Wednesday, August 6, 2025
I have published a blog each day for a full week at this point. In fact, if you are keeping track, there has been a blog entry every day of August with the exception of the 2nd. I Can’t recall another time when I have done that before, especially not in the Summer. This is actually my least favorite season for photography whether it be landscape or decay. Usually by this point, the greens have started to fade, it is hot, and just very uncomfortable to be outside, at least for me. This year, we have seen a great deal more rain than normal which has kept the greens vibrant, yet oddly enough, it seems that the brush isn’t as tall and thick as it has been in previous years. This has made it possible for me to do more work with my decay subjects which are usually quite hidden by this point during the year. I’ve had such good luck with decay subjects; I have pretty much forgotten about landscape photos. This isn’t really a problem because I prefer the decay theme in my photos more than your basic landscape images which can get kind of repetitive after a while.
The really interesting thing about the past few months is that I haven’t really been traveling all that far, and here recently, my locations have been around five miles or less from the house. The fact that I have not photographed many of these locations despite being close by is a little bit of a shock to me. Since moving out here five years ago, I have spent a lot of time out exploring and while I’ve seen several of the places that I’ve shot, they haven’t really appealed to me at those times. Maybe it is my skillset that has improved to where I can mor readily work with the subjects, or there is something unique about the conditions this year. Whatever it is, I’m having a lot of fun without driving too far to find new and exciting subjects.
If you have been keeping track, you will know that this is in no way a conclusion to a four-part blog series. I had gone out on Wednesday looking for just a few photos to keep me busy through the day before things started to get busy for me on Thursday. It was drizzling, but the light was fantastic for what I wanted. Several of the locations that I wanted to photograph I was unable to find anyone around to grant me permission to be that kind of deep in the property. The first location was one that I could get pretty much from the street, with just a little bit of fudging with the easement for one of the compositions. The second location was a complete surprise to me because I had seen this truck for years, but never really considered it ready for a photo until that day. Both of these locations were talked about in what absolutely was not a part 1 to this blog.
Had it just been those locations and a few swings and misses for permission, that would have been the end of it all. Speaking of swings and misses, I did forget about one other location that I had tried to shoot that morning. It was again about three miles from home, and it was a VW Bug that was at the end of a driveway with the windows down. I’m assuming that somebody just bought it as a project vehicle as it looked in decent shape, but the body was loaded with a beautiful patina. The most interesting thing about it was the Porsche wheels that were mounted, and with it positioned right next to some tall grass and a street sign, I had a good feeling that I could work with the car quite well. I wasn’t able to find anyone at home to ask, and I was wanting to get in pretty close to the car to make the photo work which told me that I really needed to get permission even though that car was sitting basically in the easement of the road. I’ll push a gray area from time to time, but this was something that I felt really needed permission.
Anyway, during my hunts, I had located a shop locally that had a bunch of cars on the property. Most of them didn’t interest me, but there had been a Z right at the entrance that grabbed my attention. There was a little bit of drama involved in getting the permission I needed, but thanks to me knowing where I stood in the equation, I didn’t shoot myself in the foot when I did manage to make contact with the owner. He turned out to be a very nice guy and I enjoyed our talk as well as the tour that he took me on through the property. He actually apologized for coming off as a little rude when we first met. I explained that I totally understood where he was coming from and was actually used to interactions like that. He followed that up with saying that he is usually pretty good at reading people and he was able to tell that I seemed like an upstanding person. It is nice that in a short amount of time I can be labeled as such. I truly think that is accurate and I strive to keep myself at that standard, especially in relation to working on other people’s property.
This is something that I teach in my Decay Workshops because there are so many different ways that these kinds of conversations go, but in the end, you can only control your own reactions. By keeping myself humble and understanding that I am asking the property owner to give up several things to allow me access to their property, I make sure that they have total control over the conversation and what they ask me. I am left with either two choices in these conversations, be completely forthcoming with them and let them take the time that they need to be comfortable with me or decide that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze and walk away. Honestly, I was prepared to turn and walk away from this location based on the first interaction, but I’m glad I stuck it out and let him dictate where the conversation took us.
