Sunday, October 27, 2024
Deep breath….and repeat.
Nope, that isn’t helping at all. Here it is at a quarter past nine and I am just starting to type the blog. I started this trek around 8:30 this morning and spent right around three and a half hours at a single location where I shot 129 frames. It took me roughly six hours to go through the processing, and several more hours to get the files ready for upload and the skeleton to the blog built. That brings us to this point where I am getting ready to talk about two dozen new photos that have been worked from that large group of digital RAW files. You could say that it has been a while since I have had this many photos to go through from a trek, especially one that is from only a single location.
The thought of going through the experience as I would normally doesn’t really excite me because that is just going to be too many words to deal with. I could break this up into parts, but I kind of want to share this experience in a more realistic way so that you can understand just how much I have done with this adventure. The only way to do that is to dump all the keepers right here so that there is no break within the blog because there was no break taken by the photographer from the time I started this. In order to do that without making it War and Peace is to really cut to the chase with the photos. I’m going to skip talking about gear as you can see what I shot each image with in the caption along with the titles. I’m not going to really go through the entire narrative of the day, but rather focus on each photo and why I shot it and why it was a keeper. Hopefully that will make this move right along.
Speaking of starting, you can kind of get an idea how this one started out by reading through the previous entry if you haven’t already. Essentially, I had been contacted by a friend who had recently driven by a shop that I had shot at some years ago with a fair amount of success. He let me know that there were some really interesting vehicles on the property. Usually, he comes up with really good tips that I had never spotted before, but this time I was able to tell him that I had been there before. He mentioned a couple of vehicles that I didn’t recall seeing there last time, so I decided to go out and give it a look. Sure enough, there were several different vehicles which had been added to the property. I returned and talked with one of the employees who lives on the property to see if I could come back and get some photography done once the weather got good. He not only gave me permission but told me where there were more old cars sitting and waiting behind the shop. I just needed some clouds in the sky to make it happen.
As I mentioned in the blog yesterday, the weather was looking promising for this morning, and I made plans to head out there early because I wanted to keep the sun directional from the East for what I was wanting to accomplish should the clouds be thin. Unfortunately, this meant that I wasn’t going to be able to go to church with Toni as I have been doing king of regularly. She was understanding, and with the scarcity of cloudy days, I couldn’t gamble missing out on this one. It was also a great thing that it was on a weekend when the shop wasn’t opened because I really don’t like to get in the way of business when I am working on the property. It was just the perfect day to go, and when we woke up nothing had changed with the weather.
When I arrived at around 9am, I parked on the shoulder of the road and went up to the house to let them know I was there. I saw no signs of movement and it looked like all the curtains were pulled. Not wanting to wake anyone up, I started out on the side lot where there were quite a few subjects to work with. The first one that I wanted to try was a Studebaker that was parked off on the side all alone. This was essentially the low hanging fruit of the bunch because it was isolated. Well, it was kind of isolated. There was a tree that was a short distance in front of it that had a branch laying on the hood which was going to dictate a lot of the composition. There was a house behind the truck with a chimney that reached up into the bright sky. behind the truck was another car, but that was going to be easy enough to block with the truck.
I found the right angle for the composition that I had in mind. I wanted to get the tree with the branch laying on the hood with the chimney at the opposite corner for balance. I wanted this photo to have a homey feel to it and show off the bits of fall color that were showing. The fact that the tree was covering the front of the truck made things a bit complicated from a composition standpoint because the focal point of the truck was being blocked. By getting low, I was able to focus more of the attention on the truck and use the branch as a supporting character. I shot several different variations on this composition before I found the one that I really liked. I also realized that the sky was blowing out at the top, so for the very last frame here, I added that grad filter. I’m glad that I did, because it was the only frame that allowed me to see any variation in the clouds in the background. That was why this one was chosen over the others. It was also my first one in the can which got me started on what was going to be a very long morning.
Since I wasn’t exactly sure of how that overall composition was going to turn out, I turned my attention to the details on the truck. I really loved the fact that the nameplate was still present on the side of the hood. Since the tree was laying on the hood, it was a chance to get the colors along with the emblem. I don’t usually do compositions like this, but it made sense to me, especially since the hood was separated from the fender and cowl.
There was no need to capture too much of the truck as I was only interested in the emblem and the tree. The slope of the hood made it a more interesting composition with the diagonals introduced. The branches seemed to follow that curve as well which I really liked. The light was increasing by this point, and the leaves were looking a bit more punchy than they had been, and the fact that I wasn’t having to drop the exposure because of the sky helped me bring in more color as well. The end result was a very simple composition that included everything that I wanted, while all the other elements were omitted successfully.
