Saturday, March 28, 2026
Just like that we are back! If you missed the last entry, I had just spent a bit of time with a barn on the far side of Wilkes County. If you would like to catch up, I’ll wait right here for you. You know, you wouldn’t have missed that entry had you been subscribed to the blog which is very easy to do. If fact, if you haven’t yet, why don’t you drop by and take care of that real quick before we get into this second part of the day. Since I’m taking care of some administrative things at the moment, I would like to also mention that I have changed up the gallery store where you can purchase prints. I was never really satisfied with the way that it was set up before since there are just so many options that can be made available to my clients and the fact that every photo that I share here in the blogs and galleries is available as a print. I wanted to simplify things and also get away from the division on how prints are ordered. Now, I have it set up to where you get to have a bit of a dialog with me prior to ordering. This makes sure that I get your order right, and that you are certain as to what you are getting. It takes the guesswork out of the equation and gives us a chance to make sure that what you are ordering will suit your needs. I’ve always thought is a very personal thing and should never be a cookie cutter type of transaction. This new way of doing things just feels better to me, and that is what I’m working towards this year with the whole arrangement around my photography. I’m focusing less on the business and more on the art of it all and this just fits that theory much better.
Now that I’ve got all of that taken care of, I imagine that everyone is caught up and knows why I ventured out on a sunny day with no real clear expectation of what I wanted to shoot. I was happy with the first thirteen frames of the day and would have been happy heading home to work on those photos before Toni got home. However, since it was a weekend, there is a spot in North Wilkesboro that I have had lots of good luck at in the past for getting some old cars photographed. They are always closed on the weekends which means that I won’t be in the way of their operation and will have a bit easier of a time getting any photos that might be waiting for me.
I had been by this restoration shop during the ride in the Miata and hadn’t really seen anything that interested me. Historically, the cars in the parking lot change from time to time and it is always worth going by there if I’m in the mood for an old car. It wasn’t so much that I was in the mood as it was just a chance to see what was there and if the light would work for anything. If not, I really wasn’t out anything but a few minutes extra driving to get home.
When I arrived, things looked as they had when I last saw it. The only old car on the lot was a large ’70’s Cadillac that had been pretty well stripped down. There was nothing there for me to photograph, though I think that is the same car that I had shot a few years ago when it was all put together after first arriving. I was in the parking lot anyway, so as I was getting turned around, I was looking to see if there was anything hiding with potential. About the time that I had that thought, I spotted the front of a British Roadster sitting beside a large Ford truck. It was about the same maroon color as the last MGBGT that I had shot a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t all that thrilled with the color, but it was sitting fully in the shade with no dappled light hitting it at all. I knew that this was a really good scenario for lighting and that gave me pause to really consider this car further. While the color wasn’t great, it was in good light, and it was an MG Midget which was a much earlier car than what I’ve been able to photograph before. The uniqueness of the design was enough to force my hand because I knew that there was a good possibility that it would be gone in the next few days as they did what they were going to do with it inside.
Once I got parked, I walked over to the car to just see what kind of compositions I might be able to come up with. There were the obvious ones around the front of the car that I knew I could work with, but what really interested me was the rear of the car. Sure, the majority of it was very much like the MGBGT, but the bumpers were very different and were actually a two-piece design. This gave a different dimension to a composition that I had shot of that other MG earlier. It was that single composition that prompted me to go ahead and get the camera out. I knew that for this subject, the correct lens was going to be the telephoto lens which is great at picking out the details.
The problem that I ended up facing was the distance to the wall that I had to work with. Fortunately, the wall was just a slight riser to get to a raised platform which I was able to get the tripod set up on to give me the angle that I felt was right for the composition. It all hinged on the shape of the bumper and how it interacted with the taillight and the reverse light. I liked the abstract nature of the shapes even though the taillight gave away what the viewer was looking at. As with the other MG, the colors did work together with the orange, and I did the processing very similar to how I had done that last one. It was the light and dark contrast that really established the shapes within the frame, and I liked that the reverse light was included here and just happened to be near a darker feature on the bumper that was roughly the same size. The whole composition just seemed to gel together which I was very happy about.
There were only two frames dedicated to this opening composition with a slightly different exposure for depth of field. It was the second frame that won out as the keeper, but just as with the barn that I had shot earlier in the day, I was off to a great start with this subject with a very early photograph turning into a keeper. That energized me and I was ready to start looking at the other parts of the car to figure out what I wanted to photograph next.
