Friday, July 10, 2026
It is almost like I am making a habit of this blog thing about every other day now. You might remember a couple of days ago when I went out to Siloam and ended up photographing a couple of scenes that I had not actually intended to visit. Just a couple of days before that, I went out to Ronda and stopped by a location on a whim that turned out really well. Here we are once again with another trek in the books that kind of took some odd turns from the beginning. Let’s back up a bit.
I spent yesterday out in the yard getting things taken care of that have been going by the wayside for the last couple of weeks because the grass just isn’t really growing all that much. This means that I’m just not staying on top of the yard duties like I normally do this time of year and that resulted in a full five hours of working outside to get myself all caught up once again. I was whupped after that and was ready for an easy day resting today. I even woke up with the intention of just relaxing through the day, but while I was downstairs doing my morning routine and getting the business end of things taken care of, I had the wild idea to go out and get some photos. It wasn’t that the weather was particularly great. In fact, it was rather sunny and the clouds were not looking all that great until the early afternoon right before the storms kicked off. I still wanted to go out and try to keep the momentum going since I have had a hard time being motivated here lately.
My first thought was to go back out to Siloam once again to explore the area a little more deeply. I had left a bunch of potential locations behind during my last visit and was sure that I would find something else to shoot out that way. However, looking at the weather, the clouds were going to be short lived at about an hour right before a series of heavy storms started to roll through. I started to look at other areas to see where the weather might be a little better. It appeared that down South was a bit more cloudy and there were actually no storms forecasted, just some showers here and there. I tried to think of places that I could go down that way.
The only thing that really came to mind was Taylorsville, which is a town I go through often when I am looking for photos. The inspiration for this one came from a couple of recent postings that I saw on Facebook that showed a few old Fords in the woods which were reported to be just outside of Taylorsville off of the main route that I would be taking into town. Now I’ve been up and down this road many times over the years that Toni and I have lived out here, but the cars that I was seeing didn’t look familiar. Since they were Fords, I really thought that they were from a property that I had photographed a few years ago that had a ton of old Fords, but the scenes were not familiar at all to me, and that location was a number of miles away from the main road.
I had a general area to search, and the weather was supposed to be good that way, so I made the decision that I would scout the area and try to dig a little deeper into the surrounding areas of Taylorsville. I knew that I would find something to photograph, even if I didn’t find the cars that I was looking for. This plan was actually a pretty good plan because the main reason for going into the area was just as promising as what I would likely find during the drive. I really felt that there was no way to fail with this trek. After pondering the different areas that I wanted to explore, I grabbed my gear and was on my way.
Knowing that I have spent a good bit of time out here in the past, I didn’t want to just revisit the same places that I had driven before. This meant that I needed to be very mindful of what streets I chose to drive down just to be sure that I was in new areas. This was actually easier than I had anticipated as the first road that I turned down was one that I had never been on before. The interesting thing was that there was a store at the turn with an old tractor that I had seen before many times. This is one of those clues that I look for to tell me where to turn in search of good scenes. I was very surprised that I had never bothered to make this turn before, but here I was in an area with a lot of great rustic scenes. There were signs of the old cars I was looking for, but I was pretty sure that something good would pop up soon enough.
That actually happened within a few miles from the turn. I spotted an old barn off on the side of the road at a “T” intersection. It was all alone except for a house that was just beyond it. As I drove by, I noticed a barn quilt which is always a fun thing to photograph with these old barns. I slowed and started to look at the angles, and I found one that highlighted the quilt while keeping the house next to the barn out of the frame. It was going to be a kind of tricky composition, but I felt that I could make it work. The first place I came to, I turned around and came back to the barn to check it out once again. It was even more promising this time and I decided to stop and get out.
I looked at the scene more critically this time and really paid attention to the backgrounds that were available to me. At the angle that I had thought about capturing the barn from, I found that there was another house that was across the street on the cross street which was going to come into play. There was a barn of sorts on the edge of the property that I figured I could place into the composition to add to the rural feeling of the old barn. From the other side, I could avoid that property, but I had to worry about the house that I had spotted originally. If I stayed pretty squared up to the side of the barn, I could keep the house out of the frame, but the angle on the barn was no good. It was going to be a difficult capture no matter what I did, so I thought I would start off with the standard zoom to see which way I would prefer to shoot it.