As I left off with yesterday’s installment, which was most certainly NOT part 3 of this series, I was 20 photographs into a brand new collection of images from this location. I’m as surprised as anyone because to look at the shop from the road, it doesn’t really look like there would be that many fantastic subjects to photograph. It is a good reminder of the “plus 1” rule though. Where I can see one good subject, there will be another close by. Had I come to the end of the images after the last blog, that would still be about as many photos as I would come back with after a week at the beach. This was truly the gift that kept on giving. Here we are a full four days after I started this adventure, closing it out with one last blog entry and another nine images. That will bring the total for the day to 34 keepers out of 118 frames shot. I was moving fast at this last location as I have hinted to several times. This caused me not to get bogged down by a single composition or subject for too long. I was getting the shot and moving on. There were very few times when I shot more than three frames for a given composition, and I just kept moving around like this gnat that keeps flying under the desk lamp right now.
It is nice to move fast like this because I can cover a lot of territory quickly, but it is very easy to lose track of how many photographs I am likely to get. I was really thinking that if I was lucky, I might have a dozen photos from here by the time I got home. That was way more than I had been planning for, and kind of going to the buffet for lunch after having a full breakfast with pancakes and the whole nine, it was starting to feel like pure gluttony with how many photos I was shooting. I remember wondering if I was even going to be able to finish with the processing before having to go to bed in order to wake up early the next morning for an appointment.
All of that really didn’t matter because I was really in the moment with these great cars. I don’t get the opportunity to shoot that many Mopars, and that makes these subjects that much more unique. I mean compare them to the Chevy log truck and Blazer that I had shot earlier in the day. While they are unique in their own rights, I have other photos of similar vehicles in my collection dating back several years. These Dodges and Chryslers were something special and many of them I had never seen in up close, much less photographed.
I had found a happy place with the Dodge Super Bee that was behind the last shop. This had turned into probably my favorite subject out here to shoot, and I had been working with it for quite some time. You might remember that I had noticed that the driver’s door was removed and then leaned up against the body of the car. It was close enough to make sure that we knew it belonged to the car, but far enough away to create a bit of visual tension with the lines that we are so used to seeing. Because of that fact, I really wanted to photograph how the car looked with the door on the ground. Sure, I could get an overall photo of the car to show that, but the door element would be kind of lost in the grand scheme of things. What I wanted was something more intimate that showed just the aspect that inspired me.
I started to look at the scene and really take it in. The first thing that I noticed was that the A pillar which was above the steering wheel was the exact same angle as the vent window which was below the steering wheel. Yes, I know why they are at the same angle, and realize that for the door to fit in the opening those lines had to match. What made me take note of the fact was that these parallel lines were at a diagonal and were framing a circle. That circle was also a focal point for the image and was repeated in the instruments, the rearview mirror, and even the headlight in the passenger seat. Graphically, I had just figured out the motivation for the composition. All that was left was to organize the scene and make it flow.
I needed enough of the car to make sure that the viewer knew the nature of the scene and why it was odd that the door was laying on the ground. I didn’t need the roof of the car, nor the bottom of the door. All I needed was the tall grass to indicate that the door was positioned on the ground, where it had been for some time. I allowed a hint of the wall to the shop to enter in above the fender because there were other tall grasses on the other side of the car that made for kind of an interesting frame that showed the depth of the image. All the visual clues were coming together, and I just needed to make sure that I had enough separation in the areas where it was important. That actually didn’t take too long, and I was able to get two variations on this concept.
I was pretty sure when I was shooting this one that I was going to present it as a black and white image. When I got it home and started to process it, that was how I started out. There was no going back to color because the color just wasn’t important at all. This was all about the lines and shapes and the black and white showed that off much better than a color image would have. In fact, the color image would have added more complexity to an already complex scene. It just came together beautifully in black and white and was one that I liked a lot more than I thought I would.
