Wednesday, December 17, 2025
I’ll have to apologize here at the very beginning. I had no idea that this was going to go the way that it did. In fact, there was a very good chance that I wasn’t going to get any photos at all today. It all started on Monday as I was kind of planning out my week. I had things going on Monday and Tuesday and the weather wasn’t looking all that promising for doing any photos. Wednesday was looking like the first good day to go out with the camera because of the clouds that were forecasted. Thursday was looking rather wet, and Friday there were other commitments. I spent Monday working on two different blog entries that you will be reading soon enough with my collection of 12 Significant Images for 2025, and the year-end wrap up that will be published on New Year’s Day. If I’m being honest, doing these has kind of put me in a strange place mentally and creatively. I’ve been forced to look at what I’ve accomplished during the year, and I’ve had to look at it from a business point of view. That was really not a fun thing to do, and you will be able to read about it in a couple of weeks.
Doing that blog entry kind of set the tone for the rest of the year where I wasn’t really looking to get out much with the camera and was happy to take a little vacation for my mental health. However, I was also seeing a creative slump starting because I just haven’t been going out as regularly as I did during most of the year. Going through the images from the year showed me just what I had accomplished in my personal growth, and I didn’t want to lose that muscle memory that I had been developing through the Summer. I have managed to get out a couple of times here recently with the last trek happening after a little bit of snow that fell. Before that, the last trek was in November when I went down towards Iredell County for some rural photography. Neither of those were large scale treks by any stretch and were more or less designed to get me out and working with the camera. They served their purpose, and I was able to add a few new photos to the collection, but it was nothing at all like what I had been used to doing through the previous months. It was kind of nice not doing the blogs nearly as often because I did have two pretty involved ones to work through before the end of the month.
Here I was looking at a cloudy day with not much going on and a day that I was going to be getting up early. You see, I had to do the service on Toni’s car Tuesday night when she got home from work because that was when the mileage hit. I usually like to drive the car after a service to make sure that everything was done correctly, but there wasn’t time to do that which meant that I needed to get up before she left to go out and make sure that it started without issue and everything was right for her. With getting up well before sunrise, I felt compelled to go out and get some photos if I could find anything to shoot, but I had no idea where I wanted to go.
I didn’t really think about it while I was under the car wrenching, but as I was getting ready for bed, I was thinking about some different things. There is a place going toward Lenoir that I have tried to shoot a couple of times, but I’m still not convinced that it will work out well as a location. I could go back out to Yadkin County where there are still some barns that I have considered shooting, but after being by them many times without stopping, I was starting to wonder if there was anything to them. As it turned out, I’m just now starting to post the images from a Summer trek on Facebook that turned out to be a very successful day of decay. You might remember the blog series that was simply called “Not“, followed by the different parts. The first part was just kind of the setup for the day, and the main attraction started with Not Part 2 and continued for a total of three blog entries.
That single location has produced some of my favorite images from the year and I was really happy to finally be able to share them on social media. Of course, sharing them got me thinking about my time there and the fact that it had been such a surprise to me in terms of what all I found on the property. You can tell from the blog entries that I wasn’t even sure if I was going to get permission, and then once I did, things just started to ramp up seriously. I spent my time darting around and getting photos of everything that I could which was largely the low hanging fruit because I was trying to work quickly. I knew that there was a lot of great potential out there, but there was just not enough time to explore it all. It was also the middle of Summer which made for thick vegetation which was helpful in some situations but created issues in others. I knew that I wanted to come back and try some more compositions when the vegetation died down some, but I hadn’t really made any plans to go back out there.
Now that I was looking at a full day when I could do some photography and was kind of feeling like giving it a try, it kind of made sense to go back out there again and spend some time. I didn’t want to reshoot the same things that I had shot before but really wanted to spend some time working the more difficult subjects to see what I could come up with. The more I was posting on Facebook about the previous trek, the more I wanted to go back out there. I just wasn’t sure that I was ready for the challenge since I haven’t really been thinking that much about decay photography since the Fall with all of my portrait sessions going on.
