absolute balance that I was after. The vines that were encroaching from the bottom really set the tone for this one and added a sense of neglect that the first composition didn’t really have.
I definitely like this composition better than the straight on shot that I had done so long before. That photo had remained one of my favorites and I had redone a few years after that to fix a few edge details that I had missed. That photo had been in my gallery for many years, but this one is worlds better just from the simple change of angle. These are the evolutions that I love to see in my own photography because it does show growth and being able to capture the same subjects very differently.
While I was at the rear of the car, I wanted to get something with the taillights which I had yet to do as far as I could recall. Of course, the vines were making compositions difficult with the taillights, but then again, that was what I signed up for with this trek. I took a few minutes to really survey the scene and figure out what I liked most about the taillights. I was leaning towards the passenger side more than the driver’s because of how the vines were looking. They seemed to go in the same kind of direction as the stainless trim above the bumper. This gave me an idea for a composition. While I might have gotten down low and shot this from a low level before, I actually elevated the camera a good bit and looked down on the car while framing the shot as a portrait (vertical image). This allowed me to place the taillight in a pleasing position in the lower left (think Fibonacci Spiral) while the vines, bumper, and trim all took a strong diagonal line moving up and to the left. This balanced out the taillight quite well while pointing to it and directing the eyes through the rest of the frame.
This was probably my most simple composition and I only had to shoot three frames to get it right. Those were all done to play with depth of field and focus points to make sure that I had the right shot to process. I didn’t spend much time with it once I figured out the design of the composition because I knew that I had something good and didn’t see any need in changing things up to try something different. It was compositions like this that drew me to the Pontiac in the first place. I have shot detail shots on cars for so long now that I can do them mostly in my sleep. However, the vines added an element to the scenes that I was not nearly as familiar with and I was having to really look at things differently than I had in the past. This is all part of what I am wanting to spend time learning this year, and I’m finding that sessions like this push me to see things in different ways. I’m really liking how this is going so far and can’t wait to see what I am creating by the end of the year.
By this point, I was feeling pretty good about things and was feeling more confident about working around the vines than I had to begin with. I was still hung up on that hood ornament because it offered a different feeling to that tried-and-true subject of mine thanks to the vines wrapped all around it. I went back to the same side and played with the angles and height of the camera once again. This time, I was looking at things horizontally though and felt that I really wanted to get something that would fill the frame that way. It didn’t really take long before I had figured out the camera placement to get a more side dominant view of the hood ornament.
If you compare this one with the vertical composition, you can see that I am much more to the side here as I was trying to get a much wider frame to be filled by the shape of the ornament. The focus point was still the head at the front, but I wanted to get more of the body included which would give it a better sense of implied motion within the frame. I thought that I was going to like this one better, but after looking at the two images side by side, I like them both equally and find that there are enough differences in how the hood ornament appears that each photo stands on its own. In both cases, it is the vines that add the visual interest that tells the story of this hood ornament. You can just see that guy struggling to break through those vines and you almost find yourself rooting for him to succeed. There is a pretty good dynamic quality to both of the shots and that was what I was looking for with both of them.
As I really liked working with the vines and found that the mire that they created added an element to the images that I don’t usually get to see when photographing these old cars. I wanted to embrace this and see what else I could capture that would break the routine of my detail shots. It became a game of figuring out what areas of the car were visible enough through the vines to get a photo that made sense. Both of the front fenders fit that goal, and I started to work with the driver’s side front fender first.
The shape of the car was camouflaged with the vines which meant that my eyes ended up looking for familiar shapes within the car. The bumper, wheel, and the headlight housing were all visible and drew the attention enough to help pull the overall shape together. After my eyes determined those three objects, I could fill in the rest of the fender with my mind and then I could see the patina under the vines. This added to the abstract quality of this photo as it takes a bit of consideration to really understand. It is one of those photos that asks questions of the viewer and I really like those. Anything that I can do to actively involve the viewer in looking at the photo is a plus.
There is no doubt that even three years ago, I would have considered this to be too complicated of a photo for my tastes. It is still complicated, but not in a bad way. Over the years, I have really fine tuned the art of making sure that my main subject is clear and easily seen. It has become a hallmark of my photography, but at times it does make for boring photos. The added complexity of the vines is not a distraction, but it is a layer that you have to get through to understand the photo. By getting through that layer, you start to sympathize with the car that also has to get through that layer. In essence, the viewer has reached a common ground with the subject and in a way feels like the subject. At least that is my take on how this all comes together.
By this point, I hadn’t even started the second location that I was wanting to shoot for the day and already had seven keepers in the can. I had shot a total of 25 frames to this point and was not done yet. There was still more to capture with this car, and I’ll get to those tomorrow. The real question was, did I get to the two barns that I was wanting to work after this car? You will have to tune in tomorrow to see how that part of the trek went. How many more photos did I get of the Pontiac that I had all but written off last year when I saw it covered in these vines? I’m not quite sure because there is another RAW image that I am planning on going back and looking at before starting the next blog. There are also another few that I have already processed and are ready to upload.
I’ll see you back here tomorrow for more of this adventure.
Until then….
