Tuesday, February 24, 2026
So, if you read through to the end of my last blog where I did some smoke photography in the studio, you might be expecting some decayed cars to be in front of my camera these days. The plan has been that either yesterday, or today, I was going to go back out to Lomax and talk with the property owner and see if I could get the permission to access the property. Looking at the weather, either day was going to be just about right for the chance to get some good photos with nice cloud cover to diffuse the sun and drop the shadows a bit. I even woke up nice and early yesterday hoping to head out around 8am to get there at a reasonable hour so as not to disturb him too early but still giving me enough time before he went to lunch to get some photography done.
Well, the morning kept slipping by as I was watching the clouds, or lack thereof moving through the sky. Don’t get me wrong, there were clouds, but they were a very thin overcast which was creating some very odd lighting. It was diffused, but very bright. Bright enough to hurt my eyes when I went outside which was going to cause some exposure issues potentially. The hourly forecast was calling for more clouds in the afternoon which was not idea because I was figuring that he would be back from lunch around 1pm which would just barely give me the time to do what I wanted to do. It was still workable though and that was my plan.
By 1:30, the sky wasn’t really looking any better and it was still looking like only about 30% cloud coverage over Lomax. It was still bright with very flat light which just felt odd to me for this kind of photography. It was getting too late to worry about going at this point and I started to recalibrate my plans for the day. I had been sitting in my chair watching a series on Netflix through pretty much the entire day and was really wanting to get up and do something different. The light outside was just not good for isolated photos, and the sky was lousy for getting grand scenes as with a barn or something. I was still wanting to do something with the camera, but it was getting too late in the day to get the studio set up as I had done the day before. That went much longer than I had anticipated and I was typing until pretty late in the evening after processing all of the image. I wanted to do something different than studio work anyway, but I still wanted to do some abstract work.
I went through my options, but I was feeling kind of lazy since I hadn’t been out all day and didn’t really care to make a big production out of anything. Something that did come to mind was the fact that the Miata was clean and with Toni’s truck at work with her, I had some extra room in the garage to play with. I wouldn’t even have to come out of my slippers to do some work with the Miata. It was something at least. I went down to the studio to grab my camera and tripod. I thought about getting some lights and softboxes but decided against it in favor of just working with the natural light that was coming into the space through the small windows of the garage doors. Yeah, I wasn’t going to any trouble at all with this session.
When I got the camera built, I chose to go with my telephoto lens because with the shine on this car, I wasn’t able to get too close for fear of becoming a cameo in the photos. This lens allowed me to be able to have some working room from the subject while still being able to isolate the details. It is one of the things that I love about that lens. The other thing that I love about it is that I can walk around with the camera to my eye and find the different compositions that I might want to work with. I can see how the light plays with the glossy surfaces and pick out my compositions without having to imagine how things would look in a frame.
I did this over most of the car and got an idea of the areas that I wanted to spend some time with. Of course, my main inspiration came from the headlights of the car, but after trying several different variations I wasn’t liking how the images were looking at all. They felt like photos shot in a garage because of the reflections of the different elements within the garage. I could minimize some of them with the polarizer, but there were just too many things that I didn’t like reflecting in the painted surfaces. I was finding that the reflections were well controlled below the bumper around the area of the daytime running light. This was an area that I had never really paid that much attention to when it came to photos. It is a wonderful little styling cue on the ND Miata, and the sculpting around it is something that I always enjoy when washing and waxing it.
With that in mind, I dropped the tripod down closer to the floor and started to work out an abstract around that light in the bumper. The polarizer allowed me to bend the contrast points where I wanted them to help define the shapes that I was dealing with. The whole thing was looking pretty good, but it just felt kind of simplistic as I was shooting it. I wasn’t convinced that it was going to work out at all. Because of that, I moved on to some different views around the headlights and tried some different angles. Nothing was seeming to work.
One of the ideas that I had come up with before getting started was to work around the door handle. This is becoming one of the compositions that I am looking at with my old cars, and you can see how I incorporated the door handle element into a scene with lots of vines and patina by checking out this blog entry. Of course, there are no vines and no patina on my Miata, so I’m missing a lot of those visual cues to help the composition through texture and colors. All that I have to work with on the Miata is the way that the light plays on the surface of the car. That was what I was interested in doing and found that the light from the door windows helped to bring attention to the door handle when the camera was at a specific height.