I tried from both sides of the barn and both of them left me feeling very blah about the whole thing. I didn’t like the flat view of the barn with the only point of interest being the barn quilt. I wanted more dimension to the barn and for that to happen, I was going to have to get deeper into the property and have a more quarter view of the barn. I used the wider end of the lens to make the barn large enough in the frame to where I could mask the house next to it. This worked very well and gave me a nicer angle on the barn itself. The sky in this direction was pretty awesome and I was happy with where I was standing for this shot. It was the third composition that I had tried and the only one that I really liked.
There were a total of twelve frames shot on this barn alone to capture the three different compositions. The photo that you are seeing here is the eleventh one in that series. It was a very slow start to the day, but it was a start. I was thinking that I would do one as a black and white and one as a color, so I was hopeful to have two photos from this one stop. As you can see, that didn’t happen, and I had to be happy with just the single keeper from this location. That was fine, it was still a solid start to the day. It represented the all-important “first one in the can shot.”
Now that I had something to work with, I started to drive further into the area to see what else I could find. I think it was about two miles later I spotted a barn off on the left side of the road which kind of caught my attention. It wasn’t a great barn by any stretch and there were tractors parked in the open areas which were not ideal. The barn was far enough from the road that I wasn’t going to be able to photograph it unless I could get permission to access the property. I was about to direct my attention elsewhere when I saw a rusted horse trailer in the yard near the barn. This was just another element in the scene, but I felt that this was the important one. It appeared to be close enough to the barn to be able to photograph them together.
Instead of stopping, I continued down the road for a bit longer and thought about the scene that I had just spotted. There were two main subjects there that interested me. Neither one was a strong element on its own when it came to telling a story. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the two of them together made for an excellent story. It was all a matter of whether or not I would be able to get them both in the frame in a way that looked good. The only way to determine that was to drive by once again and really look at the property.
By the time I got back there, I was being followed by another truck and couldn’t really slow down too much. I slowed enough to get an idea, and I happened to see that there was a lady sitting on the porch of the house. Since I was needing to turn around and make another pass, I had to consider how it would look, especially if she had seen me pass by the first time. Not wanting to worry her, I just pulled into the driveway and decided to talk with her and ask if I could get some photos. After a brief conversation with her, her husband came out and I inquired about spending some time with the barn. Neither of them had a problem with me doing some photography so I grabbed my camera bag not knowing exactly what I was going to need since I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about the compositions.
I knew that I wanted to get the horse trailer in the photo, and I felt that the light was better on the far side of it, so that is the side that I decided to start out on. From this direction, the trailer kind of blocked the barn and I had to worry about some other vehicles getting into the frame to the left. To avoid the vehicles, I needed to get into a position where the trailer was just about completely blocking the barn. This composition felt kind of strange to me until I really thought through it. Instead of making the barn an important part of the composition, I could reduce its importance in favor of putting more emphasis on the trailer. To do this, I just needed to drop the camera to the ground while getting in close to the trailer. This allowed me to have just the tallest part of the barn in the frame which made it a perfect support element. The trailer loomed large in the frame and for balance I decided to include the tree to the right of the barn as a framing element.
I really liked the composition and committed to it as the light changed over the scene. Something that I was becoming painfully aware of was the breeze that was blowing the grass around wildly. I initially tried to speed up the shutter to freeze the grass which I was able to do, but that almost seemed a bit boring for the scene. Since I had a main subject that wasn’t going to move and the trees weren’t moving too bad, I decided to harness the power of the wind to show the grass moving. The blue would also help keep more of the attention on the barn rather than having the sharp grass pulling the attention away from the background.
It took some quick math in my head based on the current shutter speed to determine what filter I would need and what the new shutter speed was going to be. I was looking for something around one to two seconds so that the trees were still sharp, but the lighter grass would be blurred. My math told me that the 5-stop ND filter would be sufficient for the effect that I was after. It only took a minute to slide into the holder along with the polarizer and I was able to get the exposure reworked at that point. I was between 1.3 and 1.6 seconds which was just about right for what I was looking for. I still wanted to have structure to the grass but needed that edge of sharpness reduced in order to simplify the scene a bit more.
I shot a series of eleven frames with this composition, and it was the sixth one that turned into my keeper. They were good photos and each had their strong attributes, but it was that sixth one that had the best blend of lighting with a bit of sun on the trailer. The sky also looked really good in this one with the shapes of the clouds. The remaining exposures were there in case the light actually got better from this point. It didn’t, but I wasn’t going to take any chances as I reacted to subtle differences in the light as well as speed of the breeze.
