Friday, December 17, 2021
Welcome back! I’ve been patiently waiting another cloudy day since I last went out a week ago. I finally got it on Friday when there were mixed clouds forecasted for pretty much all day long with some scattered showers thrown in for good measure. Most of this was supposed to be in the Northern areas from here which kind of dictated where I was going to plan on going. I had been wanting to get out in the area of West Jefferson for a while because that was extending my area of operations to the West from where I had been focusing over the last few weeks.
Since there wasn’t much chance of any color for the morning, I didn’t have to worry about getting up too early, but still needed to get rolling fairly early in the day since Toni was going to be taking her TEAS Test online starting at 9:30. She needed quiet and I wouldn’t be able to walk around where she was set up to take the test so it made perfect sense for me to get out and go for a trek. I would be out of her way and would be able to take advantage of the clouds all at the same time.
I was on my way around 8:30 and I was headed North yet again. I remember thinking to myself that when I start working in an area, I tend to stick with it for a while until I move on to something else. That was the case with this particular area because I had been up this way before but had never really found my rhythm here. These last few weeks have been a complete change to that, and I’ve managed to find some really interesting subjects to photograph which I had not seen previously. I think it is mainly a matter of getting familiar with the mood of an area which does take time. I think that I’ve finally reached an understanding with the area and have started to “see” what it has to offer.
The particular area that I was going to be exploring on this trek was the area on the Western side of the Ashe County around Lansing. This is normally an area that I would be in during our anniversary since we used to stay in a cabin in that area. I had thought that I was pretty well versed with the back roads in this part of the county, but I’m finding through my recent travels that I had barely scratched the surface of what the county had to offer.
The weather was a bit different than what the cloud forecast was calling for as right around home the sky was very bright with lots of blue in it. The sun was a bit harsh, but since the lower clouds were supposed to be more prevalent in the area of Lansing, I continued up that way watching the thicker clouds at the top of the mountain. I wasn’t really going to know what I was looking at until I crested the ridge and saw what was on the other side of the mountain which didn’t take too long. I was actually greeted with much thicker clouds once again, but they were not quite as detailed as I had hoped. This was the problem with a heavily overcast day, but I was prepared for it, and knew that as long as there was some detail in the sky, I would be able to make it work.
When I got into West Jefferson, I started to explore the back roads and state roads. The lighting was good for how I liked to shoot, but I wasn’t really seeing anything that jumped out at me. I just kept turning down more and more roads to find not only the right subject matter, but to find a workable composition around the subject. I was seeing tons of barns, but the settings were just not right for a photograph. This can be frustrating, especially early on when I have still yet to get an image in the bag. I tried not to let it affect me because I was still coming off of a very successful trek where I had brought home over 20 images. This was not likely to be that kind of trek, and I couldn’t let the lack of subjects discourage me.
As I was driving down one of the side roads, I could see a barn off to the right. It was interesting, but there was really no composition to it at all. The road made a nice leading line, but that was really is. It was enough to make me slow down as I drove past it to see how the elements all lined up depending on my position in the roadway. I was about to let this barn go because nothing was striking me as a photograph, but as I was just about to clear it on the other side from where I had originally seen it, I saw some potential to the barn.
The trees behind the barn added the right amount of texture to the scene and I was liking the clouds overhead which had just enough texture that I was confident that I could pull the details out. There were no competing elements and there was a gentle slope of the ground that I found quite nice. I pulled off on the side of the road and got out to look once again. There was a fence around the property so I was going to be very limited with how close I could get to the barn. Since the barn was around 100 yards or so from the fence, I decided to use my long 70-200mm lens which would give me plenty of compositional options while keeping the barn well sized in the frame.
Normally with this lens, camera position isn’t all that crucial, but this time, I really had to watch where I was setting up. There were bare tree limbs behind the barn that I wanted to kind of frame the barn, and I needed to make sure that the slope of the landscape worked with the flow of the photograph. It was a matter of moving left and right about 15 feet at a time to make the differences that I was after. There was also a section of the landscape behind the trees which I wanted at an angle to the barn as opposed to directly over it. Large movements on my part brought about small movements in the different elements due to the focal length of the lens. I also had to be careful about where I was shooting from because the tall weeds were threatening to come into the frame if I wasn’t aware of their intrusion into the scene.
