Saturday, February 28, 2026
Being a photographer can be frustrating at times, especially when that photographer primarily works outside. Case in point is the last week or so as I have been struggling with the weather a little bit. It all started when Toni and I started talking about a barn that showed up on Facebook that was out in the area of Lomax and Ronda, or thereabouts. I had narrowed down the area on the map and scouted it but wasn’t sure if it would make a good photo because it really needed something extra included in the composition. As I’ve said, a photo contains a subject, light, and a composition. If you can arrive at a good quality with two out of the three elements you will have a good photo, but if you can nail all three of the aspects, you will have a great photo. The barn was fair as a subject, so I really needed a strong composition and really good light to make it work as a photo. My first thought was to go out there in the evening when the sun was low and bathing the barn in warm light while there would hopefully be dark clouds above the barn. I tried that one day, but the light never materialized. I did end up shooting a different barn out in the area which made me feel better about scouting this barn so much.
The next idea that I started to explore was shooting the barn in the morning with a lot of fog. This would help to make the barn stick out in the frame since there would be a lot of bare trees behind the barn that would introduce a lot of textures to the photo. The trees needed to find a way to blend into the sky so that I could get a more establishing composition rather than a simple postcard shot. The fog would help blend everything together.
I had no idea that this week was going to see so much fog in the morning. There was none forecasted and I wasn’t really thinking about going out to shoot the barn much this week as I had started to put more of my thought process on a property with a lot of old cars that I had spotted near the barn. That was what I was thinking would be my next trek, but every day that I was planning on going ended up being far too sunny. Oh, and each morning Toni told me how great the fog looked as she was getting ready to go to work. Not planning on going out that early made it nearly impossible to get up and ready to get out to the barn in time for the sunrise. The barn is about 40 minutes from home, and I really need to have a plan in mind for shooting it that early in the day. Each day I just rolled over and said I would get it another time.
It was those days that I sat at home watching the hourly forecast in hopes that the forecasted afternoon clouds would become a reality. They didn’t, and I ended up doing things like smoke photography and even working a bit with the Miata in the garage for a few abstracts. I’m really glad that I did those things as they gave me a chance to stretch some creative muscles, but I was really wanting to get out to that property with all of the old cars. For that I was going to need clouds, and I was going to need them for a while because there were enough cars out there to justify at least two hours, if not four to get it all worked to my satisfaction.
As luck would have it, there was a day just like I was hoping for which happened on Friday. There were clouds all day, and even though there was a bit of rain forecasted, that never really did materialize. I’ll wait for a moment for you to browse the blogs to see where that entry went because obviously, I was able to get out and capture all kinds of great images. Don’t look too hard though because there isn’t a blog, and there wasn’t a trek. Normally, I would have been really upset at missing out on that opportunity, but the reality of it is, I’ve made some changes to how I am doing photography this year, and I am really deciding to focus on the art and not the business side of things. While you aren’t really seeing a lot of difference in the moving away from the business of photography, this is one of those times when it is affecting what I am doing. If I was treating this like a business, I would have had to go out when the light was right and get the photographs along with the blog that would accompany them. That would have been the business choice to make. However, because the business end is not really treating me all that well when it comes to photography, I have chosen to relax a bit on that end of things so that I can spend more time with Toni and do other things outside of photography. Yesterday turned into a fun…well, that might not be the right word, but it was needed time with Toni. We went to see one of her eye doctors as we continue to try and figure out a resolution to an eye issue that she developed last Summer and is still not under control. She could have gone by herself, but I wanted to go with her, and we also went out to lunch afterwards which was really nice. I enjoyed the time with her and even going into the evening when she fell asleep in my lap while I watched a series on Netflix. It was a full day and I don’t regret missing the light at all. There will be plenty of other cloudy days to come and for now, I am done putting pressure on myself to produce.
Now, I did start to look at the weather for Saturday because I was really wanting to get out with the camera. It had looked like it was going to be partly cloudy a couple of days ago which would have been a decent day to get out and work the old cars if the clouds were filling up a good portion of the sky. I pulled up the hourly forecast as the evening was coming to a close and found that the clouds were all going to be gone by 10am which wasn’t going to give me enough time to work the property as I would want to. However, the clouds were low and one of my apps was showing a strong potential for fog. Looking at the history of the recent days, fog was highly likely and with the cloudy and humid conditions from yesterday, I was feeling pretty lucky. I could almost see the composition of the red barn in the fog with the bare trees fading into the sky above. This was going to be a pretty good chance to get that photo and I wouldn’t really need that long to get it, so the limited cloud cover wouldn’t be an issue at all.