When I was comfortable that I had what I wanted from this angle, I moved back to the other side to see what I could do with the entire scene from an angle that would show the barn much better. I kept the wide-angle lens attached and found the rough angle that I was wanting to work with. I felt that because of how low and wide the barn was, I would probably need to make this a 16:9 aspect ratio to keep the attention on the barn. I still wanted the trailer to be a focal point and chose to go with a low position once again which would force the trailer higher than the barn. From this angle, I also had the grove of trees there to frame the trailer with the perfectly contrasting green and red tones.
To get the scene fine-tuned, I needed to pull the filters off of the camera in order to see through the viewfinder. It wasn’t totally dark with the ND filter, but it was dark enough that I was worried that I would miss something simple at the edge of the frame. It was too bright to rely on my live view screen for setting up the composition which is why I love using my viewfinder on sunny days.
Once I had the basic composition set up, I started to look at the exposure requirements that I was going to want for the shot. The grass wasn’t nearly as dominant in the scene, and the trees were blowing pretty fast by this point. The long exposure didn’t really make sense for this view, so I removed the ND filter and just kept the polarizer. I also sped up the shutter to a point where I could freeze the motion in the grass and the trees. To get 1/80 of a second, I had to boost the ISO to 400 which for the lighting over the scene didn’t bother me. I wasn’t going to be recovering much in the way of shadows which is where the noise would have happened.
All that was left here was waiting on the sky to change up and give me a good collection of shapes above the barn. It took ten exposures until I was happy with what I had captured. The keeper of that group was the last frame, so I’m glad that I kept with it for as long as I did. Having shot a total of 21 frames for only two compositions I felt that I had enough from this location. I didn’t really see anything else that jumped out at me as a possible composition, and I had succeeded in my goal of capturing both the barn and the trailer. It was time to pack up and find the next location.
After thanking the owner once again for the chance to photograph the property, I was back on the road looking for the next subject. I had passed by several spots that had interested me that I wanted to come back to. These didn’t really turn out to be promising when I started to look at them again. I wasn’t discouraged though as I was in a new area and was happy to explore. I still might find those Fords that I had set out looking for. Of course, this meant looking deep into properties for just clues of old cars sitting in the woods because the photos that I had seen had the cars in the woods. I was expecting to find something way off in the distance so that was where I was mainly looking.
It was a complete surprise to me when I came upon a property that had a Chevy truck sitting in the trees about a car’s width from the roadway. It was right at the edge of a gravel path that went to a shed. The truck was mostly covered by the trees and weeds, and it didn’t have a bed on it. There wasn’t much visible of the truck other than the cab, and only the cab as the front clip was just about fully covered. My first reaction was that there wasn’t enough visible to get a photo here. However, as I continued driving down the road, I thought about the colors at play. The red contrasted beautifully with the green which made the cab stand out nicely while being totally obscured. It was the color contrast that bright me back to the scene if I’m being honest.
I had no idea whose property this was, and I felt a little uneasy about working the truck, so I just left my truck running while I grabbed a quick photo. There was also the added benefit of the AC continued to keep the inside of the truck cool which I was looking forward to. Knowing that I was going to be right on the shoulder of the road was the only thing that allowed me to actually stop for the photo and I knew that I wasn’t going to get any further into the scene than that.
There were two angles that I wanted to work with this truck. The first was the one that you see here from the rear corner of the cab. The other was a little more square onto the side of the truck which showed the fender detail a little better. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized just how strong the first concept was with the extra red on the rear of the cab showing through the leaves. In the interest of time, I only shot three frames of this truck with the first two being of the successful composition. It was the first one that won out and had the best positioning of the leaves. There was still some wind, and I was having to time the exposures around the lulls while still having the ISO boosted to 400 to keep the shutter fast enough. I would have liked to have remained here a bit longer, but I didn’t want to press my luck any more than I already had. I think I spent a total of five minutes here from parking to leaving. Not too bad, and this photo is becoming one of my favorites from this part of the trek.
“Part”…..Am I implying that there will be more to this trek? Well, from the title, you know that there are chapters to this one, so the short answer is yes, there will be more. There was one other car that I found which I wanted to work with. It wasn’t the Fords that I was hunting, and the odd thing was, it was a car that I quickly recognized from several treks into North Wilkesboro where it had been parked at a shop for a few years. The last time I had photographed it was in the Fall of 2024, and the sun was not all that forgiving to me. The time before that was in the Winter of 2023 when I first had a go at it. Both of these times I had been unable to get an overall view of the car because of where it was parked and what was around it. The tree overhead also made the lighting difficult as did the tarp that was draped over it each time. It was that tarp which caused a minute of uncertainty as to whether or not I recognized the car. The wheels gave it away though.
I’ll be back tomorrow with some more photos from this one car, so keep your eyes out for that next entry.
Until then….
