Monday, May 4, 2026
This should be a quick blog because I just went out for a couple of hours to try and see if an idea that I had would work. The more important reason might be far reaching one that really prompted this trek. You see, I had another model shoot scheduled for last Friday, but he ended up needing to reschedule for this coming weekend. That wasn’t a problem, but I had started to get my mind wrapped around his shoot which was going to include two different sets as well as some pop-up backdrops to give him a lot of different looks for his portfolio. That meant that I was in full planning mode for most of the week and didn’t bother going out for my own photography during those days so that I could concentrate on the job at hand. When he rescheduled, the weather wasn’t good to do much in terms of outside photography, so I left it alone through the weekend. However, there was a good morning to get out on Saturday, but I just wasn’t motivated to do it at all. This got me thinking about how my creative process had been stalled by the reschedule and I was starting to feel like a creative slump was just around the corner.
Yeah, this is the part of dealing with people photography that I don’t particularly like. I have to completely change up my creative eye and how I shoot when it comes to people versus landscape images. This isn’t a problem and it is good to engage the clutch and shift gears from time to time, but when a session falls through, I am left with the creative energy going in the wrong direction with no outlet. This is where the slumps come from at times and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to hold onto that energy for the upcoming shoot for another week. That creative energy would just turn into anxiety and imposter syndrome which would really affect my ability to put together a great session. I needed to get out with the camera and push through the process to keep my muscle memory alive and to allow some of the creative energy to go to good use.
I should have gone out on Saturday morning, but I wasn’t thinking along those lines then and I just wasn’t motivated. I did have a subject in mind though and knew what I wanted to shoot with it. It was close by, which might have caused a bit of reluctance in going out to it. It is very easy to put off a subject that is five minutes away because I can go there any time at all. The subject was a barn that I had photographed a couple of times before. In both situations, I had gone for the long shot from the far corner of the property. This allowed me to capture the barn with a nice tree beside of it while avoiding the house next to it. I felt that this was the only way to get a good composition of the barn and it did work well.
It was a week or so before that I was driving through the area on a sunny morning that I saw this barn once again but saw it in a completely different light. The sun was hitting the side of the barn towards the road which looked really nice, but I didn’t really care for the blank sky above. There was a fence that was there at the corner of the property that was really quite tall but seemed to work well with the barn. None of this was new from what I had seen of the barn in the past, but there was something different this time. I was looking through an imaginary wide-angle lens this time rather than my telephoto lens that I was more used to. If I didn’t know better, I would say that being able to do that is thanks in no small part to working with that lens more and more this year. With the idea of getting right up on the fence, I could see that the house would fall completely behind the barn, giving me yet another way to isolate the barn from the house. The fence would also make for a nice foreground element. The concept sounded pretty good as I was talking through it with myself, but I was going to need different conditions to really make it work.
The thought that I went with, almost out of instinct was to look for a…you guessed it…cloudy day with some texture in the sky. That seems to be the right choice for most of what I like to shoot, but those days are few and far between this year. As I mentioned, Saturday would have worked with that idea, but as I was considering it, I couldn’t help but think about the nice light that the morning sun was putting on the barn. With the deep clouds, I would have texture in the sky, but the barn would be flat and devoid of light which seemed boring to me. Of course, that could have been the lack of motivation that I had to begin with. That was a valid concern though and the more that I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of having the sun hitting the barn. I was just going to need a few clouds in the sky overhead to break up the blue. This could be the best of both worlds but would mean that I would need the right clouds in the sky between 9-10am while the sun was still in a good position for the light to happen.
Looking ahead at the weather on Sunday night, I saw that my cloud forecast was calling for morning clouds from 8-11am, but they were going to be spotty and at mid-level altitudes. That could work, but the other forecast was showing clear skies and nearly no clouds at all. I would just have to wait and see what the morning brought when I woke up. I wasn’t sure how easy that was going to be because I ended up watching TV until pretty late and hoped that I wasn’t going to sleep in too long in the morning. Still not being that motivated, I didn’t bother setting an alarm but hoped to be away around 7am or so.
As luck would have it, I was starting to wake up just before 7am and I took a look at the weather real quick. The cloud forecast was looking less promising, but the regular hourly forecast was showing some clouds between 8-9am. It wasn’t much to hold out hope for, but it was enough for me to go ahead and get out of bed. I grabbed breakfast and took care of the morning routine before coming back upstairs to look at the sky now that the sun was fully up.
