Friday, October 17, 2025
Taps mic….
Is this thing on??
Hey there, excuse me. I don’t know if you remember me or not, but I’m that photographer that was posting several times a week for the longest time over the past year or so. I know that I’ve been a little absent here lately during what is arguably the most active month for a photographer out in my neck of the woods. In fact, the last time you heard from me was the final part of a blog series that was started at the end of September. That was a very epic adventure with a friend of mine where we had the opportunity to visit Eastatoe Falls in Rosman, NC, which is on private property. There were a couple of other waterfalls added in after that one for good measure, and it took me four different blog entries to cover it all. There is no doubt that the experience supercharged my want to get out into nature and do more landscape photography for a bit of a change after pretty much a solid year of doing decay work.
Well, all of that landscape energy and inspiration seemed to fall by the wayside, but not because of any lack of creativity. Nope, I’ve actually been quite creative during that trek, but what I’ve been up to I try to limit here in this blog because I’m still trying to keep this a place that is focused on my landscape and decay work. What I’ve been up to firmly falls within the realm of people photography, and I know that most of the subscribers to this blog are not as interested in that aspect of my photography and would rather see more of the landscape and/or decay in these pages. I get that, and I do try to keep the focus here which is why I’ve been relatively quiet over the past couple of weeks.
To catch you up, I’ve now done a total of two different portrait shoots with the first one being a boudoir session here in the studio where I ended up building three different sets and shot for something like five hours. I delivered 69 fully edited photos to the client in what I have to say is one of my strongest studio sessions to date. It also marks the first time in more than two years that I have done a boudoir session which was a nice change of pace with a whole different skillset that was used.
The next photo shoot was a location shoot that has been in the planning stages since September I believe. It was a conceptual session where I was going to tell a visual story to describe a part of the client’s life. It all started after hearing about her history when we were deciding what kind of photo shoot she was going to want. I keyed in on an aspect of her life and part of her story that I was just really amazed by. I had a single photo in my mind of how I wanted to capture that. Over the coming weeks, that one concept image turned into a location and a complete storyline through photos. The session took around three hours and resulted in 79 delivered fully edited images a couple of days later.
Why is all of this important? Well, first of all, I want everyone to know that I am still very much active with my photography, and the creative juices are still flowing. Second of all, I want to explain this trek in a little more context. You see, the second shoot that I was telling you about took place at Doughton Park, at the old Bluff’s Lodge. I chose this location because I felt that it would help tell the client’s story and allow the mood to be set the way that I wanted to see it. There was a good long time of putting myself in the frame of mind to capture what I see as a very beautiful place as a dark and almost sinister location. I had to think about adding lighting and how I wanted ambient light to look, and then I had to think about the attitude and look of my client during the shoot. It was an emotional session for both of us and with the following days that I spent fully emersed in the photos, I kept reliving that emotional experience. When the photos were delivered at the beginning of the week, I did an in-person reveal which then brought everything back to the forefront. Once that was done, I had to move on to the next portrait shoot that I had planned back in September. That was where the rub came in.
You see, while talking with the couple, I found out that they enjoyed Doughton Park. As you all know, I have long enjoyed this park and have been to it many times over for different photography sessions. In fact, I had a landscape workshop scheduled here for the 18th, but due to a lack of interest, that workshop was cancelled. In fact, I’m moving away from doing workshops, but I’ll touch on that more at another time. We set the location and a rough time of the month to coincide with when her pregnancy would be at the right time for the photos. Oh, did I mention that this was going to be a maternity shoot? I was excited about doing this shoot at Doughton because I have long thought that it would make for a great backdrop for a portrait session, and I was excited to have my first maternity session on the books. I had no idea just how much that storytelling session would affect me and my view of the park when I was getting everything scheduled.