Of course, the question was asked as to what would happen if I included more of the truck. I moved back and reframed the shot to have pretty much the entire cab included in the frame. By doing this, I realized that the leaves were no longer a focal point, and neither was the emblem. With this composition, the focus was on the patina and strangely enough the cracked glass. With more elements in the composition, I had to really figure out where I wanted to cut the frame. I needed to show that this was a pickup, so part of the bed was included as was a portion of the rear window. That gave the needed dimension to the truck and made it to where I didn’t need to include the full bed. This allowed the attention to remain on the broken glass and what eventually became a focal point of the unmounted fender and poorly fitted hood. The longer I looked at this one during the processing the more I kept thinking that it just looked like a busted can of biscuits which just made me smile. When it came time to name it, that seemed like a logical choice and so it was.
Not wanting to spend too much time with any particular vehicle, I moved my attention over to a Chevy Apache which was parked next to another Studebaker and an S-10 Blazer which I had no interest in photographing. This meant that I was going to be doing more isolations. If you have paid any attention at all to my photography, you will surely know that I love spending time with headlights on these old vehicles. That was where I started with this one. One of the design features with the Apache that makes it stand out is the dual headlight pod on each side. With this truck, the passenger side had one of the lights pulled out which was laying on the chrome grill piece. This was an added layer of interest for me and made this the side to shoot.
I’ve done this type of composition many times over, so there wasn’t a lot of thought put into it. With this truck, the different lines made for some pretty strong S-curves which I am always looking for as it adds interest to the composition. The patina was great on the top of the fender, and there was a leaf on the bumper that matched that color. Everything just fell into place for a successful composition which I really liked. The empty headlight bucket was still my favorite part of this photo though. I am glad that I opted not to include the chrome bumper because I think that would have put too many elements in the frame and ultimately would have detracted from the ejected headlight.
By this time, I was fully in the groove and working on auto pilot much like I had been doing yesterday. Since the patina was something that caught my attention, I wanted to get a photo that showcased that over everything else. Usually, I would want to include something like an emblem or headlight to break up the patina, but this time, I just framed up a composition that showed the seam between the fender and hood going in the same direction as some black paint on the fender. These became leading lines that worked very well in the composition to pull your eyes through the frame so that you can enjoy all that texture which I am sure was from a sanding party on the old paint at one time. With some creative processing techniques, I was able to really bring out that texture and add to the contrast that was already there for even more depth. The end result is a photo that I like a lot more than I probably should, but this was an early favorite of mine from the entire batch for its simplicity and visual appeal.
I wasn’t quite ready to move on from the Apache and turned my attention to the front bowtie emblem. This is another area of a vehicle that I enjoy photographing. Much like with the headlights, the Apache’s grill was a bit complicated in design. This can make for interesting compositions or very cluttered ones. I started off by looking at it from directly in front which had symmetry going for it but seemed boring and complex to look at. I started trying to find other ways of capturing it and discovered that shooting it from an angle really worked out well. By elevating the camera and having it off to the passenger side I was able to bring in a lot of diagonals to the scene that upped the interest level. By reducing the depth of field, I was able to focus the attention on the emblem quite efficiently. What started as a boring shot that was similar to what I would always do, turned into a very unique perspective in my collection that looked unlike anything else that I had shot in the past.
While I was working on the Apache, turned my attention to the Studebaker beside it, at least I think that is where this photo comes from. I know I was looking for dash shots at this point since there were several of the cars with open windows. I just really can’t remember which one this photo came from. At any rate, what drew me to this was the fact that the speedometer was so bright in comparison to the rest of the dash and the numbers were clear thanks to the fact that the bezel was missing. There was also the fact that the needle was at around 7mph which I thought was optimistic for this old vehicle.
Interior shots have always been difficult for me because I have a hard time organizing all the elements to have them make sense. What I had to do here was to put the frame well into the steering wheel to visually reduce the space that it took up and make it more in line with the speedometer size. I found elements on the opposite side that helped to establish a boundary or sorts while indicating that there were more bits and pieces to be seen off to the right. The whole idea here is to have the viewer fill in the missing parts, but I needed to give some clues as to how to go about doing that. I’ll get into more about that in my upcoming Behind the Camera in just a few days.