While working on the isolation of the Dodge, I kept looking over my shoulder at the huge Imperial which I had kind of worked with some when I first got back here. I would have loved to have captured the entire car, but I’ve shared the difficulties with doing that kind of composition with the location the car was in. My only option was to get isolations and so far, I had only gotten an abstract of the rear of the car and had shot a failed front corner composition before turning my attention to the Dodge. I really felt that I had left some meat on the bone and decided to go back and try it again.
I was most interested in the front of the car and started to look for options up there. The first thing that I spotted was the center emblem on the hood. I’m surprised that this slipped my attention during the first round on the car, but in my defense, I was in a hurry and wasn’t familiar with the car at all. Now that I had spotted the emblem, I felt that I needed to capture it. Of course, I wasn’t able to get a straight image from the front because the box truck was about a foot away from the front of the car. I could only work from the side and in order to determine which side that was, I had to look at the patterns of rust to see where the natural framing might be. I decided based on the fact that there was a large area of rust off to the right of the emblem that made for a nice extra diagonal component to what was already going to be a diagonally charged composition. I knew that I was going to be including the grill below the hood for depth, and I needed it all to frame the emblem in the upper left area of the frame. All of this needed to be done without creating empty space. I was fine with negative space, but it was going to have to add to the composition overall if I was going to use it.
When I framed this up in the camera, there was no reason to shoot more than one because I was very happy with how this turned out when looking in the image review. I had chosen to go with a limited depth of field to further bring the attention to the emblem. This worked well and kept the textures from pulling your eyes away. Everything was darker and softer than the emblem and that made it the visual anchor to the whole scene, not to mention the part where the eyes tended to stay. The negative space filled the rest of the frame to add tension, but not to distract from the emblem. It was more effective than empty space, because a void of that size would have pulled the eyes away as they tried to search for a reason for its inclusion.
Feeling like I was starting to understand the Chrysler after all this time, I went back to the front corner and tried the same concept yet again. This time, I opted to shoot the image vertically to go along with the shape of the hidden light. This also brought more emphasis to the emblem on the grill. I still made sure that the weeds framed the emblem as well as they had in the first attempt. The weeds were thrown into blur through a wider aperture to make sure that the eyes didn’t get hung up on those before seeing the Imperial emblem. I shot just a couple of this because I still wasn’t sure if it would work or not.
After getting the images home, both this composition and the earlier horizontal one were trashed because I didn’t really like the flow in either one. After getting the majority of the survivors of the culling process rough edited, I came back to these two once again and gave them a second look. I ended up pulling the horizontal photo into the develop module to start working on it. I tried it in black and white as well as in color. I fought with it long enough to realize that if I had to fight with it this much, it wasn’t worth the time. If I had shot it better, the processing would have been easier and more natural. everything that I was doing seemed forced which was not a good start.
It wasn’t until the following morning when I was going back through the images one last time to correct for color and contrast using fresh eyes that I went back to the ones that hadn’t made the cut during that first day. I was again looking at the corner shots of the Chrysler and deciding that I really liked the concept but needed to find a better execution. I recalled feeling better about the vertical composition when I was shooting them and decided to pull that one back in and give it a try. I kind of cheated because I was tired of editing photos at this point and I pulled the processing settings from a similarly toned image that I had done in black and white. Those settings were applied to the Imperial shot, and I moved the local masks to fit this particular scene. I just looked at it briefly and took it all in. I was actually pretty happy with what I was seeing and felt that this was a successful execution of the concept. I tweaked the edit a bit more so that it fit this particular image and decided that it polished up nicely. It might not be a portfolio image, but it is one that I am happy to have in my collection, and it represents a car that I just don’t get to see all that often. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this car before.
