Tuesday, August 26, 2025
I got into bed around 11pm last night which was pretty normal for me. I had just had an epiphany about a photo session that I was working on planning and was starting to think about those details as I was trying to go to sleep. Dinner had been late, and I had eaten more than I should have which was making me a little uncomfortable. The stromboli that I had eaten was a little salty which was making me very thirsty as well. I was surprised when I went to sleep rather quickly. I should not have come as a shock when I woke up at 1:45. I was thirsty, and my brain was starting to roll with thoughts about the photo shoot which turned into thoughts about another one that is the process of being planned. During all of this, I figured out how I wanted to finish out the Behind the Camera that I had started yesterday. Oh yeah, and I was still thirsty.
After laying there for about an hour, I finally got up and went to the kitchen to get some water. That helped, but it did nothing for letting me go back to sleep. Somewhere around 3am, I grabbed my phone and started to look at the weather for the day to start planning how the day was going to look. It was going to be a nice day with a great temperature for going on a long drive with the Miata. I figured that I could go and visit Dad, but that wouldn’t be until the afternoon. Surely, I would be asleep through most of the morning and that would work out fine.
Well, a little before Toni’s alarm rang at 4am, I was still wide awake and watched her get up and start her morning routine before going to work. Since I was still wide awake, I offered to take her to work since her eye was still bothering her from some problems that she had with it last week. She insisted that she could drive herself. I knew that was going to be the case and already had a counter ready for that. This was something that I had been thinking about through the night as well.
You see, we had ended up by her job last week after a doctor’s appointment and she wanted to show me a Dodge truck that was in a field behind a business. Before we got there, she spotted an Oldsmobile G-body car, I think it was a Cutlass. She really loves that body style and is always talking about the 442 variant of it. Of course, I always tell her what the real 442 is, but this is the one that she likes, and this car reminded her of it. It was parked by a shop of some sort that looked kind of vacant, but I wasn’t paying that close of attention to it as we passed by since I was pointing out the car to her. After we turned on the road where her job was, I slowed, and she pointed out the truck that we had come out here to look at. It was a ’70’s Dodge from appearances and it was behind a car dealer. There was some clutter behind it on the other side of the trees that was going to make it kind of difficult to get a composition, but if I could get in close, I might be able to mask the clutter with a wide-angle lens.
It was not a fantastic truck by any stretch, but there was plenty of patina on it, and it looked like it had been recently pulled out of a barn. The colors were good with the trees behind it, and I decided to put it away in my mental notebook for another time. I was thinking possibly in the Fall before the leaves dropped, I might be able to get something a bit better than what I was seeing here at the time. It was worth some consideration at least.
We continued down the road and at the next intersection was another auto repair shop that caught my eye. There were two old Ford tractors parked beside the building. One was in the open and the other was under a shelter. I wasn’t able to get a good look because there was a truck blocking my view from the roadway. They were interesting looking and had a slightly different shape than I was used to seeing from the old Ford tractors. I didn’t care much for the backdrop of the building, but that was where they were, and I thought that there might still be a way to get a photo or two of the tractors if I really tried. If nothing else, I was sure that I would be able to get an isolation or two. It was enough to get me thinking about how I would want to photograph them.
Well, all of these thoughts were starting to come into my head as I was trying to go to sleep…and failing miserably. I hoped that I would be able to doze for a bit while Toni was in the shower, but I just laid there in bed staring at the ceiling fan rotating and recalling the scene from Major Payne where they “borrowed” a scene from Apocalypse Now. As you can tell, my mind wouldn’t stop thinking long enough for me to get back to sleep. Realizing the futility of it all, I grabbed my phone and did my morning posting to social media to get that out of the way. Getting something accomplished might have allowed me to rest my brain and go to sleep.
No such luck, none at all. Toni was now in the kitchen making her breakfast and I was still wide awake. I decided to get up and start getting ready to see if she would let me drive her into work. I even pulled the card that I was going to try and shoot the scenes nearby which would have me out there anyway. She refused and insisted on driving herself. I couldn’t take her hostage; she would have bitten my kneecaps. I abandoned that idea and decided that I was just going to have a very long morning before it was time to head out to see Dad.
The weather was looking good for the scenes that I had been thinking about shooting, and right after sunrise was probably going to be the best time to get the photos. Well, I was awake and dressed….might as well go.
When I got done with breakfast and my morning routine at the computer, I loaded up the camera and headed out behind Toni who had about a 20 minute head start on me. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go because I had really only started to put the idea together a few hours before. I would be getting there at the right time though. I will say this was one of the few times that I was happy to see just partly cloudy conditions. I was wanting to get some light from the sun to add a bit of depth to the scene if at all possible. It was shaping up to be a nice morning. It would have been even better had I not been sleepy driving down the road. Of course, I would be ready to go to sleep now after trying all night long.