It was going to take about 40 minutes to get there and I knew that I wanted to be there roughly 30 minutes before sunrise to get things scoped out and to make sure that there were no cows in the field as I had seen during a scouting trip. That meant I was going to need to leave about 5:50 or so which meant that I was going to wake up at 5:15 to check the weather and get ready to head out. Just after 5am, Toni woke me up and asked when I was needing to get up. I had 10 more minutes, and I took every one of those 10 minutes because I wasn’t looking forward to waking up. When the clock did ring, I turned the noise off and checked the weather. Before I even opened up the app I realized that I was hoping for clear skies and no fog. That is not a good way to start a trek because if that was what I saw, I would just roll back over and go to sleep.
What I saw was clear skies at home, but in the area of Lomax, there were cloudy skies. The only fog showing in the area was all the way in Winston Salem. Essentially, I was looking at low and mid-level clouds with no fog. The breeze was very light, and the humidity was very high. There was still a chance for fog, and I figured that I would take that chance. I rolled out of bed and started to get ready. I was hoping to see fog outside of the window as Toni had seen through the entire week. There was no such luck there, and everything looked crisp as could be. Undaunted, I continued to get ready and headed out a few minutes early to the barn that I had been by a half dozen times now during several scouting trips.
If there was any luck to be had, I would finally be able to shoot this barn and hopefully get a decent image of it. That was my entire goal for the day, just one good photo so I could mark this barn off my list of subjects that I wanted to shoot. I was playing out the possibilities in my head while driving out to the barn. It was looking like the fog wasn’t going to develop at all and it was seeming that I was going to be saddled with a bland sky with very little texture and no chance of color. By best bet would be a telephoto shot of the barn with the trees reaching into the sky to provide some texture and interest above the barn. It would be a postcard shot, but sometimes that is all you have to work with.
When I got to the barn, it was still very dark outside, but there was enough light to see that the cows were not grazing in the pasture as I had seen them one other time. This was good news and that made me happy. However, the sky was totally devoid of texture, and it looked like a solid overcast. That made me less than happy, but I decided to stick it out. Since I wasn’t overly excited about the prospects here, I pulled out my phone and did my morning posting on the socials which I hadn’t bothered to do before leaving the house. That didn’t take very long, but it did fill that time until the light was starting to perk up. There was still no color in the sky, but the sun wasn’t causing any issues in terms of backlighting the barn which I had worried about during a morning shoot. The sun would be in a better place during the evening, but the sky was going to be blank by this evening.
I had already decided that I could shoot this barn with any of the lenses that I carry with me. Since I am trying to work on my wide-angle photography, I selected my 16-35mm lens to start out with. I moved over to the side of the road with the barn and started to find the exact spot that I needed to place the camera. Since I had the wide lens on, I went with my first thought for a composition that included a portion of the fence. Since it was mainly a barbed wire fence, I didn’t bother getting the whole fence, but the section next to the gate had a wooden reinforcement at the top of the fence that gave a bit more context than just the barbed wire. That was what I used as a foreground, and it dictated most of the rest of the composition.
As I was working on the framing, I started to worry about the barn itself. Because of how I was framing things, the barn was looking kind of small in the midground which was less than ideal. I needed it to be larger, so I ended up zooming the lens to 35mm and moving away from the fence a bit. This helped, but something still didn’t feel right. Everything that I did had the lens at or near the 35mm point on the focal range. This was a big clue that I needed a bit more reach, so I went back to the truck and swapped the lens for my standard zoom. With that on the camera, I moved back into position and worked out the relationship between the fence and the barn once again. I liked this better and started to make exposures like this, but the sky just wasn’t looking good at all.
Since I had a longer lens on the camera, I changed up my composition and made it much more like a postcard shot by removing the fence entirely from the frame. This gave me more ability to frame the barn correctly and I filled most of the frame with the ground since the sky wasn’t looking good at all. I was starting to get in the mood for this barn and was seeing it as a black and white shot. It wasn’t anything special and I didn’t have good light, and the subject was still kind of middle of the road. The composition was good, but that was pretty much it. I needed something else to make this photo work.
As I was trying to figure out the missing ingredient, I started to see that the sky was picking up some warm hues from the sun to the right. This might be the light that I didn’t know I should be waiting for. I recomposed the frame to take advantage of the light while still avoiding the fence. Things were starting to look really promising and it was looking like I was going to have good light, a strong composition, and now that there was color in the frame, the red barn was becoming a much more interesting subject. I might be on my way to having all three aspects of a photograph that I strive for with this photo.
As the colors increased in the sky, I started to think about that first composition that I had set up with the fence. It was now seeming like a good idea again, so I moved the camera position back to where I could include the fence. I got things all organized in the frame once again and started to fire off frames as the light got better and better. There was still something that I didn’t like about the composition, but I wasn’t able to change anything to make it better. The placement of the elements in the frame was correct; it was the reading direction that was throwing me. I looked over the scene a bit to see if there was anything that would give it away if I flipped the image for a mirror view. I didn’t see anything and figured that would fix the reading issue and how the photo was perceived. I committed to this composition and stuck with it until the light was over.