I spent the next few minutes walking around the Imperial (I think I got all my steps in for the day doing that, it was a big car) looking for more compositions, but nothing was presenting itself. I think had there been some direct sunlight, I might have found some areas with interesting shadow detail that I could use in a composition. With the clouds as thick as they were, that wasn’t going to happen today. Speaking of the clouds, I happened to look up and saw that they had some great texture as the lower clouds were really showing off against the mid-level clouds. I knew that I had a sky worth photographing, but I needed to find a composition that would work with the sky.
As luck would have it, just to my left was the Super Bee that I had been working with. It was kind of by itself but there was a metal building beside of it. I’m not a fan of including metal buildings in my photos, but sometimes it is necessary. This was one of those times because in order to get the sky in the shot, I was going to have to go wide and include something around the car. The building was the least problematic option, and I got to work on forming a composition with the car and the building.
Since I was needing to go kind of wide with the composition, I had to swap out lenses and decided to go with the standard zoom for this so as not to go overboard with the perspective distortion. I looked for the right angle to get the car from and decided that there was a piece of unknown equipment buried in the grass off to the front of the car which would make for a good foreground. It was low enough and obscured enough that it really wasn’t important what it was, but it helped to establish more depth to the scene. I got the composition dialed in and realized that the sky was still a bit too bright for the scene. I ended up adding a 2-stop grad filter to control the sky just enough to make the exposure work. I then shot several frames as the clouds moved overhead. I would have done a long exposure, but the grass and trees were moving just enough that it would have been a distraction. Had there been more wind and the greenery had gone fully blurred I would have considered it. I just didn’t like the idea of it looking like an accidental use of barely too slow of a shutter speed.
When I was satisfied that I had a good image to work with I took one last look at the scene and tried to find another option for a composition with the sky. I started to get something that I liked but the lens was racked out to 24mm and I needed to go wider to get it to work. I swapped out the lens to my 16-35mm which gave me the right focal length to make the entire photo work as I had envisioned. I no longer had the equipment in the foreground and had focused more on the front of the car rather than the side. The perspective caused the hood and fender to swell visually which became my foreground interest. The receding building to the left gave that nice diagonal component while showing distance thanks to the lens.
As you can see, this image works in many of the same ways as the previous, but they arrive at the result in different ways. I like both of them equally because they focus on two different areas of the car. It depends on which lines appeal to you the most as to which you will lean towards. For me, I love the side shot because of the door that I had already spent so much time with. The second example focused more on that hood that was another area that I had really enjoyed working with. In both cases, the mood is set from the sky and there is a great color balance with the greens and oranges. The subdued blues add that bit of coolness to the colors.
When I was finished with this composition, I looked around one last time. I also looked at my watch and found that it was a little after 4pm. I had been here for two and a half hours. I was getting hungry, and very tired. I had not planned to be out all day, yet I had left the house at something like 10am expecting to be home by a little after noon and done with the blog by the time Toni got home. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen, but I still wanted to get some food in my belly before starting to look at the day’s images.
It was time to hit the road, and I was satisfied with what I had accomplished for the day. Once I packed up my bag I started to walk back to the truck. The funny thing was, I remember thinking to myself that I was breaking one of my personal rules. I never pack up my gear before I get back to the truck in a location like this because there is always something that will strike me while I’m walking. I dismissed that thought because I was hungry and creatively done for the day.
As I passed the building that I had just shot, I saw a young man walking from the entrance. I spoke to him briefly and as I was looking in that direction, I saw it…
This is why I don’t pack up my gear before getting back to the truck. I’m an idiot.
I forgot the Rambler!!!
Under normal circumstances, I probably would have taken the loss, but since my Grandfather had such a connection to these cars, I had to photograph it now that I had the opportunity. I opened up the camera bag very aware that I didn’t want to get any more photos. I looked at the scene and decided that with it being a white car, it wasn’t going to offer many options for isolations, and it wasn’t a color that was going to stand out in an overall composition. In fact, there were no great angles that I could shoot it from where it would be free of distractions in the background. I was kind of at a loss as to how to photograph it. I needed to take a breath and get back into my creative headspace one last time before I called it a day.