The resulting photo was one that I felt worked quite well and had a theme of circles throughout the frame. The bare metal color also showed up multiple times, but it was still that speedometer needle that kept drawing me in. Because I was focused there, I started to realize that the 10 was reversed and was showing as 01, which made the speed somewhere between 0 and 01 which I thought was just really slow. I then realized that the lower four numbers were reversed to make them easier to read left to right. This is something that I had never noticed before and found kind of interesting.
A couple of spots down the way was a ’46 or so Dodge that was very similar to one that I have photographed many times in downtown North Wilkesboro. There wasn’t much to this car that caught my eye, but I did like the rust on the front of it along with the lines of the fender, bumper, and hood. I had shot similar compositions before but wanted to get the various textures that were present here which I had not seen on the previous Dodges.
I knew when I was framing this one up that I was going to be breaking the three shapes up into masks and processing them each differently for a bit more control over the whole image. While I was capturing the two frames that I tried, I really didn’t much care for how it was turning out. The colors looked lifeless, and the textures weren’t as stimulating as I was hoping they would be. To be quite honest, this was one of the last ones that I processed because I didn’t have much hope for it, although it made it through the initial culling. I think that I spent ten minutes working this one in Lightroom and what ended up on my screen after that was beyond my expectations. It was truly an abstract image that captured just what I was wanting to share with the photo. There isn’t a change that I would want to make which usually doesn’t happen that often.
This image is one that I had to try, but really didn’t expect much out of it. While working with the Apache, I saw that there were chevron emblems on each door. I had not ever noticed these before on the Apaches that I had photographed so they really caught my eye. I just had no idea how to photograph them. I kept going back and forth between the sides looking for something that pulled the composition together, but never found anything. The last thing that I wanted to do was just get a photo of this bit of chrome against the rust. It would have looked fine, but there wouldn’t have been enough visual interest to keep the attention of the viewer. I had to come up with something else to make it work.
What I decided was that I would shoot the emblem at the lower portion of the frame and capture the two bits of glass above it. This seemed to work and kept with the rule of odds for the number of elements that are included in the frame. I struggled a bit with the angle that the camera needed to be at to get the elements to all work together. It was done as a vertical, and there were two frames shot. The one that you see here was the only one that made it through the culling. When I finally got around to processing it, I was probably 16 photos or so into the batch, so I was well in the groove. However, I didn’t like anything that I was doing with this particular frame. I figured that it was going to get culled out and left on the editing floor, but I didn’t pull it from the list of picks just yet. When I was almost done, I gave it one more try and flipped it horizontally which changed how it read. I also cropped it differently than I had shot it or cropped earlier. I went with a shorter crop and just included small portions of the windows. These two changes made my interpretation of the photo much different. Now I could see a face looking down derisively at something and that made me smile. I finished up the processing and actually don’t hate the final image. In fact, I like it quite a bit with how it was treated in processing.
Of course, I would end up finding myself back at the Apache again. I had decided a while earlier that I was going to need to see what the standard zoom would allow me to capture and now that I had exhausted my telephoto options, I went with the shorter focal length and started working around the cars once again. This composition of the front of the Apache I had shot with the long lens, but didn’t quite like how it turned out. This allowed me to change the relationship between the main subject and the Studebaker in the background as well as the leaves in the foreground. It was a small change, but one that made a huge difference in how the image looked. This one was much stronger, and I liked the slightly shallower depth of field as compared to the original attempt at it. You can see just how close together these vehicles were parked here which caused me more than my share of grief in how to photograph them.
With the new lens, I worked my way back over to the Studebaker that I had shot first off. I wanted to get more involved with the broken glass on the driver’s door. This has become one of my favorite subjects to work with because just like rust, glass breaks in very unique ways. I took lessons that I have learned recently about how best to shoot broken glass and found a composition that partially framed the most interesting part while showing some context behind the broken glass. With a shallow depth of field, I focused on the cracks and fired off the shutter. When it was time to process the image, I could tell that there was really no importance to the color which prompted me to process it as a black and white image. This forced the attention to the broken glass which was the why behind the shot. I love clarity in vision when it comes to determining what was important to me through the eyes of the viewer.
After about an hour and a half, I felt that I needed to go over to the shop and let Justin know I was there. There was also a ’57 Bel Air coupe parked out front that I was very excited to photograph. After letting him know I was there, I started to work with the Chevy. This was not going to be an easy subject because it was positioned right next to the road, and beside a blue dually pickup which was not something that would make sense in a photo with the old car. I looked for angles on it and found that the only way to get an overall composition with it was to shoot it from basically from dead on forward. This just missed so much of what made this car unique and while I shot the composition, I didn’t like it at all when I got home. There was just no way to get the sides in the shot without making the entire composition overly complex.