Once I got all of the elements lined up the way that I wanted them, I committed to the composition and shot a number of frames as the clouds moved overhead. It was a slow process as the clouds were not moving fast at all, but I wanted to make sure that I had a sky that complimented the landscape below. I ended up with about 20 or so frames here before I was reasonably comfortable that I had what I needed. There was no need to look for other compositions here because this was the only angle that worked for the barn, and short of altering the framing, there was really nothing else that I could do with it. I got things loaded back up in the bag and started back out on the road in search of my next location.
I had that all important first image in the bag at this point which was good news. It wasn’t an outstanding image, but it was enough to get me started with the day. I had a working understanding of the sky now and knew how it was going to render in the photographs so that helped. I also had figured out the overall exposure issues with the lighting of the day. I knew that I could captured these scenes without the need of any grad filters because the sky was not overly bright. I also knew that the LCD was going to show a very dark subject, but the histogram was showing that I was going to have plenty of detail to work with in post. In short, the images from this trek would look terrible right out of camera, but with a little tweaking in Lightroom, I would have images that fit my style of photography quite well. I just love working with the even light of a cloudy day.
The next scene that I came to was one that I passed by with barely a second look. It was a very short and wide barn situated atop a hill on the other side of a fence that was itself up a steep hill from the road. I nearly missed it from the roofline of the 4Runner but saw enough to realize that there wasn’t much of a composition there because of the angle. It did stick in my mind though, and as I drove down to the end of the road, and the end of the next road, I decided that I might want to take another look at the barn on the way back out to the main road. It only took a few minutes to get back to it and I pulled off on the shoulder of the road. There wasn’t much shoulder, and it went into a ditch, so I had to do a little gymnastics to get out of the truck without the door slamming shut on me. I got out with all of my appendages intact and climbed the short distance up the embankment to the fence. The angle on the barn was better from this slightly elevated position, but the barn was still quite a bit higher.
Looking around at the different elements, I found that I liked the trees which were behind the barn and saw that the third one was a bit taller than the others from this perspective. That would give a bit of a diagonal element to the top of the frame which I thought would be beneficial for a slightly dramatic element. The overall scene seemed to lack balance though because the barn was just so low that it was going to be overpowered by the tall trees. To combat that aspect, I decided to look at this as a 16:9 crop which would follow the shape of the barn giving it more visual weight in the frame. I would include the four trees, even though three would have been a better number. It was that fourth one off to the right which linked the entire scene and made it work so I felt that it had to remain in the composition.
You might have noticed that I have yet to pull out my camera yet but was already making a lot of decisions for the composition. This is how it works some of the times. Now that I had an understanding of how the composition was going to work, I went back down the hill to the truck and got my camera with the long lens back on it. I added a polarizer just to help with the saturation of the scene and walked it all back up the embankment. In order to get the perspective on the barn as accurate as possible, I extended the tripod as far up as I could and extended the center neck to the top of the travel. This placed the camera well above my eye level, so I was having to use the Live View to frame the shot which was fine since I was using the in-camera 16:9 crop to get the framing right. Once I got the frame right for the image, I settled down to making exposures as the sky changed overhead. It was not enough to have a good composition, I wanted to get the variations of tone in the sky to work with the overall feeling of the image and that took time to achieve. The clouds were moving a little faster than they had been before, so I didn’t have to wait as long. It also made me think about doing a long exposure to streak the clouds, but I could tell that the limbs were also moving in the gentle breeze which would have registered with a blur over a long exposure of several minutes. It wasn’t worth trying to work this out because the sky probably didn’t have enough texture to it to support a long exposure anyway.
After about 15 minutes or so, I had the shots that I thought would give me what I wanted from here. It was time to go because the horses were starting to get curious about this guy standing on the edge of their field with this gadget that just kept beeping and clicking. As they got closer to me, I was waiting for them to edge into the shot. Unlike previous horse encounters, they would not have added anything at all to the frame as close as they were. It would have just been a photobomb with a horse head coming into the frame right at the camera. I was happy with what I had and was actually a little happier with this composition than I was with the first barn that I had shot.
I spent the next half hour or so driving around and getting more and more lost as the light continued to change. The clouds weren’t going away, but there were some thin spots which were starting to let a little bit of light through. This would be great if I could find a subject to take advantage of this magical light. The problem was, I wasn’t finding anything at all that worked as a photograph. I was seeing all sorts of potential and was going into rural overload. It was all looking great, but when it came to actually working a composition out of the scene, it would fall apart quickly. The light was really great though, and I was determined to find something to put in it.