I could see some clouds overhead and more importantly; I could see them to the West which was the direction that I was needing them to be. I debated for a bit because there were not many clouds out there and the sun was still rather bright. I could have just skipped it and stayed home. I told myself that I could start putting things together in the studio, but it was way too early to do that since the session wasn’t until Saturday and I would have to work around two different sets for the entire week. It was technically a very nice day outside by just about anyone’s judgement, though it was normally a day that I would see as just too sunny to really work with.
The reason that I don’t like sunny days is that it restricts the directions that I can shoot in which will greatly affect my compositions. However, in this situation, I had a subject that I knew would work in the light of morning and with a similar intensity. That made things a little easier to deal with. I wasn’t going to be able to shoot as freely as normal, but if I could get this one barn shot, I would be happy with the time spent. That was enough to get me motivated to head out and give it a try. It wasn’t but five minutes from the house, so I wasn’t going to be out much if it didn’t work out.
I ended up leaving around 9am which would put me there right when the light should be working. When I arrived, things were pretty much as I remembered and there was a single cloud formation above the barn. There wasn’t anything else around in the sky, so I was going to have once chance to get this right before I was left with a blank blue sky once again. After pulling off on the side of the road, I grabbed the camera with the 16-35mm lens attached. Because of the expanse of blue sky, I didn’t add a polarizer for fear that the sky would show banding in the blue tones. I quickly got into the position that I was expecting and started to look at the composition.
That was when I found my first problem. While the house was completely covered by the barn, the fence was a lot taller than I had given it credit for. This caused it to overlap the barn quite a bit and I didn’t care that much for that aspect. After playing around with different positions, I found that there was no way to avoid having the fence overlap the barn. The solution was easy enough; I could shoot through the fence and avoid it completely. Well, that idea sank pretty quickly because of the shadow from the fence that was going to be the new foreground. That wasn’t going to work at all.
I went back to the best spot in order to get the fence and I raised the camera as tall as it would go. The fence was still blocking portions of the barn, but only at the tops of the posts for the most part. I played with the position so that the two outer posts lined up with the edges of the barn while the center one ended up over a closed door so as not to block the view of the open areas of the barn. The fence started to blend in with the barn at this point, and the lack of separation didn’t introduce any distractions to the barn. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best that I was going to get.
Once I had the focus locked and the exposure figured out, I shot a single frame and looked through the image review to see if there were any issues. There were no problems with the image, and I saw no reason to shoot a safety frame. I did want to see if I could improve on the composition from a different position, possibly from across the street. I tried that, but nothing really lined up right and I saw no reason to take another frame. By this point, the neighborhood dogs were starting to bark a lot and there were a few that were coming through another yard. Not quite sure how that was going to turn out, I decided to go back to the truck and pack things up.
I had only shot a single frame from this location and was packing things up. There was a large part of me that thought that this had been a failed experiment and that I was happy that I had the other photos taken from the other side of the property. I had liked the idea, but the height of the fence had really thrown me. Oh well, I wasn’t out anything and if the one photo didn’t work, that would make the rest of the day pretty easy as there would be no editing to do, and no blog to write.
Now when have you known me to give up that easy?
I continued driving to the West and could see some really nice clouds over the mountains. I decided to head out that way and see what I could find. There were some good side roads off of US 421 that I could head down in an attempt to find more subjects to shoot. It wasn’t until I crested the mountain that I could see just how far off the clouds were. I wasn’t feeling like driving into Tennessee today, but I did see some other clouds off to the right which was in the direction of the Jeffersons. Without giving it too much thought, I made the turn and started down the highway in that direction. This is an area that I first started exploring during anniversary trips with Toni many years ago. I had forgotten what some of these back roads had to offer but decided to make some turns here and there to see if I could refresh my memory.
There was one road that I ended up on that didn’t ring a bell by name and I wasn’t seeing anything that I remembered seeing before. There was a lot of potential out here, but the light wasn’t looking good for any of it. Eventually, I did pass by a barn that I had shot during the Fall many years ago that jogged my memory. I really liked the barn and how it sat at the base of the hill but remembered the glorious Autumn colors that had surrounded it the last time. This time, everything was green and kind of bland in comparison. I didn’t stop to try any photo with it because I really didn’t think that I could improve on what I had already done with it. Now that I kind of knew where I was, I knew that there were other locations not too far from here that might be worth checking out.