I did two different shots of the passenger side door handle with slightly different positioning before moving on to the next area that I wanted to work with. That was the wheel and brake caliper. I did a couple of compositions of those, but that started to feel more like an advertisement than an abstract which wasn’t true to what I was trying to accomplish with this quick session. I gave up on that and moved down the lower skirt and how it shaped around the lower portion of the door. This felt odd to start with, but I continued on and found a composition that worked. When I finally made the photo, I thought that I might have something that would work out nicely with that. It was the twelfth frame that was captured of the car. After that, I was losing hope with this subject.
As much as I love the Miata and the shapes that it has, it is a difficult car to photograph in many circumstances. Doing abstracts with it is an extra level of challenging as well. I looked back through the dozen images on the camera and decided that I wasn’t all that excited to go and pull them into Lightroom and figured that I would just look at them after I got back from the next trek which was hopefully going to be happening on Wednesday.
Well, fast forward to Wednesday morning and I was awake when Toni left for work and checked the weather. The clouds that were supposed to be here in the morning were just not showing up and it was looking like the afternoon was going to be better. With a sigh, I rolled back over and went back to sleep. I woke up around 8am and started to look at the weather again. The cloud cover was looking to be acceptable around 1pm which would be good enough to give me time to work the area before his shop hours were over. That left me with a good bit of the day to sit and wait. I wasn’t looking forward to just sitting in my chair all day knowing that the weather might not work out by the end of the day. I also knew that once I got comfortable, the chances that I would want to go out and start a day’s worth of photography was slim. I needed to start out doing something creative so I could just continue with that process should the clouds work out.
The answer came from an odd source. I had nearly forgotten about the photos that I had shot of the Miata the day before, but they came to mind while I was downstairs doing my morning routine. I decided to pull the photos into Lightroom and check them out. It didn’t take long to import the 12 files, and I started to work through them and tried to find merit in each of them. I ended up with four that I wanted to look at fully and possibly do some processing on. Two of those were eliminated after I started the processing. One of them was because it just looked like a garage picture and I had missed the focus on the headlight trying to keep the background blurred out. The other failure was the one of the side skirt which I had kind of liked at the time. The failure of this image was an odd reason and one that I had worried about. You see, this car has over 21,000 miles on it and is coming up on six years old. While the paint still looks great for the age, there is some wear on it after driving it as I do. Much of this wear is down at the lower portions from sand and dirt getting blasted on the sides as I am driving down the country roads. It is not all that noticeable to look at the car, but the resolution of this camera pulled out all of that sand blasting, and it became a bit of a distraction in the photo. That eliminated that shot pretty quickly leaving just two to explore.
The first one that you see above was done initially in color, but the more I looked at it, the more I didn’t like all the red and the slightly rainbow effect in the lens of the running light due to the plastic used viewed through the polarizer. I also wanted more contrast built in and the focus of the composition on the light housing. The red pulled the attention from that element and that just didn’t work for me. I chose to go with black and white and found the right profile to make the contrasts pretty close to what I was after. Then I just massaged the tones through several methods in Lightroom. The end result is one that I am quite happy with and think that it fits the bill for my want for an abstract image of the car.
The second keeper from the session was one of the two door handle shots. I liked how this one was arranged in the frame, and the bits of light reflecting seemed to add to the visual interest. What I spent the most time with on this one was the contrasts throughout the image. It was very important to me to direct the viewer’s attention to precisely the right places in the frame. This was done with the use of shadows which were deepened by a couple of different techniques in post. Of course, getting an accurate red for the color became a very important aspect which was not all that easy to do with the red which is on this car. There is a lot of pearl and tints in this paint which really drive me nuts when photographing it, especially with a polarizer which will affect the color. What I ended up with was a photo that I was quite happy with and also reached the bar for what I was after with this session. The processing was very similar to what I had done during the first trek of the year when I was working with the blue Studebaker. I love it when I can revisit techniques that I stumbled on for later photographs, and especially when the subjects are kind of different. I’m always learning, and that is going to be a big part of this year for my photography. I really want to leave my comfort zones and try some different ways of doing things, especially in how I actually see my subjects.
I hope that you have enjoyed this trek (well, kind of a trek) and the photos. I’m still hoping to get out here in a couple of hours to head out to Lomax to try for an actual trek into the field rather than staying at home and working in a more studio setting. I don’t know if that is going to work out today because the sun is shining bright outside right now and isn’t really looking like it is going to ease up. I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope to see you back here later tonight, or tomorrow sometime.
Until then….