On one of the roads I was driving on, I saw an old farmhouse off on the side which caught my eye. It was a white house with a rusty tin roof which was right up my alley. There was a great tree next to it as well, but there were two houses on the other side of the road which spoiled the composition. As I got closer to it, I found that the house was at a “T” intersection which gave me the opportunity to look at it from a number of angles. After I made the turn, I found the angle that I wanted to photograph the house from. It was being hit with front light which worked reasonably well since it was very soft light. The woods were also benefitting from the sunlight which made the sky that much darker in comparison.
I pulled off on the side of the road and grabbed my camera. This time, I went for my standard 24-70mm lens with a polarizer which would give me all the flexibility that I needed here. I started to move around left and right to get the different elements to line up just right. I put most of the importance on the front door which I didn’t want to be cut by the porch support beam. I also concentrated on the large tree which was close to the house. I wanted to keep the tree off of the roof line, but close enough to it that it seemed to be a part of the house because that was the story that I wanted to tell. I had to be careful about the background to the right as there was a power pole just visible out of the frame to the right which I wanted to avoid. I tried to watch how the hill to the left extended up because I didn’t want to shift too much weight to that side of the frame.
In order to find the right balance, I ended up placing the house roughly centered in the frame but kept the chimney off on the left third with the tree on the right third for balance. The visual tension was brought in with the sloping of the hill in the background going up to the left. It was a simple composition, but it had a lot of details considered throughout. When I finally got the composition that I was after it was a matter of waiting for the light which was coming and going as the clouds moved around. For the most part, the house remained in the shadows, but for a one brief period in about 20 minutes the sun came out long enough to bathe the house and the trees with a soft warm light which made the image work.
Having gotten the light that I was after, I started to look for other compositions and found a really nice one further to the left. It really showcased the slope of the hill behind the house, and the sky was looking really good in that direction. The problem that I had was that the screened in porch to the left of the chimney was filled with what looked like white tables leaning up on the screen. They were very dominant in the scene, but I was hoping that the composition would overpower those tables. I waited for the light which never came, but I shot a number of frames as the clouds moved overhead. In the end, without the light, the porch contents were just too dominant to the scene, and the house was too static without depth. I didn’t like the composition enough to even try to do an edit on it, but I was really happy with the first composition that I had shot when I got there under the sunlight.
I had now worked three scenes which has been my standard here lately and I considered calling it a day. I didn’t consider it long though because I was still feeling creative and felt like I hadn’t shot that perfect image just yet. I was happy with what I had captured, but they all seemed like solid attempts rather than a slam dunk photograph. It was also still within the time that Toni was going to be testing. I wanted to check on her to see how things were going because she had been preparing for this test for several weeks now and it was going to be what determined whether or not she got into the actual Nursing Program. I knew that I couldn’t interrupt her so I just had to keep sending positive thoughts and stay away from home. That worked because I really wanted to keep rolling to get a few more photos taken.
I continued on my quest to get lost going through the town of Lansing. I passed by the old Jones Memorial Infirmary that I had shot earlier in the year and was actually happy to have found it again since I really didn’t remember where it had been. I considered stopping and photographing it once again, but the sky wasn’t any better than it had been the last time, and I remembered that the composition took a long time to work out. Without the hopes of making a better photograph, there was no sense in stopping here again. I did start making turns that I had not done previously to see what else I could find. It wasn’t long before I saw an open field with a pair of barns against the tree line. One of the bars had a pair of silos attached which I thought was rather interesting. The bare trees behind the barn were pretty thick and gave a nice background to the structure. It was interesting enough to stop and check out a little further, so I pulled off on the side of the road. Once again, I was at a pretty extreme angle with the 4Runner so that I wasn’t in the roadway. I struggled to open the door which was more like a hatch, and I jumped out. My sliders were now about mid-thigh up from the ground, so the bottom of the door was at waist level now. I noticed that the tires remaining on the asphalt only had contact on the inner edge. I just hoped that this wasn’t going to end up with the truck rolling over.