No sooner than I had that thought, I passed by a small cabin that was perched on a hill by a stream. I immediately recognized this barn as the one that I had shot in the rain, holding an umbrella all those years ago. The weather was a far cry from that this time as the sun was out in full force which didn’t do this scene any favors. The green foliage was also a little boring in comparison to how I remembered the scene looking six years ago. There was no need to stop for this location.
I continued driving until I ran out of road, quite literally, and had to turn around. I noticed that the clouds were starting to come in at this point and the light was getting softer and more muted. This was the kind of lighting that I particularly enjoyed. Everything was starting to look better to my eyes, and I was still on the hunt for the next spot to set up for photos. A few minutes later, I passed by that same little cabin on the hill and took another look at it. This time, the lighting was much better and I kind of liked the lush greens around it, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. However, on the other side of the small road that branched off of the road I was on, I spotted an oddly shaped barn of some sort right alongside of the road. I am sure that I had seen this before but apparently hadn’t wanted to photograph it. Looking at the scene in the existing light with the small stream running through the Spring colors the scene took on a different view. It was quirky and full of character with that bit of decay as the visual anchor. I kind of liked it, and it was something that I had not shot before. That was about to change.
I got the truck parked on the shoulder of the road in the same place that I had parked the last time. I grabbed the long lens because I wanted to get a close up shot of the little building to get started with. The sunlight on the scene prompted this decision because there was still too much contrast for an overall view, but the shadows were going to work well for this isolation. Since I didn’t have to worry about the banding in the sky, I added the polarizer for this one and went over to the shoulder of the small road right at the embankment for the stream. I needed to get as low as I could from this particular angle so that I could get as clear a view under the small tree as possible. By spreading the tripod legs and getting the whole rig down to just above ground level, I was able to get the angle that I wanted. To keep things simple in the frame, I opted for a vertical composition that focused the viewer on the shape of the building while leaving it framed between two trees and some rocks below.
For the next few minutes, I fired off frame after frame as the sunlight changed on the building. I wasn’t sure how much shadow I was going to want and wanted to have options when I got home. There were a couple of slight changes to the composition as well as I constantly evaluated the photos that were coming up in the image review. Once I was happy with that composition, I started to look around for other ways of shooting this subject. I still liked the fact that there was a stream running through the scene and decided that I would try capturing a composition with that included. My current lens choice quickly showed its limitations, and I knew that I needed to change up the glass.
A quick trip back to the truck and I had the telephoto lens swapped out for the standard zoom. I liked how things were scaled from where I was standing and that told me that I would be very close to 50mm in my framing which meant that I didn’t need the wide-angle lens at all for this shot. I had plenty enough wide end to work with on the standard zoom. This composition was a bit more involved to put together because of all the aspects that it included. I had to make sure that the structure was placed in a strong location within the frame and at a size that kept it visible. I wanted the stream in the frame, but not the roadway to the right of it. Since there was a bit of interest in the sky, I wanted to keep a swath of the sky in the shot which would also bring in some cooler color tones that I thought would help out. The road to the left was something that I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with. It was going to be hard to compose the image without the road, but I didn’t want it to be a distraction either.
What I ended up deciding on was to include just a section of the road that similar in shape to the stream. That would allow me to bring in the tree that was framed by the road which turned into a framing element for the left side of the photo along with the dominant rock on the embankment. The little building was moved closer to the center of the frame for ease of spotting, and I angled things so that the rocks helped to lead the eyes to the building.
I think that the composition turned out pretty good and worked the way that I intended. The problem that I was running into at this point was the breeze. With the clouds, there was a storm brewing overhead. I could smell it and feel the change in atmosphere. While it felt great, and we could certainly use the rain, the breeze was causing the trees and other vegetation to move wildly. This was not an occasion to let these elements blur as it would become a distraction and take away from the scene as a whole. In order to combat this, I had to jockey around with the exposure settings to get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze everything while keeping the rapids in the stream nice and silky. It was a juggling act for sure, but one that I eventually landed on the right set of exposure values for. From there, it was a matter of waiting for the breeze to die down while the clouds covered the sun just enough to soften that light over the scene.