I would have loved to have gotten a full and establishing shot of the car at this point. I had looked at the scene to determine if that was going to be possible, but with the bright yellow Ford parked on one side, and the cab of a GMC pickup on the other side, I was very limited in angles that would work. The building behind the car also had a lot of distractions going on which would have just overly complicated a shot of the whole car. Instead of going that route, I chose to explore more of the detail and abstract work that I have been trying to figure out this year.
Of course, images of the front corners of cars might as well be my calling card as I have loved working with headlights for many years now. I wanted to avoid that creative trap and try to change how I saw the front of this car. What I decided that I liked about it was the grill because it was a very early example of one which I had not photographed before. I started off looking around the emblem as I have done in the past but quickly determined that the details in the emblem were just the adhesive residue that was left after the emblem fell off. While it provided some interest, it was not a story worth telling. The next best solution to capturing the grill was the way that it all curved on the sides. I needed more than just the grill and decided that the patina on the passenger’s side provided loads of texture and visual interest to go along with the grill.
The problem that I was running into with that was that the part that I was wanting to photograph was dangerously close to the headlight which pretty much had to be included to capture what I had determined I liked about the scene. I knew that the headlight was going to be bigger and brighter than the portion that I wanted to concentrate on which would cause that element to overpower the story that I was wanting to share. The composition didn’t work without the headlight, and it didn’t work with the headlight. The only solution that I could come up with was to include only a portion of the headlight and use it like an additional shape.
Once I decided that was a good solution, I realized that the arch of the headlight bezel was very similar to the arch of the grill and the trim within the grill. This pattern repetition was going to give a very nice framework to the rust and patina that I was interested in capturing. I also liked the different levels that the hood and the fender were at which added to the visual interest. Looking through the viewfinder, I had a wonderful balance of elements, and nothing was overpowering the parts of the frame that I was wanting to capture. The vertical orientation really focused the attention on the difference between the hood and the fender which would have been missed entirely had the entire headlight been included. Everything just felt right and it made for a fantastic image. That turned into the third and fourth images that I shot of this car. That last frame was the keeper giving me two out of four exposures that worked very well with this car.
From here, I wanted to explore more of the gill since that was what had brought me to this part of the car in the first place. To do that, I knew that I needed to rotate the camera horizontally. The wider frame would accentuate the horizontal lines more than the vertical taking the emphasis off of the panel gap and bring it back to the grill. The headlight was included in a similar fashion as it had been with the vertical frame. The reason was still the same as it matched up with the grill shape and helped to draw the attention to that aspect.
With the depth of field that I wanted to use to blur the headlight, I had to really work on where I was focusing to get the depth of field over the areas that were crucial. This took a bit of experimenting in addition to using the depth of field preview button. Once I landed on the right place to focus, I had to adjust the aperture to get just the right blur in just the right places. This took four attempts and it was the last one that I found worked the best of them all.
Not wanting to get too caught up at the front of the car, I started to look for other abstract opportunities around the car. One area that I had already spotted was down at the bottom of the front fenders (wings in England). It was here that there was a small badge that told a bit about the car as well as the “Midget” nameplate affixed in the black lower portion of the rockers. There was a nice curve to the panel gap between the two emblems and the chrome trim strip that I found interesting as well from a geometrical point of view. This what I decided to work on next for a composition.
The angle that I liked the best included some of the greenery growing through the parking lot. I wasn’t really wild about that to start with, but after thinking about it for a brief time, I liked the green and maroon of the car along with the blue hints. The colors seemed to work together. What I had to pay particular attention to was the breeze that was starting up. I didn’t want to have the greenery blurred by motion because I felt that would be a distraction to the image. I had to time it right between the gusts of wind. That proved to be difficult and I ended up having to boost the ISO to get the shutter speed quicker as I tried to get things still in the frame.
There was a total of four frames shot trying to get the grasses to be still, and I ended up with only two where there was no motion. Ironically, the best one was the first exposure that I made that was more or less the test shot. I hadn’t really looked for motion in that one as I wasn’t paying attention to the breeze at that point. I just had assumed that the grass was blurred by motion. As it turned out, there was no wind for that shot at all, and the breeze had come in after I had decided I liked the composition. Whatever the case, I was very happy that I had gotten the shot when I did because it was the only one that had no motion at all in the frame. The last one was usable, but the first one was by far the best one.
I did like the abstract nature of this one with the way the panel lines came together and the different colors. The two badges established a lot of the story of this car and did so in a very minimalist way. The patina gave another aspect of the story as well as providing a lot of visual interest to the whole scene. In short, this was a very effective composition while including very little of the car. That was just what I was after with these isolations, and I certainly consider this one a success.