On Wednesday morning I got up as Toni was getting ready to leave to go out and check her car. When I was done, I was cold and mostly awake as expected. I went ahead and got my day started which was kind of nice after several days of getting up later in the morning. When I got done with my morning routine down in the studio, I looked at the weather which showed mostly sunny and cold. This was not the forecast that was promised, so I kind of gave up thinking about calling the property owner to see if I could come back out again. A little while later, I was essentially done downstairs and came upstairs to see that the weather was far from clear. There was a thick overcast in the sky, and it actually looked like rain. It was still quite cold outside, but it was supposed to warm up nicely later in the day. With all of the weather apps showing clear skies, I was thinking that the sky I was seeing was very localized. The place where I was wanting to go wasn’t too far from here, but I didn’t want to be out there under a full sun, so I decided not to call the owner. Instead, I loaded the truck up and just took off to see if I could find anything worthwhile to shoot in whatever weather conditions I found outside.
I drove around for a little while and found that the clouds were looking pretty good over most of the area. One thing that I hadn’t really considered was the fact that every car I was seeing had a layer of frost on the glass from the cold weather. This was going to make what I wanted to do a bit difficult so I decided to drive around a bit longer to see if the frost would clear on the cars. I did drive by the location to see how things were looking and I could tell that the cars were all frosty and just not looking like I wanted them to look. It was about an hour later that I drove back and figured that most of the frost should be gone by this point. It looked like that was the case when I finally pulled into the driveway and parked the truck. I walked down to the shop which looked like the first time that I had visited here. With no open doors, I was hesitant to open any since that created some concern from the owner. This time, I walked up to the bay door and looked through the window and listened. I could hear the owner talking and felt better about opening the door. When I did, he recognized me which was a good sign indeed. We chatted a bit and he let me know that the former Police Chief of North Wilkesboro had been talking to him recently about pictures he had seen online of his cars. It’s a silly thing, but that made me feel really good that my photos were out there being seen by folks and talked about.
Unlike last time, there was no vetting process I had to go through, and he was happy to let me explore the property as much as I wanted. This is probably the biggest argument that I can make for getting permission to access properties like this. It is the difference between getting run off, or having a gun pointed at you, and having a perpetual blessing to return any time. I’ll always aim for the latter situation because I love being able to return to locations to shoot them again. There are a few places that I have tucked away like that, and it is a wonderful feeling to know that I’ve earned the trust of so many property owners over the years. It sure beats the alternative where I’m constantly looking over my shoulder as I work.
I walked back to the truck and grabbed my gear as I started to work through what I wanted to shoot. I knew that there was a Chrysler Imperial that was parked at the edge of the property that I had tried to shoot the last time but found it to be incredibly hard to compose anything fitting this car. I don’t recall the details, but I remember the owner telling me how rare this particular model car was, and that has stuck with me since the Summer. I love to photograph rare cars because…rare. I also know that if I wait too long to capture a decay subject, there is a pretty good chance that it will be gone the next time I go out to see it. I had already spotted the car in the same place parked between a rollback wrecker and a Hyundai sedan. The vegetation was now dormant which allowed a much easier time of moving around the car. This was where I wanted to start, and I was hoping to get at least a single photo of this car.
Before I got the camera out of the bag, I did my standard looking around the car. It was pretty much as I had remembered it, and I could see why I had such a hard time photographing it last time. I had pretty much gotten this far with it and never actually made any photos of the car. I was not going to be defeated as easily this time, at least I hoped that I wasn’t. It wasn’t looking good though as I was running into all the same problems as I had before. There was no way to get an overall shot of the car because of its neighbors. The isolations weren’t really presenting themselves to me because the car was just so large and had such grand body panels to it. I was finding myself in the same predicament as I had been in before. The one thing different that I had in my favor this time was I could access the rear of the car much easier than before. I started to pay more attention to that area and found that the part that caught my eye the most was the pine needles sitting on top of the trunk trim. Of course, looking at that trim had me looking at the emblem in the center which was pretty neat. I was starting to get the idea for a shot finally after months of drawing a blank on how to shoot this beast of a car.
I knew the basic idea behind the photo but wasn’t sure of what lens to work with. I pulled my phone out and started to play with the zoom to figure out what focal length would be best suited for what I had in mind. It was looking like my telephoto lens was going to be the right choice and that was what I put on the camera. Now it was time to put in the work and start making photos. By work, I mean dancing with the camera and finding that best spot to put it and finding the right height for it to be. I’m a little embarrassed over how long it took me to find the right spot, but then again, I was a little rusty doing slow photography after so much fast photography over the past few months. It was nice to be back on a tripod again so I could pay attention to all the details within the frame.