This was the composition that I spent the most time with between getting the exposure values right and waiting on the right light. Looking back on all of the photos, I can say that this was worth the time that I spent on it. I love how it is nearly the perfect blend of a landscape and a decay photo. It works very well in both realms. I didn’t pat myself on the back too long with this one though. Once I was sure that I had the image that I wanted, I turned my attention back to the little cabin that I had shot here in the rain before. The light was now looking very good on it with the clouds coming in. I was finally liking the greens through the scene and felt that this was going to make a pretty decent photograph.
There were some big differences to the scene that impacted how I wanted to shoot it though. I remembered that the last time, I had used the wide-angle lens in order to get more of the water below. That was mainly due to the fact that you could see the rapids as the water passed by the rocks. This time, the water wasn’t high enough to show any white water so that was no longer a concern. I wasn’t upset about that as the wide-angle lens and position of the cabin the frame had caused the already leaning wall on the right to lean even more due to the distortion. I was happy to shoot at a more conservative focal length this time and just include a small bit of the water near the curved tree trunk on the left by the cabin. I didn’t care to include the base of the tree to the right because there was a large area of vegetation that surrounded the tree right at the edge of the bank. I let that aspect define the base of the tree rather than including too much information below and creating a distraction for no reason.
To do this type of composition, I was perfectly happy to use the existing standard zoom lens as it gave me all that I needed. Because my framing had changed significantly from the last time, I was able to change up the angle of the image to correct an issue that I hadn’t cared for before. Originally, I had shot this cabin from much further to the right in an attempt to use the foreground tree as a frame for the cabin itself. It ended up just framing the nearest window and blocking most of the far side of the cabin. There was still a tree that was growing right next to the siding which added another layer of distraction. This time, I chose to use the foreground tree to specifically frame that nearest window in the “V” of the tree while allowing the rest of the cabin to be visible. This made it possible to use the more interesting side of the cabin as the focal point rather than the side of it. This also brought more attention to the single curved tree at the edge of the water which worked very well with the water occupying the lower left corner of the frame. The lower right corner was all green leaves with contrasted nicely and showed of depth in the scene.
It was really nice to be able to go through all of this discussion on composition without having to move things around while holding an umbrella to keep the lens element dry. Slowing down the process allowed me to make better choices with the scene and that provided a stronger composition while being greatly simplified. I still had the issue of the breeze which caused some motion blur that had to be dealt with, and I also found that the sky that was coming into view in the upper left was blowing out relatively easy. I had to find the happy median between boosting the ISO enough to ensure a good shutter speed and keeping it low enough so that I could underexpose the scene and safely be able to bring up the shadows. The compromise that I found made it to where I had to wait for a lull in the breeze so that things weren’t flailing wildly at the time of capture. This happened a few times and enough that I was pretty certain that I had a good frame of this scene.
Looking back, I am very glad that I shot this scene again. While I do miss the Autumn colors, I like the greens and the revised composition is much stronger. Of course, the processing is a bit more mature as well which stands to reason. It was a long time ago that I shot this one, and I hadn’t developed a lot of the techniques that I use today. I might like this one better, and it might just be a spot that I return to during the Fall to get the same composition, only with the vibrant colors of the season.
That was the last composition, and more specifically, the last frame that I shot for the day. What had started out as just a single exposure for the first barn had turned into a total of 33 exposures for three subjects and four different compositions. I managed a keeper out of each of the four compositional ideas that I had for a total of four keepers. That isn’t too shabby considering that I was fighting with the lighting through the day and had to shoot numerous exposures to deal with the different lighting intensities. That is just par for the course, and I still count this as a high hit rate because every composition that I shot turned into something worthwhile and that matters the most.
Thank you for joining me on this trek, and I certainly hope that you have enjoyed the photos. Let me know if you would like to discuss getting a print made of any of these and I’ll be happy to match you up with your very own print which is made to order. There is just no better way to enjoy photography than in the actual form that it was meant to be seen in. The amount of detail and the colors just can’t be replicated on a digital screen. I know that my love for a photograph increases exponentially when I see it in print and I know it will for you as well.
Until next time….