I was committed and wanted to get the tractor and the Dodge photographed if at all possible. I could do the tractor from essentially the sidewalk, so I wasn’t worried about needing permission. I knew that the shop was going to be closed and with it at a very busy intersection, I wasn’t worried about looking like I was up to no good. When I arrived, I did double check that there were no signs indicating that I couldn’t be there. I say nothing except for signs prohibiting smoking and vaping. I engaged in neither, so I was good to go.
I pulled out the camera as I started to take a closer look at the two tractors. They were both Fords and appeared to be about the same model year with some subtle differences and badging. The one that I was probably most interested in was under the overhang and had a large For Sale sign propped up on the front bumper. I wasn’t comfortable touching or moving anything, so getting an overall photo of that tractor was going to prove difficult. The other one was in a better position outside of the shelter.
I was able to spot a clear angle where none of the surrounding clutter would sneak into the frame. There was a blue section of wall at the base of the building that went really well with the blue in the sky above. That allowed me to include the sky which also meant that I could get the interesting lines of the roof sections in the photo. I started out with my standard zoom in a horizontal orientation and tried to get the scene to look right in the camera. The dimensions were not working out and the visual balance was way off. I needed to do something different here.
Since I was really wanting to include more of the sky, I decided to try the composition flipped as a vertical frame. This seemed to work better and allowed for a more balanced composition. I was also able to include less on either side of the tractor which reduced the chance of clutter entering into the frame. The only issue that I had with this composition was the way that the trees were creeping into the edge on the left. I decided that I would permit that because I had similar trees showing up over the roof on the right and there was a certain amount of symmetry to this arrangement.
Now that I was happy with the composition and the histogram looked good, I fired off an exposure. I could see that there was some clipping in the clouds that I had missed in the histogram, so I backed off on the exposure and fired off another one. That brought the clipping down a good bit, but there was still one section of clouds that was causing problems. Another click on the shutter, and I had the exposure nailed.
After checking everything for any reflections from passing cars I called that first composition done and a success. I was off to a good start it would seem. I didn’t see any other way to get a good overall establishing shot of the tractor, so I started to look for details that I could photograph. One of the things that really caught my eye was the large emblem on the front of the grill and I really liked how “plump’ the grill shell looked.
I decided to get a composition of that aspect, and I started to work out the framing for it. It only took a minute or two in order to find the right angle that I wanted to photograph. I didn’t go straight on because I needed to get some color balance to the frame and that was best done by including the wall that was painted blue. Even with that addition, I was pretty sure that I was going to have to work with the saturation of the red tones to calm the photo down a bit.
The composition did work out quite well, but I wanted to try some different depths of field by changing the aperture a bit. I ended up firing of four exposures of this composition with the last one being the keeper. It also helped that by this point; I had realized that I was reflecting in the emblem and had moved over to the side to eliminate myself completely. This second composition worked out pretty well and I felt that things were going great.
I went to the tractor under the shelter to look for some isolations, but nothing was really jumping out at me. I could have done a similar shot of the front of the hood, but there were chairs in the way, and I wasn’t going to be able to avoid those. The more I looked, the more I figured that this tractor was a lost cause. I went back to the one in the open one more time to see if there was anything that I missed.
I did like the Ford script on the sides of the hood, and they both came with headlights below the badge. The difference was that the left side had a better patina to it, and I felt that it also read better from left to right. I started to frame up a composition to show this aspect off and decided to position the camera so that the script would appear a bit horizontal, but not due to a Dutch Tilt. Nope, this was all elevation of the camera and having it pointing in at a 45-degree angle to the tractor. The camera itself was level for this composition.
I must have been living right because I only shot a single frame of this image and felt that it was solid enough just as it was. I had the limited depth of field that I wanted to blur the ground and to keep the Ford script as the only thing in tack sharp focus. The balance looked good, and I was satisfied that this was what I was wanting. After that, I was able to move on to the next one. I just needed to find the next composition.
There was really nothing at all left on this tractor that caught my eye. I looked pretty hard too. Just in case I had missed something with the other tractor, I went back to it for one last look. I tried a composition with the seat and fenders that also showed the Ford name, but nothing there worked enough to bother pressing the shutter button. I looked around the badging on the sides of the hood, but there was just too much information there and I didn’t like how the composition would have to look. I didn’t care for the looks of this tractor from the sides at all the more I looked. However, that nose was still interesting me with a very unique badge affixed.
As I had mentioned, I wasn’t able to get this shot from either side. I didn’t like it straight on because it just looked boring. What else was there? Well, I considered raising the camera a good bit, getting it in close and using a wide-angle focal length to enhance the perspective distortion. I would focus on the badge and shoot a narrow depth of field so that the receding elements of the tractor would blur out further enhancing the impact of the grill badge.