What I ended up doing was taking isolations of the car which I knew would be the case for most of my time with it. I started with the rear of the car because that was going to be the easiest to work with and there was an antique auto plate from Alabama which I found interesting. The composition here was one that I have done many times with many different vehicles, but it worked here like it was designed around this car. It wasn’t a stellar photograph, but it got me going on this Chevy and that fueled the fire for me to keep on going with it.
The area that I was most interested in was the patina on the passenger side front of the car. To do much with this I would have gotten the dually in the shot, so I had to be careful with the composition. The answer was to use a composition that I had come up with sometime last year I think where I focus my attention on the base of the windshield and the cowl of the car. The seams from the hood, fender, and door link together with the cowl to make for a visually interesting collection of lines. The patina here added to that interest by adding textures and colors. I only needed two frames to get a strong image of the car that I think captured the essence of it. These abstract types of shots would only be recognizable to those that really know the design of the particular car in the shot, for the rest of the viewers, I am hoping that it is just an interesting collection of shapes, textures, and colors that keeps you coming back for more.
As I still wanted to concentrate on the front passenger corner, I moved my attention up front and down low. I knew of another composition that would work well here and got it framed up quickly. By this point the traffic was building up on the road and with each passing car the grasses would wave. I was going to have to time my exposures with the passing cars to make sure that nothing blurred too badly. I also opened the lens up quite a bit to direct the viewer’s focus and to allow for a faster shutter speed as well. It worked well and I ended up with this shot that was pretty much destined to be a keeper. There are just certain compositions that I know will work well, and this is one of them, especially when the subject is a ’57 Chevy.
There was one other obstacle that I had to get past with this car and that was the street sign that was just beside the car on the passenger side. This was going to prevent me from shooting the car from the driver’s side…or would it? The more I thought about it, the more I thought that the sign could actually be a part of the story of this car. I wanted to get a full front quarter view along with that sign, but the dually kept getting in the way. There was just no way for me to get the angle that I needed without the truck taking up my entire foreground. The only way I was going to get a clear view of the car was by crouching down next to the truck and shooting from very close to the car. I might could have gotten the full car, but the compromise would have been a lot of power lines above the car and a sky that wasn’t quite photo ready.
My only other option was to get a close crop on the car and focus the attention on the front end only. I worked out the angle and height to get the sign positioned where it was obviously related to the car and figured out where I needed to crop the car. I wanted to have the entire front end because it is so iconic. I didn’t really need the windshield but wanted enough of it to establish the car as a complete entity. The low vantage point also showed the hollow front end, even though there was a motor deep inside of the bay. Seeing through the car just added to the humor of the photo and I felt that it worked with the vibe I was going for. The yellow of the sign helped me to be able to bring in some color to the sky in order to harmonize the colors in the image. When it was all said and done, this photo worked much better than I had expected, and I was very glad that I had taken the time to experiment with it.
Sadly, the ’57 was one of the cars that I was most excited to work with, but it offered a very limited number of compositions. Not wanting to get stagnant, I decided to move on to an Impala that I had spotted when talking to Justin earlier. This was basically a shell of a car that was uniformly rusted. The only chrome on it happened to be the bumpers in the trunk and the grill in the passenger area. There was no glass in the car and the trunk lid was missing. In all reality, I probably shouldn’t have even thought about photographing this car, but there was a tree that was shedding leaves on it. It was these yellow leaves that pulled me in. I loved the contrast between the light and dark warmer tones. It took me a minute to figure out a composition that made sense which included these leaves. My original overall composition was boring and didn’t work at all. It was this isolation that that was the most interesting. Oddly enough, it was the hinge that really made the whole thing work as it gave another diagonal that was just not expected within the composition. The processing was the last little bit that brought this one together because I was able to treat the reds, yellows, and greens all separately so that the colors came out just as I needed them to for the contrast that I envisioned.
On a side note, this was one of Toni’s favorites when she went through the collection. I would have never thought that would be the case since she doesn’t really care for the rust images, and this photo is pretty much all about rust. I guess it was the leaves that did it since she loves trees. Whatever the case was, it is a pretty good indication that the photo will be well received as she is rarely wrong about an image.