Throughout the week, I was trying to get my creative energies around happy things and new life. I was trying to think about where in the park I would be able to find the best locations for the maternity session, but I just couldn’t escape the reality that I had created the previous weekend. I kept grinding my mental gears as I worked through the different stages of creativity as I was planning out the shoot. This shouldn’t be difficult because I have seen this location as a beautiful and calm place for so many years, it was kind of odd to me that I was so latched onto the “look” that I had given it earlier. I knew that a part of the maternity session was going to be centered around the Fall colors, and I had seen that Doughton looked to be at or near peak when I was up there the previous weekend. I needed to see how the colors were faring through the week and wanted to go back out there for a bit of a scouting visit to check the areas that I had in mind for the session. Of course, to get a relatively accurate assessment of the colors, I was going to need to go out there the day before the shoot which was yesterday. Yes, I got up early this morning to write this blog out knowing that for the next couple of days I will be quite busy with a new set of photos.
The scouting trip wasn’t going to be anything major, just drive up there and see how the colors were looking. I could make the drive later in the day to see how the light was falling across the area to get some better ideas of where to go at what times during the golden hour that we were planning on being there for. Of course, it would help that end knowing that the weather was going to be roughly the same, so I looked at the forecast. Both days were partly cloudy, and looking at the cloud forecast, it appeared that on Friday, the clouds would be coming in right at sunset and would be high up in the sky. This would possibly suggest strong colors in the sky at sunset. Saturday’s forecast was a little bit less cloudy, and the clouds were looking to be lower level which would change things up, but the direction of the sun would be the same. Looking at the forecast for Friday evening though got me thinking about shooting a sunset. I really didn’t have the time to be out there on a trek when I had a client shoot the following day. That would be irresponsible of me and would put their session in jeopardy of being a secondary concern.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how difficult it still was for me to get in the right mindset for this maternity shoot. One of the attributes that they had said they liked about my photography was dealing with how I captured the landscape. They wanted that introduced into my photos of them. I needed to get my mind around landscape photography for this shoot, and it wasn’t. I’m sure that once I got started with their session, I would fall back into my comfort zone with landscape work, but I also didn’t want that delay in their session because I was working with a limited time based on the falling sun. I also didn’t want to stress the Mom-to-be out as I found my groove with the shoot. The more I thought about it, the more sense going out there with the camera started to make. I could scout the area and get a few photos to cleanse the palette and get ready for a very different kind of portrait session.
I would just leave a little later in the day than I had originally planned for. I would no longer be taking the Miata but would take the truck with the camera in tow. My plan was to get out there around 5:30 which would give me a bit over an hour before sunset. That would give me time to get the best light and to see how the session would be looking through most of the time that we would be out there. It was double dipping in a way, but I felt that it was very much needed for me to perform my best for the client shoot.
When I arrived at the park around 5:30, I saw all the different people that were around. This was something that I wasn’t used to because I normally go out here early in the morning for sunrise to avoid the crowds. It was also the Fall season and that meant that many travelers were stopping here to enjoy the scenes. I really don’t like working around this many people, and I was thinking that it was going to be even worse come Saturday, but this was still easier than getting my clients out here at sunrise in the cold. I grabbed the camera and started to look for what excited me.
The first stop was a small section of the fence that is by the entry to the parking lot which I have photographed many times as a landscape photo. I was starting to wonder what it would look like as a portrait backdrop with the sun hitting it from the side. It actually looked really nice, but the tree had lost a good many of the leaves from the top, leaving a receding hairline of leaves near the bottom. It was enough to show the season, and the light was good. Not only would this work as a backdrop for my session, but it would also make for a good landscape photo. Since I had my camera out, I decided to frame it up with the telephoto lens which would get me into the focal length that I would be using for the portrait shoot. The compression looked nice and helped to focus the attention on the band of color at the bottom of the tree. There it was; my first shot in the bag. I was starting to feel my normal connection to the place coming back and that made me feel great.