As I started to put this together in practice it was looking great. Of course, I went with a vertical presentation to really accentuate the length of the hood and the strong verticals of the grill. I kept the crop tight on the sides so that the grill dominated, but in the rear, I had to include the wheels and fenders which I proportioned just so keeping the visual balance. The end result had all the punch that I was expecting and after a little bit of work dodging and burning for contrast, I was extremely happy with how this one turned out. In fact, it is my favorite from the day. Not too bad for shooting a tractor that I didn’t think was going to work at all for a photo.
There were only three frames shot of this composition with slightly different exposure settings and focal points. This brought the shutter count to only 11 frames for the morning. I was thinking that I had two, maybe three images from those 11 frames, but as you can see, there were a total of four keepers. I really should have been happy with that, but I wanted to go and try that Dodge.
Now, I had already looked the business up and found that it didn’t open until 9am, which was still over an hour away. It took all of 5 minutes to get to the location from where the tractors were. The business looked closed, but the Dodge was still sitting there in the back of the business. I looked for a way that I might be able to shoot it from the parking lot, but there was just no way with the background like it was. I attempted to call the number hoping that it would go to an on-call employee since they offered tow services as well. It just went to a voicemail which I didn’t leave. I decided to go down the driveway to another commercial location next door to see if I could get a better angle that way. When that didn’t work, I returned to the main shop and started to look for business hours, or an indication that somebody might be coming in early.
Not only did I not find business hours, I found a lot of spider webs between the vehicles by the front door. This indicated that it had been some time since someone had walked through there. I was actually starting to wonder if the business was still in…uh…business. There was no way that I was going to get the Dodge shot and the more I looked at it, the less I was interested in it. I decided to go the back way home to see if there was anything else that caught my eye. I knew that there was a shop in Booneville that had a nice Chrysler that I might want to shoot, and it would be on the way.
As I was driving down the main artery from Yadkinville to Booneville, I recalled pointing out the G-Body to Toni the other day, so I started to look for it again. It was going to be a little more difficult from this angle because it was on the back side of the building in this direction. However, I did spot the building I thought was by the car and slowed down to turn in. As I slowed, I could see the car sitting there by itself on the side of the building. It wasn’t particularly rusty or decayed. It was kind of newish for what I like to photograph, but as I looked at the full scene, I realized that with the building, the car told a story and there was an aspect of decay and neglect here.
I got parked on the shoulder to make sure that I wasn’t going to be in the window as a reflection and walked over to check out the angles. The car was kind of far away from the building, but I figured that I could frame it in a way that would shorten that distance a bit. It was either going to be the wide-angle lens or the standard zoom. I chose to start out with the latter and got to work finding where the camera needed to be positioned to make this work. I actually tried a number of different spots for the camera and tried several different heights for the camera. I shot three frames with the standard zoom and then decided that I needed to switch out to the wide-angle lens for what I thought was working better.
There were an additional eight frames shot with the wide angle as I worked in really close and tried different heights. What I thought was going to be my favorite of the bunch was one of the last two frames which were the same, only waiting for the wind to die down so that the greenery hanging from the front of the building wasn’t moving. When I had those captured, I saw no reason to shoot isolations of either the car or the building. I had to get home anyway and try to get these photos edited before heading out again. If I played my cards right, I would be able to get the blog done as well.
There were no more stops on the way home and I got the images imported into the computer. I culled the 22 frames down to nine and then worked out the last five images which were all of the car and building. I whittled those down to one shot with the 24-70mm lens and one done with the 16-35mm. It was the wide-angle that I processed first and I did it as a color image. It kept appearing too garish and I kept going back and working the colors, but I never got to the point where I was happy with them.
It was almost as an experiment that I went with the other image that had made it through most of the culling process which was the last frame that had been shot with the 24-70mm lens. The perspective distortion was minimal, so I just did a quick correction on the perspective and then started to process it as a black and white image to eliminate the colors. Very quickly, I decided that I liked the black and white for this scene even though it hid the rust on the Oldsmobile. What I decided was that the colors were just too overpowering with the low sun and the main subjects being either black or white. All my attention went to the saturated portions of the photo and to desaturate those areas caused the overall color effect to look very odd.
Now that I had a good black and white edit done to the image, I applied the same edit to the color image that I had started with. It didn’t turn out nearly as nice, and I made the decision at that point to trash the shot from the wide-angle lens. There was no doubt that the earlier one was a stronger image at this point, and I had no problem accepting that I had made a mistake when deciding which one deserved an edit to start with.
For the entire morning, I had shot only 22 frames and had come away with five solid keepers which I am very happy with. I would have had this blog done much earlier in the day, but I did want to get out to see Dad, so this ended up waiting until I got back home. At least I’m getting it all finished up in the same day that I started the trek, and there won’t be a follow-up entry to this one. It would normally be here that I would talk about why you should purchase a print of one of these photos, but honestly, I’m about to pass out from lack of sleep and just want to go to bed. So, if you like any of these, consider purchasing a print to hang on your wall.
Good night, and I’ll see you again soon.
Until then….