After walking around the shop for a few minutes, I could find nothing else to photograph, although I was really tempted to capture what looked to be a 1990 Nissan Hardbody king cab 4×4. It wasn’t in a location that would have made a good photo, and there were no isolations that I could find on it, but it was fun to look it over and remember my 1990 standard cab 4×4 from college. I realized how small these trucks were after having gotten used to the new Frontier which is like a full-size truck in comparison. The little diversion was nice, but I knew that there was another section that I needed to visit. I had directions to get me to a neighboring property around back where I would find some more old cars that might be of interest.
I made the quick walk around back and found a large group of later model vehicles in the lower portion of the yard, but over to the left, I saw several older cars next to an old barn. This was what I was looking for, and I made my way over to them. I started off with an overall shot of the area that I thought was looking pretty good. I omitted the Oldsmobile Toronado, but captured a Plymouth sedan, a Chevy C-10 truck and an older Ford pickup in front of the barn. As much as was going on, I was surprised that the photo was actually quite boring and had no real story to it. It didn’t make it past the second stage of the culling process.
Surprisingly, the first photo to make the cut was the car that I found the least interesting. The Olds was basically covered in leaves and was not a very interesting color. There was also no rust to be seen on the car which kind of made it a non-starter for me…at least initially. It was hard to look past the design language of the car though, and that was what I started to key in on. The fact that it was nearly buried in the leaves became part of my compositional idea for this photo. Mainly, I just wanted to capture the headlights and grill, or rather how the lights retracted into the grill. The leaves made for a great framing element in the composition.
I shot this one originally in color, and even processed it in full color. The colors that were present just didn’t really appeal to me though, and even after finishing the processing it just didn’t seem right. During the final color checks on the images, I decided to reprocess it in black and white which would force the attention on the aspects that I wanted the viewer to look at. This removed several problems from the composition and brought with it many other positives which cemented the monochromatic presentation.
It was the old Ford pickup that I was most interested in capturing. If you read through the blog that I linked above about when I first visited this shop, you will notice several photos of the Ford when it was parked at the owner’s residence. It had now been moved to this backside property right next to the old barn. I wish that the other cars weren’t so close to it so I could get a really good photo of the truck in front of the barn. Because of the limitations of the scene, however, that wasn’t going to be a possibility. My best chance was to get the truck from a front quarter which would put the barn off to the side, and not in the background. This wasn’t terrible because there was some nice fall color that I was able to include in the shot. I did several compositions with just the truck, and after realizing that those seemed kind of static, I backed up and decided to pull in a bit of the barn.
Because of the proximity to the other vehicles, I had to place the Ford near the edge of the frame as just outside of this frame is the blue C-10 pickup. Since I was forced to put the truck that close to the edge, there was no way I would be able to include a large portion of the barn as it would pull the attention from the truck and make it insignificant. My only chance for this to work was to capture only a small portion of the barn off to the left to balance with the truck while keeping the primary attention on the Ford. I think what I came up with here worked out very nicely and it was noticeably better than the compositions that featured only the truck.
Something that I had a hard time photographing before were the sides of the truck because of the close proximity to other vehicles and the background. I had a bit more room to work with here and I took advantage of it. There was enough similarity to the body lines with the hood and fender that I was able to pull one of my favorite compositions out for this truck. I liked being able to include the vent on the side of the hood to balance out the stamped Ford moniker along with the fallen leaves and twigs. It was the patina that most interested me here and I had a lot of fun processing this one adding in a lot of variation in the tones that were not readily visible at the time of capture. I actually think that I like this subject better for this composition than all of the Chevys and GMCs that I have done previously. Just something about the stamped name and the very honest patina that is found around it. It makes me want to give it a chef’s kiss, and that doesn’t happen all that often.
To give you an idea of how close the Ford was to the Plymouth, just take a look at this composition. The idea behind it was to give the repeating patterns between the two most interesting vehicles here. The problem was I wasn’t able to get a full shot of the Plymouth because there was a blue pickup right behind it that didn’t give me room to get a comfortable crop. I wasn’t able to get a corner view of the Plymouth because of the Ford, but I could get both of them easy enough. The trick was to be very selective of how much of the Plymouth to include. I decided to crop the frame right below the oil jugs which i thought was instrumental to the story. This got rid of the bumper of the car which every time I tried to include it made the Plymouth too heavy in the composition. This creative crop allowed the Plymouth and the Ford to exist in the same frame comfortably. The limited depth of field kept the attention on the Plymouth as did the lighter color. I had tried this same shot with both vehicles in focus and with only the Ford in focus. This was the one that made the most sense and looked most interesting.