I finally landed on the right spot for the camera and was able to get a few frames shot with some slight variations. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was the first shot in the bag which was what I was after. I finally had a workable composition on this car and started to feel like the curse had been lifted. I began to move around the see what else spoke to me now that I was more open to hearing how it wanted to be photographed. There was a shift that happened right about then when I stopped thinking about every move that I made and I just started to be inspired. It was the first time I had experienced this since sometime in September when I was in full swing before the portrait shoots started to get lined up. It felt great!
Building on what I had loved about the rear of the car, I started to turn my attention to the driver’s side cowl area. This is a portion of cars that I’ve enjoyed shooting for a while now because of how the body seams all come together. Now, with the needles in place, there were very little body seams to be seen, but I knew that the needles would introduce a different texture to the scene. Now, one thing that I have learned while putting together my list of significant images for the year is that I’ve really started paying more attention to the abstract details of my subjects as I concentrate on shapes and the abstract qualities of the subject. That was what I was essentially doing with this Chrysler at this point. There were no overall compositions to be had, but I could find abstracts and details if I looked hard enough.
The mirror was in really good shape and that contrasted nicely with the needles that showed just how long the car had been sitting here. I liked the juxtaposition between the two elements and liked the remains of the inspection sticker in the window. These are the things that started to form the composition in my head, and it was just a matter of organizing all of the elements within the frame of the camera. It really didn’t take long at all before I had a composition that I liked, and I was able to get the shot relatively quickly This one looked great in the image review and I knew that I had nailed the photo and now I had two in the bag. Things were starting to get revved up. I was finally feeling like I had conquered this car, but I knew that there were more compositions to be had.
I didn’t even have to move before I saw the next idea for a composition. Looking through the open window into the passenger compartment, I could see that the front seats were missing, but the rear seat was still in place. The part that caught my eye was the same emblem that I had shot on the rear of the car sitting between the two rear seat backs. It reminded me of the Impala logo that I had shot in a similar situation, and I knew that there was a photo to be had with this emblem between the seats.
There wasn’t much in the way of color around the back seat. Everything was a very dingy green and that wasn’t a pleasant color at all. I was liking the contrast from the emblem and the surrounding housing which prompted me to create this as a black and white photograph. I even set the camera up to show me the black and white as I was composing and shooting the photo. I still had the long lens on, and I was going to need it to reach into the rear of the car. I’m not kidding when I say that this Imperial was a large car. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that my Miata would actually fit in the passenger compartment of this car. I might be able to do a 3-point turn in it as well. It was so big…..How big was it you ask?…It was so big that from where I was standing in front of the rearview mirror, I wasn’t able to get the crop close enough with the lens racked out to 200mm. I had to get the camera much closer to the rear of the car looking through the open window. It was a bit of a dance to get the right position that was close enough because where I really needed to be put the angle wrong which shifted the emblem too close to the driver’s side seat back. I had to move the camera back slightly and tilt the tripod over to get enough separation between the emblem and the seat. That worked well enough to where I didn’t have to go and get the extender to get the reach needed. I was already struggling with depth of field and didn’t want to complicate matters with something in excess of 200mm.
What I had was working, and it looked great on the back of the camera. The clouds overhead was making this a very evenly lit scene even though it was covered by the roof of the car. I didn’t like the flatness of the scene, but I also knew that I would be able to add contrast in post to create the scene that I was wanting. This is why I love shooting on cloudy days. With just a little bit of dodging and burning in Lightroom, I am able to work out a high contrast photograph even in flat lighting.
As I was working out the photo, I was able to see that the emblem was in great shape, and the lines were very sharp. I knew that after I did a bit of contrast work that it would really pop, looking almost new. That went against the obvious decay of the seat surfaces which showed lots of accumulated dirt. It was another case of showing off a juxtaposition in a photograph which always makes for an interesting composition. That is where the story comes from as you start to put the clues together to figure out the parts of the image that you can’t see.
I was on a roll with this Chrysler at this point. What had totally stumped me months ago, was giving me more and more opportunities for photos. I still had one area left that I really wanted to work. This was probably the most unique aspect of the whole car. The headlights were behind headlight covers which I have to believe were high end luxury back then. Not only were the lights behind covers, but the covers also had etchings on them which matched up to the grill slats. This gave the front end a very cohesive look considering the materials were vastly different. This was the part that I had wanted to capture during the Summer because of how unique this was. None of my normal compositions would work out here unfortunately. I had to come up with something different, and it was going to be more of an abstract kind of composition to keep it visually interesting.