I went back to get the camera which was actually a good deal lower than I was used to. I was just about dragging the rear differential on the ridge I was parked on, so the trunk floor was a good eight inches lower than normal. I pulled out the camera which was still built with the 24-70mm lens and polarizer which I placed on the tripod. I then started to work around the area to find the right placement for a composition. I bounced between including the smaller barn and omitting it. I wasn’t sure if it added to the composition or not as I was getting a few frames here and there. I also had to figure out what angle was the best for this scene as I wanted to get a good quarter view of the barns but didn’t know exactly how I wanted the balance to appear between the silos and the long wall of the barn. The more I fiddled around with the composition the more I felt like I needed to omit the smaller barn. That allowed me to get the large barn in the lower left of the composition and have the trees extend upwards from that point in a nice diagonal. In the LCD that composition looked the best, so I committed to that one and shot a number of frames as the clouds moved overhead. I was really quite happy with that composition while I was at the scene.
Just in case, I decided to look at other compositions to see if I could find a workable one with both barns in the scene. I ended up finding the right angle for the barns by shooting right at road level. It was a pretty even quarter view on the large barn, and I was able to include the dominant large tree to the right which framed the composition. The smaller barn balanced out the image and provided a left framing element. As I was now happy with this composition, I decided to commit to this one as well and I shot a number of frames as the clouds moved overhead. I actually noticed at this point that the wind was picking up. It wasn’t bad by any stretch, but it was causing motion in the trees which I had to watch for. I had to keep my shutter speed fast enough to keep those trees from blurring. I looked and saw that I was going with 1/8 of a second for most of the images and I felt that was going to be just good enough. I zoomed in on the image review and looked at the treetops which looked to be sharp, so I left it at that. I didn’t want to come off of f/11 for the depth of field which meant that in order to get a faster shutter speed, I would have needed to boost the ISO which I really wanted to avoid due to the lighting. As with the others during the day, I was going to be bringing out a lot of shadow detail in order to get the balanced exposure that I knew was possible with the very diffused lighting. If I were to boost the ISO, that would give me a much noisier image to start with which would then be amplified during post. This is a prime example of shooting an image knowing how you are going to process it. This is something that I do talk about in my workshops, and I think that it is a very important part of the digital capture.
After another 15 minutes or so, I was pretty sure that I had something workable from one of the compositions that I had committed to, so I packed up my gear to head onto the next stop. I was pretty sure that it was going to be the first composition that won out, but I was surprised to find that it was actually the second one that felt the most balanced. The first one made the barn feel very small since it was tucked into the lower left corner while the trees stretched out well into the sky to the right. The second composition didn’t have nearly the same height of the trees which made the barn bigger, and then I combined that barn with the smaller one to the left. I also noticed how the trees seemed to mimic the shapes of the two barns in a way which gave another nice element to the composition. It was just a much stronger overall composition and the one that I decided to keep out of the bunch.
Shortly after leaving here, I got a phone call from Toni who was letting me know that she had finished the test. I was fully expecting her to play a trick on me by telling me that she had failed, and I had already practiced how I would respond to that without making her feel bad if that had been the case. What she said though, was not what I was expecting and showed just how mentally exhausted she was from taking this test. She simply said that it looked like she was going to nursing school, and she said it almost deadpan. It wasn’t that she wasn’t excited about it, she was just that exhausted and thankful that this was now over and behind her. I was excited, and she was in tears from the lifted weight. I was so proud of her and glad that she had done so well on the test. Now it is just a matter of two years of nursing classes before the next big test. At least she will enjoy the classes for the next two years…. the test will be a different story.
With a sense of relief, I decided to try for one more location before heading home to celebrate with Toni. I just kept taking turns that I wasn’t familiar with until I came up on a road that I remembered from a number of years ago. It stood out in my mind for some reason, but I wasn’t quite sure what that reason was. I decided to turn and check it out. Nothing was really jogging my memory about it, but something felt familiar to me. It wasn’t until I came up to a bridge and saw a couple of barns that something started to click. I liked the big barn, but there wasn’t a composition there which was the same reaction that I had had here before. When I crossed the bridge, I remembered the last time that I was here. It was with Toni on our anniversary trip back in 2016! This time I was able to spot it on my own because the bridge was now completed, and I wasn’t dodging orange barrels driving down the road. It was ironic that I was thinking about her so much right now and happened to find a place that we had found together almost six years ago. I had been very happy with the photograph from that trek, and actually still was happy with it. I had a large print of it in my office when I was still working and since that point it has found a new home. I remembered the composition quite well after having looked at it for several years across from my desk and looking at it now, I didn’t really see much chance on improving on this composition. However, because it was a spot that Toni had found interesting, I wanted to give it another try to see if I could do anything else with it.