I left the camera built and started up the trail to the top of the meadow where I have spent so much time over the years. I noticed that the grasses had grown up quite a bit through the meadow which indicated that the cows had been rotated to another field. This was good because I had been worried that the cows might interfere with the portrait session. The results of them not being here were quite positive with the trail very much visible snaking through the landscape. This was a very good thing because it would give me some leading lines to deal with. I started thinking about capturing them walking along the trail and different areas where they might be able to stop and pose. I was also seeing this as a landscape composition, and it all came to fruition when I got up to the rocks at the top of the meadow.
I was looking back over the trail and loved how it snaked diagonally though the lower portion of the frame and directed the eyes to the Fall colors on the nearest ridge. The sunlight was just kissing the lower mountains in the distance as they all faded off to the blue range of mountains in the background. I really liked how this looked and found a place to set the camera up for the shot. It was a very simple composition and one that didn’t take but a minute to capture. In fact, I found myself wondering if I were conducting myself more like a portrait photographer than a landscape photographer. It seemed that I wasn’t working nearly as slow as I usually do. Shooting portraits is a bit of a faster paced type of photography and I have to keep both rationales in mind when shifting between the two of them
Nevertheless, I was happy with the photo that I had gotten from the trail and started to turn my attention to the lone tree atop the hill. I had been so worried that this tree was going to fall victim to Helene that I was very excited to find it still standing earlier this year. This was the first time I had photographed it since that storm. I wasn’t able to get it from my normal spots because there was someone sitting at the base of the tree right at the trail watching the sun go down. Of course, I had no right to ask them to move, nor did the thought cross my mind. I just walked around to see what the scene would look like from a different angle that would put me lower and more than likely hide them below the hill.
The surprise that I got from doing that was that from this angle, I was kind of shooting into the sun a bit, but there was a sun dog showing just to the left of the tree. This is one of those things that I don’t usually get to photograph, and they are quite hard for me to capture without them looking over the top in terms of color. This one was faint, but it was large which doesn’t usually happen. It was worth trying to get a shot, so I planted the tripod and started to look through the lens. I was too close for the telephoto lens, so I backed way off of the trail and found that I still wasn’t liking the framing. It was time to switch lenses, and I went the complete opposite way and fitted the wide-angle lens. The polarizer was retained because it helped to give a bit more contrast to the sky, though not much with the angle to the sun I was shooting.
With the light kissing the top of the tall grasses, I chose to focus on that aspect, the tree, and the sun dog which dictated a vertical composition. Oddly enough, even though the sky was the main part of the story, I chose to keep my focus much lower in the frame by filling most of the frame with the grasses. The tree occupied the majority of the top third with the sky becoming more of a negative space to house the prism effect just to the left of the tree.
Now, if you know what a sun dog is, you will know that they can’t exist without the sun. They are actually showing the ice crystals in the atmosphere which are bending the light from the sun and usually happen in a radial fashion around the big bright orb. To give more context to the atmospheric event, I flipped the camera horizontal again and reframed to include the sun. This gave a very contrasty image, and I was seeing ghosting through the viewfinder. Since the polarizer wasn’t really doing much for me, I removed it so that I didn’t have the flare showing up in the image. This worked and I dialed in an exposure that maintained just enough shadow detail while only clipping the brightest portions of the sun. I honestly didn’t think that this photo would work out, but it actually came together with very little post processing.
This is one of the most expressive trees that I have ever worked with, and I love the fact that it is so isolated above the hill. It interacts with whatever the sky is doing quite nicely, and it is almost presenting the sun dog in the frame. The textures of the clouds add so much to the frame and with the horizontal composition, I let the sky take on much more of the frame to tell a different story about the scene. How we frame our images has a huge effect on how they are viewed and received.
I didn’t want to spend too much time here, especially shooting into the sun because I wanted to get to the next spot along the trail that offered an interesting set of trees to work with. This one is usually pretty empty from what I’ve seen over the years, and I figured that I would end up spending much of the upcoming session with this group of trees. It is only a few minutes’ walk from the dancing tree that I had just photographed, so I grabbed the camera and walked on to see what it was looking like.