It might sound like this was going to be a lost cause for a photo, but I still had some tricks up my sleeve for this one. The first thought came from the old Sprint telephone booth that was standing next to the building the car was parked by. I could use that as a framing element at the rear and that would allow me to incorporate the building as well as a good background. I decided to use the telephoto lens for this idea which would put me kind of far away from the car, but for the shape of the car, I didn’t want any perspective distortion at all with it. What had to be only a couple of minutes since I had packed up my bag, I was opening it and pulling the camera back out once again. It was the Rambler after all, so it was very much worth it.
I started to frame up the composition that I had in mind, but the phone booth was too far away, and since it clearly said “Sprint” on it, I was kind of losing interest because I was pretty sure Sprint wasn’t around back in the ’60’s. Now had it said one of the older phone companies, that would have worked better, but there was no sense in trying to get the angles right to include the booth. What I did notice was that the bay doors seemed to frame the car quite well on their own and by dropping the camera down really low, I was able to get the proportions in the scene that I was after. I cropped just inside of the phone booth to the right and used the bush to the left as another framing aspect while giving the car sufficient nose room.
While I was shooting this, I really noticed that the color wasn’t playing into the composition at all which made me realize that black and white was the way to go. Even looking at it on the back of the camera with the black and white profile selected, I was seeing a lot of promise to this scene. With some careful tone shifts and a bit of contrast here and there, I was pretty sure that I was going to have a pretty solid image to add to the collection. There were bonus points for getting the entire car and flattering the shape of the four-door sedan.
Happy with the overall and feeling rather inspired about the use of black and white, I moved in closer to check out any isolations that I might want to capture. Of course, I started to look at the front of the car since I do enjoy photographing headlights. These headlights weren’t all that great and didn’t have a lot of style around them, especially considering the different cars I had been working with so far today. I did notice that the Rambler emblem was embedded into the grill right next to the headlight. That was an interesting touch, and I decided to look at the angles for a photo. My normal quarter view of the car really didn’t work out all that well, so I started to dial in the composition to fill the frame with only what I liked. I went horizontal to include the light and the emblem, but that seemed very static. When I moved off to the side and elevated the camera, I noticed that the grill went beautifully diagonal leading to the light which was placed in a great spot to be the visual anchor for the entire photo.
Even looking at the photo in the black and white version on the back of the camera, it looked very flat, but I loved the composition. I knew how I was going to process this one and I was kind of excited to see how it would turn out. It was the addition of a lot of contrast with dodging and burning that really brought out the details and texture of the patina. It had a gritty quality that I really wanted to see when I was shooting this one. The processing actually went very fast and there were not many adjustments that had to be made before I was really happy with it. In fact, this is one of my favorites from the day for just how unique the composition turned out.
I wasn’t finished though and wanted to go around to the rear of the car to see what was back there that I could work with. The American emblem on the quarter panel caught my eye and I liked that it was placed just above a very dominant body line which flowed over the rear wheel. That gave me another idea for a composition. I just had to fight that urge to get the shot straight on with the body line appearing horizontal. I moved around to find a good way to balance the large wheel with the small emblem. This meant that I would shoot from an elevated position behind the car. I used the bumper as a framing element as well as the dogleg of the quarter panel which framed the wheel. The chrome hubcap was a visual anchor, and the emblem was the main subject of the photo. The balance turned out great and once again, black and white was the way to go.
I’ve found that with white cars, it is often the better choice to go with black and white over color. The exception to that would be if there were powerful colors in the scene such as a gold emblem or red trim. Other than that, the lack of color in the white just prompts me to tone it with a hue for a desired color palette. This often comes across as forced, while a black and white photo embraces the white aspects and forces the attention on the shapes and contrasts which are usually a better part of the story. In this last photo, the color of the car or the grass holds no bearing, but the shape of the composition becomes something very important to the image. That was the part that I wanted to focus on the most.