By the end of the lightshow, I realized just how lucky I had been. I had wanted fog which would have been the easy atmosphere to shoot this barn in but had lost hope in the whole session when that fog wasn’t there. I had considered shooting the barn at sunrise but had placed the sun in the wrong position in the sky giving much too harsh a backlight. That idea didn’t really last long, and I figured that a sunset would make for a better lighting scenario. As it turned out, sunrise with low clouds worked perfectly for this barn. I had a bunch of frames on the memory card and figured out of those, I would likely have two, and maybe three keepers from my time here. That was much more than what I had planned on getting from this barn, so I was really happy with that prospect. I was satisfied, and ready to head home.
I ended up going the Southern route to get home which took me down one of those roads that I seem to always find myself on. It took me through the town of Ronda which I have spent a great deal of time over the years. There seems to always be something work photographing out there, and as I was driving home, I found yet another subject that was ready to be photographed. Now, this isn’t the first time that I have seen this subject, nor is it the first time I’ve stopped and given it a closer look. It is a subject that I have yet to photograph though, and it has kind of vexed me over the years.
It is a little house, or maybe a small store that is right off of the main road. It has trees growing up around it and vines covering one of the walls which has always spoken to my decay side. It is right beside several other buildings and right underneath of some powerlines. It has been a hard sell for me to get a composition figured out with it which is why I’ve stopped, but never actually shot it. To be fair, I did drive by this spot at least four times as I was deciding if it would be worth shooting or not. I was about to let it go once again until I remembered that I was trying to learn to see differently this year and was trying to get more use out of my wide-angle lens. This is not a lens that I had considered before because I usually don’t care for the odd perspective that the lens creates with non-organic shapes. The converging verticals just don’t look good most of the time. However, looking at the lay of the land and how things were positioned around the structure, I knew that my composition was going to have it centered which would mediate the converging verticals quite well. It might actually give the structure a bit of a funhouse vibe which would match the creepy appearance of it.
Eventually, I decided to stop and give this a try. I pulled off on the side of the road opposite of where I was going to be shooting. I loaded up the wide-angle lens and added a polarizer because the sun was out at this point and there was glass that I could change the tonality on with the filter. I walked over to the structure and started to frame up a composition that included the tall tree behind it. I have always liked the bare tree in the background and with the lens I had chosen, it was going to be easy enough to be able to include.
It took a few minutes to get everything organized in the frame because I was in so close to the main subject that every slight move changed the relationship between each element. When I had it all worked out, I fired off a couple of frames to make sure that I didn’t get any of the passing traffic reflecting in the windows. Honestly, I was really liking how this was looking in the image review and was getting excited about this subject after seeing it for something like six years now. I wasn’t sold on the converging verticals and knew that I would need to elevate the camera to address that. By doing that, I lost the perspective and the ability to have the tree in the shot. However, I could see the potential in doing a completely different composition that would make the perspective shift much less intense.
I flipped the camera to horizontal and started to frame up a different composition. I almost liked this one better and felt like it had a much creepier vibe to it this way. There was no debate in my mind when I saw the composition. I knew it was going to have to be done in black and white. I even switched the camera over to that profile so I could really see how it was all coming together without color. A few more frames and I was happy that I had what I needed from this little building.
Had I felt a bit more comfortable here, I would have gone in closer and looked for some abstract details, but the building next door had plenty of signs indicating “No Trespassing” and while this building didn’t, I wasn’t going to push my luck. I had managed to stay within ten feet of the roadway during the shots that I had made. I didn’t feel it was appropriate getting in too close to the building without having spoken to someone in charge of the property. There wasn’t a whole lot of draw to do more here because I was really thrilled that I had gotten the shots that I had already. It felt like a total win for me, and now I was looking at another couple of keepers on a day when I was expecting a single image. That single keeper that I was expecting was going to be the product of what I thought would have been ideal conditions too.
The conditions that I ended up with were not what I had been looking for or expecting. However, I was able to react to the conditions as they developed, and I was able to find additional subjects that worked in the conditions. I might not have had much hope as the morning had gotten started, but things had really turned out well. I was ready to go head home and see what I had in the can. I was optimistically looking at four or five images from the morning and that was more than enough to make this a successful trek.
As you know…I have a problem stopping when I have built up this kind of momentum though. Today was no different and I wasn’t quite finished with the day. You will have to wait for the next part of this blog series to see how the second part turned out. I will say that I had the chance to do some abstract work close to home at a location that I have shot a few times before. If you remember the sanded down red Oldsmobile Toronado from last Summer, you will want to keep an eye out for this next part coming soon. The car is now out of the shop and in a bit more open space.
I’ll see you back here soon enough. Until then….