As I was coming up to this section, I spotted a guy sitting in a chair by the tree that I was planning on photographing. We spoke briefly and he happily offered to move if I wanted to work with that tree. He was waiting for nightfall to get some astrophotography done. Since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to capture, and I was mainly just scoping the area, I said that I didn’t need him to move but was very appreciative of the offer. I spent some time looking around the area to determine what angles might work during the following evening. I eventually decided to go to the other side of the trees to the trail where I know of a pretty good composition that worked well with a wide-angle lens.
When I got back there, I noticed that the grass was very overgrown here which changed the look of the trail quite a bit. The area was also in shadow which I had expected noting what direction the sun was in. I also noticed the colors of the sky just around the bend of the trail which really caught my eye. I wasn’t sure if the camera would be able to capture the full dynamic range of the scene, but it was just pretty enough to force my hand and give it a shot.
I’ve shot this composition a few times before and even taught it on a mentoring session a couple of years back. The lighting was unlike anything that I had tried here in the past though, and that made it interesting for me. I went over to where I would normally situate the camera and found that achieving the composition was much easier than in the past thanks to the overgrown grasses and the fact that so much of the scene was in shadow. It all came together without much fuss at all while I am normally working the camera position by the inch to achieve what I wanted.
I really liked the mystery of the shadowed portions of the scene and chose to keep them pretty dark with just enough detail to keep them from being totally black. The main part of the frame that I wanted to capture was the light in the distance which actually filled up a very small portion of the frame. It provided so much depth though, and I was really hoping that I would be able to make this work in the processing phase of the trek. With scenes like this, there is just such a fine balance between light and dark with what looks natural, yet painterly. It is far too easy to get too much detail, and have it look like an HDR image from the early 2000’s or get it all blocked up and have the shadows create too much weight to the scene. I was hoping that I had captured the raw visual information in a way that would allow me to fine tune that balance the way that I wanted it to look.
Not spending too much time on that very dark scene, I moved around the trail to get another view of the tree that the guy was sitting under. From this angle, he was covered by the greenery at the base of the tree and that worked very well for me. I liked the way the sky was starting to look dramatic and there was a good bit of the blush from the early sunset thanks to the incoming high clouds that had been forecasted. I can actually say that for the first time in a very long time, the forecast had been dead on.
With the direction of the light, I was really looking at another scene when much of the landscape was going to be in shadow. For this, I didn’t really want that kind of darkness in the areas that I needed texture. A grad filter wasn’t going to be a good option because it would end up darkening the tree too much. I decided that I would go for an HDR image, but not that kind of photo that I was talking about a second ago. I just wanted to be able to capture what my eyes were seeing with the scene where there was a bit of color in the leaves, and the grasses were picking up some of the warm tones from the low sun.
that sun was still quite bright to the left, so I made sure to keep it out of the frame as I focused my attention on the tree and a large boulder in the foreground. There was more than two stops difference in the light and dark areas, so I decided to do three images with 1.3 stops of difference between them to be blended later in Lightroom. Fortunately, there was very little breeze and that fact allowed me to do the series because very little was going to move between each shot. I still went through them very quickly so that the clouds didn’t move between the exposures.
When I was finished with the HDR series of images, I started to look around to see if there was another composition that might work out. I really wanted to include the sun, but it was still much too bright to bring into the frame as it would push everything into shadow. There were lots of clouds below the sun that it was going to be going through shortly. Hoping that would diffuse the sun just enough to make a shot possible, I composed the image that I wanted with the tree in the right upper corner atop the large rocky surface. This allowed me to place the sun diagonal from both of these elements to create a triangle. I then just had to wait for the sun to dip behind the clouds.
It didn’t take long before that started to happen, but I quickly realized that the sun was much brighter than I had hoped behind the very thin clouds. I had to do something to control the sun, but I didn’t think that an HDR would work here because of how the sun was moving. I needed this to be a single shot, so I pulled out my 2-stop reverse grad which is made for situation like this. It would allow me to darken the horizon by two stops while leaving the bottom and the top of the frame unaffected.