As I was finishing my walk around the car, I took note of the trunk emblem. This was an interesting one because the same emblem had two different fonts for Rambler and American. I thought that was rather interesting and wanted to capture it in some way. Looking around the emblem, the only thing that was of interest was the dirt on the car. It wasn’t really rust, and there wasn’t a lot of texture to be had. There were also not that many body seams that I could work with to add shape to the scene. However, since I was already looking at the scene in black and white through the camera, I realized just how much contrast I could dial in with the dirt to have it present some interest in the scene.
I noticed that there were larger areas a bit further up on the trunk and they were shaped in a way that would provide a natural vignette for the frame. That was going to be the top of the frame while the emblem occupied the lower area of the frame to introduce the entire composition. I again stepped off to the side to give the whole composition a bit of a diagonal flare for some visual excitement. There wasn’t anything overly interesting in the composition, but I knew that I could process it in a way that would overcome that aspect and give this emblem its time in the sun.
With that photo, I was officially done for the day. I packed up the bag once again knowing that anything else that I wanted to photograph would wait until another day. I went in and talked with the owner one last time and thanked him for the opportunity to get some photos out here. He let me know that he had been looking at my work while I was out there getting photos. He asked about the property where I had shot the Pontiacs, which all I could say was that it was in Taylorsville. He then started to tell me about other areas in and around Taylorsville where I could find more cars. Some were areas that I was familiar with, but others were new to me. I’ve now added these areas to my list of places to visit the next time I’m out that way. When I tell you how important it is to make good impressions with these property owners, this is exactly why. I had been on the verge of being told to kick rocks just hours before, but now I had access to this property and a lead on two other locations which sound equally as interesting. This is the reputation that I want to uphold so that I can continue with this type of photography which is largely based on complete strangers giving me access to their property and possessions.
After a parting conversation, I was on my way home to get some dinner before getting started with the editing and processing of the images. I was getting a very late start to this part of the day, and I knew that I was not going to be done with the blog by the time I needed to be in bed. I was actually going to be hard pressed to get the images ready before then. As it turned out, I only had the rough edits done to 28 of the 118 frames that I had shot before having to call it a day. I did another couple of edits the next morning before I rolled out for my line of appointments. When I was done with the first blog, I had added another few, and then one additional photo the following day. When it was all tabulated, I had a total of 34 keepers from the day which was mind blowing considering I was looking for no more than six photos.
Of course, all of those photos had no business being in a single blog post, but I kept remembering that I had intended on keeping this one simple and to the point, easily put into a single blog. I know that the titles of these entries didn’t fool you, at least not for long. It was my way of poking fun at my intentions for the day. Plans never work out the way that I intend, but usually that is because of the weather. For once, the weather was exactly what I had expected, and it worked out fantastically. The part that I hadn’t planned for was finding something that offered this much photographic potential so close to home and having it be a place that I had never worked before. It just goes to show that no matter how familiar you are with an area, there are always opportunities for finding new and exciting things to photograph.
I hope that you all have enjoyed this trek as much as I have. If any of the photos speak to you on a level where you would like to have a print, I would love to connect with you and match you up with that perfect print of your favorite photo. If you would like to learn more about how I create these images, consider joining me for a mentorship session, or participating in an advanced mentorship program. Either way, my goal will be to help you achieve your own goals as a photographer by sharing some of the skills that I have acquired over the years. It all starts with a commitment free consultation where we see if we are compatible and if I can offer what you are wanting to learn. It really is as simple as that.
Thank you all for joining me. I’m probably going to be taking a few days off to recover from all the activity here lately. My external hard drives are smoking from having so many new images added to them over the past week. I’m creatively drained at the moment and still have a portrait shoot to get ready for on Thursday. That is where my creative energy will be for the next few days. After that, I hope to get back out there and possibly shoot the VW Bug that is close to the house, or the car close to the barn that I had shot at the beginning of the month. At any rate, I’ll be back here with some new photos soon, but I want to give you all time to soak in all the new ones that I’ve shared so far this month.
Until next time….