Since I wasn’t able to shoot from the front corner like I tend to do, I moved to the center of the bumper and looked at the outer corners for a composition. This also had issues because of the neighboring vehicles which I didn’t want in the scene. I really started to work this concept and tried to figure out how to photograph these headlights without it being just a documenting photograph. I started to pay attention to the fact that the fenders extended well beyond the headlights and that would give me a wall of sorts to contain the composition. It was the best way that I could tell to keep from including the neighboring vehicles. With this in mind, I started to frame up a composition and tried between vertical and horizontal. It appeared as though the horizontal version would be more effective, so that was what I shot first. First from the driver’s side and then the passenger’s side. Since I wasn’t quite familiar with this composition on this car, I didn’t know which side would read better from left to right. I needed to get both so that I could figure it out over the course of time.
As it turned out, the passenger side had a much better flow than the driver’s side both from a design standpoint and also from the lighting and patina that I was dealing with. That is the side that I ended up working with for pretty much the entire time, though I had alternatives from the other side just in case. The biggest problem that I was having to deal with at this point was my own reflection in the chrome. This is just part of the experience when photographing cars. The really rusty ones don’t really have this problem, but the chrome on this car was in really good shape and with all the bends, I knew that there was every chance that I was going to appear somewhere, and potentially several places.
This was where I did my patented “funky chicken” routine where I waved my hands around to see if I could spot movement in the shiny surfaces. I was able to find myself in the corner and was able to move out of the way thanks to using a 2-second timer to give me time to leave the area. That was the trick to getting the shot cleanly. I only had to remove the tripod in post to get rid of any evidence that the photographer was there.
The passenger side of the car had a unique aspect to it with the bumper being bent out at the bottom. This created an effect almost like a chin spoiler. It gave an almost racy feel to the very large sedan. In order to capture that, I was going to have to flip the camera back to vertical and frame up the shot like that. This was the composition that I had found to be less effective when I was setting things up, but now that I really wanted to include the bent bumper, it made more sense to do it this way. A side effect of this version of the composition was that there was more chrome in the frame compared to paint which kind of negated the use of color. I was happy to switch to black and white here because I’ve found that presentation to be very effective in situations like this. Seeing it in the camera during the image review, I knew that I was onto something. It was looking really good, and I knew that I would be able to introduce more contrast into the scene during post.
There it was, after months of feeling defeated by this car, I had come back and even though I wasn’t quite feeling 100% like my creative self, I managed to crank off several different compositions which yielded a total of five keepers from this car. Yeah, I was really proud of myself for working through this and figuring out how to best shoot it. I was feeling very much back in the groove of photographing decay, and I was ready to move onto the next subject.
Oh, you didn’t think I was going to stop here, did you? You know me better than that, and I’ll go ahead and let you know that later in the day when the sun came out, I returned to this car for a second try at some compositions. I’m not going to overburden you with all the photos that I shot during the day in this one blog entry. I’m going to give them to you in more manageable segments. That kind of brings me to the title for this blog. Surely you noticed the title of “Not Again.” This is a title with a few meanings for me. First of all, it is a nod to the first time that I was out here with my blog series titled simply “Not,” with several parts to it. Here we are again at the same place. It is also going to be another multi-part blog hence the “Again” portion of the name. It also refers to the fact that 2025 has seen more multiple entry blogs than any other year. I’m actually not going out and searching out these situations because I do get tired typing all of these blogs. For me, it is a case of “not again” with all of the typing.
So, you see that the title works in a number of ways. While it might come off as negative sounding, I am actually quite thrilled with this trek. I shot a total of 113 frames during the day which is really about average for a location like this. I think I was there for a total of four hours, so I was actually moving at a slow pace, but I was shooting for effect rather than sticking with a composition for many exposures as the lighting changed. I’m not going to tell you how many keepers that I have, but I will say that I well surpassed the 10% mark this this one. The five keepers that you see here are only the beginning and they only scratch the surface.
Stick around when you are done reading this one and I’ll be getting the next entry out hopefully tomorrow morning. I can think of no better way to end out the year than with a creative bang. I’ll let you be the judge of whether or not that has happened with this trek.
I’ll be back soon with Not Again (Part 2).….