This filter did just what I needed it to do, and what it darkened beyond the sky was at a point that I could pull it back in post without too much problem. This was just another way of dealing with the lighting that I had to work with, and part of why I spend so much time talking about getting it right in the field. There is always more than one way to accomplish things in photography but having the ability to effectively do different things gives you the opportunity to pick the right option for the specific situation. These are essentially the same photograph with the sun being the biggest variable. They two images were captured in very different ways though with very similar outcomes. It is just all in what makes the most sense at the time.
At this point, the sun was dropping pretty quickly, and I knew that sunset was not far off. I was wanting to get to a view off of the parking lot for the actual sunset to show off the rolling hills in the distance. That meant that I was going to need to head back that way so I would have time to get set up. I was quickly walking back along the trail and passing my favorite tree when I noticed that there was nobody sitting beneath it now. I had a clear shot of it, and the sky was looking really nice over the area that I had just been.
I didn’t have to give it much thought at all before I was setting the camera up with the wide-angle lens that works so well for this tree. Off in the distance, I could see that the guy who had been over by the other tree was starting to move and packing his chair up. It was small enough in the frame that I wasn’t going to have a problem removing him in post, so I didn’t let his presence bother me. I just got the shot that I was after that got some of the Fall colors to complement the tones in the sky. It didn’t take but a couple of frames to get this one in the bag, so the delay wasn’t long at all.
There was a moment of lingering as the other photographer was moving as I was hoping that he would move out of frame and save me from the 30 seconds that it would take in post to remove it. He didn’t move out of frame and actually started coming my way. It would be a minute before he would dip below the ridge, so I decided that I was happy with what I had. Getting to the next spot was more important than saving myself time in post processing for that little bit of added effort.
Not long after I left the top of the meadow, I was back in the parking lot again and going over to the side. There were a ton of vehicles parked there which didn’t make me very happy. As I got closer, there were not as many people as I had suspected, but still way more than I wanted to see. I was even greeted by an overzealous chihuahua that was perched atop a picnic table. I was willing to overlook all of this because I knew that there was a good shot to be had here. However, when I actually got in close, I found that the same tall grass that I had been loving about the park for the past hour or so was actually ruining the composition that I had in mind. There was no clearing to get the rolling hills that I was after here. The light was starting to happen, and I didn’t have much time to react. I had to figure out something quick.
The best thing that I could think of was to go back up to the top of the meadow because I knew of another area where I might be able to get a similar view of the distant mountains. Actually, there were two areas that might work, but I would have to get there quickly before the light faded. I started the hustling hike back up the trail that took about five minutes or so at the pace I was walking. The first spot that I wanted to work with wasn’t going to work because the sun was much too bright, and what I needed to make the shot work was going to be too dark because of the sun’s position. I had one more option left, which was just over the ridge on the other side of that dancing tree.
When I crested the hill, I realized that the color in the sky was not as pronounced in this direction, but the light was much more even across the scene. I could see some chances of introducing depth into the scene both by foreground interest and the shape of the tree line. My initial thought for the composition had been to use the telephoto lens to really focus on the distant mountains so that was what I fitted to the camera. It didn’t take me long to realize that was not the right choice. The composition just wasn’t coming together and looked too flat. I didn’t think that the wide-angle would do any better as the mountains would get too small in the distance. That left me with the standard zoom which allowed me to get a bit more depth in the scene by getting close to a small tree that introduced the background. It was narrow enough to keep the mountains at an appropriate scale in the scene while showing more of the surroundings.
The part that I really liked was the strip of color through the sky that seemed to go in opposition to the rest of the cloud shapes. The bits of yellow at the horizon worked very well with the cooler tones of the evening sky. They sun had set, and this was what I thought was the last bit of color to the scene. There was still enough ambient light to allow me to capture the detail of the landscape as well as the Fall colors in the midground trees. It was a surprisingly effective image considering it was a last-minute attempt to get one final image before the light was gone. With that, I was happy and packed up the camera to head back to the truck.