I pulled off on the side of the road and got my camera. There was a slight mist in the air which was a tribute to the snow that I was shooting in the last time I had seen this barn. Of course, it was much too warm to be snowing now, but the similarities in the lighting were very apparent. I started off with my 24-70mm lens so that I could use a polarizer as well as the lens hood unlike my long lens. I also wanted to see if I could do something different with the composition this time. I remembered very well having shot this with my 70-200mm from the side of the road and didn’t want to start out with the same composition. I worked my way through the weeds and found a couple of positions that I could work with to get started.
These compositions made the barn feel overly small because of the wider focal length. The general composition was roughly the same no matter what I did here because I wasn’t able to include the sky. It was just too high up in the composition and it felt disconnected from the barn. I tried a number of methods of composing this scene, but in the end just wanted more reach than the 24-70mm was going to give me. I reluctantly went to get the long lens and debated on using the polarizer since it would mean that I wasn’t going to be able to use the lens hood. The mist had nearly stopped, and I felt good about going with the filter which helped to reduce the glare on the tin roof. I went back across the street and found the right spot to set up in once again. I worked through the composition and got things positioned as I needed them. I looked at the screen and immediately recognized the composition from before. I think it was exactly the same. Well, it was a strong a composition even then, but nothing about the scene had really changed, even the light was the same. That meant that I was shooting this again just to have the benefit of some more pixels in the image. That was a decent reason, but not enough to allow me to be satisfied with the composition.
I considered my options here and tried to think of something different. My main concern with the previous composition was that the barn seemed a little close to the right side of the frame which crowded the scene a bit. I could shift the camera over to right a bit, but that would crowd the smaller shed to the left. If I opened up the image a little bit, the trees would become too heavy in the composition, and I would start to have the same issues here that I did with the standard lens. I could do that and go for a 16:9 crop which would give me a bit more room on the sides. I tried that and liked it, but it still didn’t feel right because now I wanted more room on the left beyond the smaller shed.
Then it hit me… I had been wanting to do another panorama for a while now, and after doing my top 12 list (coming soon) I was even more interested in working a panoramic image. This might be the right subject to make that image with. I got the tripod leveled out which is the most important part of doing a panorama and then made sure that the ballhead was also leveled out. At this point, I flipped the camera to vertical and figured out the top and bottom edges of the frame. I then did a dry run from left to right across the scene to see how the exposure was looking. When I had that all set, I focused on the barn and locked the focus in. I then made a series of seven frames from left to right. I reviewed the series and thought that it looked good but might be a bit overexposed for the existing lighting. I dropped the shutter a third of a stop to get the right exposure and did another series. Having seen that it was too far to the right, I only did six frames on this run which worked out better.
I had a lot of images to choose from with this barn after using two different lenses and then adding in a multi-image panoramic capture that kind of fell in-between the two lenses. I thought that it was enough to ensure that I had something that I liked enough to process. Looking back over the day, I had shot five different scenes and felt that I had at least five photographs to show for it. It was getting well into the afternoon and the clouds were getting thicker and thicker. I was satisfied with what I had done for the day and was looking forward to getting back to Toni who was now a step closer to being an RN. It was time to call it a day and head back. I was just under an hour away from the house which would get me back at a good time.
I do hope that you have enjoyed this trek as well as the images that I have brought back from the day. As always, if you connect with any of the images here in the blog, please consider purchasing a print as this helps to support these very treks as well as giving me a bit of creative support along the way. If you are interested in how I form compositions and would like to learn more about that, I am offering a workshop in May that is dealing specifically with that subject. Join me at Doughton Park to find out how to form a composition in the landscape.
Also, I apologize for any inconveniences with accessing this website here recently. I’ve been having a time with errors when I’ve tried to view it or edit content. Speaking with the brains behind the website, it looks like there are bots trying to hack into the site which is taxing the host. We have taken steps to strengthen the defenses and are now looking at changing the hosting to one that is better equipped to handle the attacks. I’m just hoping that this is not a long-term issue as it is really hurting the visibility of the website right now. Just cross your fingers that it can be resolved sooner rather than later.
Until next time…
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