Not wanting to linger on a good composition, I decided to move around the car and look for something completely different to shoot. While I was on the passenger side, I took note of the antenna that was mounted to the fender in front of the windshield frame. There was something interesting and yet abstract about the shapes that I was seeing. It was enough to prompt me to try and find a composition here.
Now, I have shot compositions around the A pillar of cars for years now and that is not something new for me. However, I chose to look at this from a completely different angle (literally) from what I have done in the past. While normally, I will elevate the camera well above the car, I was liking the view from down low. I started to look through the viewfinder to see how things were lining up and at what focal length things worked out the best. Seeing this detail from just a few feet above the ground was something very interesting as this just isn’t a vantage point that we would normally see. The curve of the fender on the car really helped out with this composition and I started to play around with the polarizer to change how the tonality on the painted surface was represented.
The next thing that I started to work through was the depth of field. Normally, for a shot of this part of the car, I am looking for most everything to be in focus. That didn’t seem like the right thing to do here, and I chose to go with a very shallow depth of field instead. I figured that the most interesting part of the scene was the antenna with the flathead screw visible. That meant that this was going to be the part that was in focus. I wanted the windshield post to be blurred into just being a shape and a lighter part of the frame. I really liked how the separation was working out with the shallow depth of field, and I could see a photo unlike anything I had done before.
Of course, I knew that this was going to be done in black and white because that maroon color had nothing at all to do with the story that I was telling through this photo. It was all about light and dark as well as the shapes within the frame. I also knew that doing this in black and white would also add to the abstract nature of things which was a bonus in my eyes. I’m really happy with the end result of this composition that I only shot two frames of in order to get it right. It is definitely a composition that I will keep in my mind and use again if the opportunity presents itself.
The last composition that I worked took a bit longer to work out than the antenna one. This was another shot of the front corner of the car and ironically was centered on a large portion of the corner that I had cut out from the earlier compositions from that same corner. Normally, I would have included everything from the tires to the grill in a corner composition. This has always been very successful at establishing the design language of the car. However, I’ve come to realize that it tells too much of the story in most situations and I can do better at really dialing in what I like the most about this part of the car. The grill had already filled my frame for a couple of different compositions. It was the damage on the other side of the headlight that was interesting me now. The really surprising aspect was that I was not wanting to include the headlight yet again.
In all the years that I have photographed automobiles; it has been the headlights that have really drawn me in. I see them as the eyes and therefore the window to the soul of the car. However, when shooting details on a car, the headlights become very big and dominant in the scene. Since these are the typical sealed beam headlights, they are all the same between most cars of the era. Keeping that in mind, I wanted to change the narrative of the photos to capture the unique parts of the car. In this case, the unique part was the way that the damage appeared on the fender.
I played around with some different concepts and decided that I needed the visual anchor of the marker light which actually pointed to the area of the fender that I found most intriguing. The problem was, this composition lacked balance for me, and I needed something to keep the eyes in the frame. Once again, the headlight bezel was chosen as an additional element that framed the image and provided a shape on the edge of the frame.
Since the front of the marker light was a point, that tended to point the eyes to the right of the frame and without something on the edge to block exit from the frame, the eyes would just leave and not really spend any time on the way that the patina appeared. By including the bezel as I have, the eyes are stopped between two elements that have roughly the same luminosity. The soft lines of both shapes pair nicely and keep the eyes on the patina that defined the damaged portion.
Once again, I went with black and white here as that reduced the composition down to the elemental parts of shape and brightness. This simplified view of the scene worked very well and created a very nice abstract look. I think it might have worked better flipped horizontally, but there was text on the marker light that would have become confusing had I done this as a mirror image. I worked the crop out to flow as well as possible in this direction to avoid any issues with reading from left to right. I’m very happy with how it turned out in the end.
Ironically, that was the last of four frames that I shot of this composition bringing to a total of 31 images for the day. I’m really surprised that the first and last frames of the day turned out to be keepers as well. Considering I went out on a sunny day with no clouds at all, I consider myself very lucky to have found anything at all that I found photogenic. To have landed on two different scenes was very lucky indeed. The nine keepers from the day happened to be the icing on the cake though. I never would have thought that I would have come away with so many from just two scenes. There were three from the barn, and six from this little car that I wasn’t even able to get an overall establishing shot of. Maybe I’m learning to see things differently, not only in terms of compositions, but also in terms of lighting. Whatever the case, this was a very fun trek and I’m glad that you were able to join me after the fact. Hopefully you have enjoyed the photos as well as the story along the way.
Until next time…