On that short hike back, I saw that I had given up too soon and that there was a very strong second blush that was happening in the sky. All of those high clouds were picking up the color from the sun which was now well below the horizon. I should have seen this coming but really thought that the sun had been snuffed out by the clouds. I was faced with an issue. The sky was awesome, but the camera was packed away. I could get it out quickly enough, but didn’t have a composition in mind, and this kind of light usually doesn’t stick around long. It might just be better to enjoy it than try to photograph it, but here I was with the camera and we all know what was going to happen next.
I pulled the camera back out and fitted the telephoto lens because I could see some of the rolling hills in the distance. I started to frame up composition after composition in an attempt to capture the colors in the sky. Those colors were remaining which made me happy, but the compositions that I was coming up with were just not all that engaging to look at. They all looked like snapshots without much thought, and to be fair, that is pretty much what they were. I didn’t have time to move somewhere else, so I had to work with what I had.
I started to look critically at the scene and found that what I liked about it was a sliver of light at the horizon. The color was very much restricted to a small distance above the horizon and there was only one tree to give a sense of scale to the scene. What I was seeing was a panorama. Would I have time to set that up and shoot it before the light failed? I had to give it a try, so I leveled the tripod, made sure the camera stayed level while panning it from left to right. I flipped it vertically and zoomed in to get just that sliver that I was after. I made one pass with nine frames and realized that I had started at the brightest side and moved to the darkest side which was the wrong thing to do. I changed up my exposure settings for the now darker scene and slightly overexposed knowing that when I finished the series of shots at the brightest portion, that light level would have gone down. The result would be a very evenly exposed image despite several seconds between each frame.
The second run was for ten frames which captured just a bit more of the scene from left to right. It worked out better than the first which was good, but there was now no more light to work with as the colors were now quickly fading. There wasn’t time for another string of images to improve on the composition, so I just packed the camera up and finished the walk back to the truck which was in pure darkness just a few minutes after packing up the camera.
I had come to Doughton for a quick scouting visit for a maternity shoot that I have scheduled for like five hours from now. I figured that I would try to reconnect with the beauty of the par through some photography while I was here. In a bit over an hour, I had shot 76 frames which resulted in ten keepers which is really quite amazing to me. I was really looking for two or three if I was lucky since I wasn’t really in the mode of doing landscape photography to start with. Regardless of how many photos I got from this impromptu trek, the main goal has been realized. I’m now looking at it as a landscape again based purely on beauty. I’m ready to put some wonderful people in the frame and let this park capture what is soon to be a new life entering the world.
Thank you for joining me on this trek. I do hope that you have enjoyed the photos and the story that went along with it. If you are interested in seeing the photography that I have been working on through the first part of the month and the photos from the session here in a few hours, I’ll be sharing many of those photos in some upcoming Behind the Camera instalments. You can also see examples of my portrait work by checking out my Portrait Services tab at the top of this website. I maintain that I am not going to make this website about my portrait work, but I do need to include information on it as it does help to pay the bills. If you, or someone you know is looking for a photographer, I always love talking to new potential clients. I’m open to about anything except for weddings, so let’s chat about your portrait needs.
Of course, if landscape photography is your thing and you are interested in having any of these photos to hang on your wall, I do offer prints of all my work. You can select directly from the website for some of the smaller sized prints, or you can contact me directly for custom, larger orders on different media. I love to make prints and share my visions with folks, so if you ever see a photo that you might like to have hanging on your wall, please let me know.
It is time now to start getting things all ready for my session coming up very soon. I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll be working on the photos from that session for a couple of days. After that, I might be able to get back to some of my regularly scheduled photography, but there is still one more client session that I have in the works which is going to prove to be a very fun session. It will be in the studio and there will be a smoke machine used for it. It should be quite interesting if it all comes together like I am hoping.
Until next time….