While I was up at the front of the Plymouth, I decided to go for the corner shot which I knew would work here much like it did with the Tri-5 Chevy. What I liked about this composition was that the colors went very well together. The mint green along with the deadfall leaves complimented each other well and created visual layers for some added interest. The hood seam line and the side molding created some nice diagonals to work with while the headlight, wheel arch, and corner of the windshield brought in three very nice curves to counter the straight lines. It was a simple composition but one that worked very well. I did wish that I could get a more all-inclusive composition on this car because I really did like the look of the car and the color made it stand out in its surroundings. That just wasn’t in the cards though. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a big loss because I was able to really concentrate on the isolations that made this car a star.
The Oldsmobile sitting next to the Plymouth was not hardly a star, but it was interesting in its own way. I did like the design of the car and how it was a little ahead of its time. The leaves that covered the car provided a bit of added interest and story that I couldn’t get past. After a while of deliberating, I decided that I was going to get an overall composition of the car. This was kind of easy because it was on the end with enough room to get a decent angle on it. The only issue was that the other group of cars was in the background. In order to keep them from being a distraction, I elevated the camera which pushed the background up and away from the car. I wasn’t able to get them high enough to crop out of the frame but where they were actually worked very well to establish a background and a sense of place. Once again, it was the color that caused me more difficulty than was really necessary. I spent far too long with the colors here, but eventually landed on this recipe which seemed to work quite well. Black and white was not a possibility here because I needed the color to help identify the car among the organic parts of the frame. With the leaves on the hood, the eyes would lose the rest of the car without the colors to connect the section. In this case, color was used to simplify the image which is sometimes the case.
One more look at the Plymouth and Oldsmobile showed me this composition that was kind of similar to the one with the Ford I had shot earlier. The two were close enough that there had to be overlapping of the cars. In this case, I was able to get the scaling right to include more of the Plymouth and have it still work with the Oldsmobile in the background. The Chevy truck behind the Plymouth prevented me from capturing the entire Plymouth which did annoy me. This composition did turn out quite balanced at least with the way that I chose to frame it. The brighter colors on the Plymouth helped it to stand out from the Olds which took second place in importance. Because the brightness was such a difference as well as the minimizing shape of the front, there was no need to limit the depth of field. I actually needed both cars to be in focus for this composition to work since there was very little of the Olds which was visible. I didn’t want it to get lost in the frame due to having soft focus.
By this point, I was running out of compositions. I don’t think that this was due to a lack of creative energy as much as it was due to just being tired. I had been working for around three hours by this point and I was just worn out. That didn’t mean that I was necessarily done though. I wanted to go and look at everything once again to see if maybe I missed anything. There was nothing of interest on the C-10, so I didn’t shoot it at all. I was pretty happy with the Plymouth and the Olds but felt that there was still some more potential with the old Ford truck. I went back to it and tried a couple of things that didn’t really work out. I did see that there was some visual interest behind the hood on the driver’s side that made it different from the passenger side that I had already shot. I wasn’t able to get the same angle from this side because of the neighboring cars, but I wasn’t wanting to do the same thing on this side. I used the close proximity to force me to shoot from an angle. I didn’t like the angle from the rear, but really liked how it looked from the front. The progression of depth pulled your eyes towards the Ford stamp which was what I wanted. The added diagonals gave some more visual interest to the frame as well.
I’m not sure which of these I like better because I am still over the moon with how the patina and texture turned out. Both of the compositions are very much different from each other but suit the application that they were used in very well. I like them both equally, and since this is a unique subject for me, I had no problem keeping them both. What I was able to do with this truck really impressed me since I had such a hard time with it the first time I shot it. The differences were that there was more room to work with and better light this time. I would dare say that I have developed some additional skills that have benefitted me to a large extent.
I guess the same could be said for most of the subjects that I have shot here today. There were no easy subjects to compose photos around as they were tightly packed for the most part. As few as five years ago, I might have just skipped out on even trying to shoot any of them. A few years ago, I might have tried a few isolations and moved on after a short time. I now have an understanding of how to photograph these subjects that affords me a lot of options which can yield some very strong images. The things that I taught in my most recent Art of Decay workshop from the spring kept coming to mind and those lessons were very relevant throughout the morning. I hope that I have the opportunity to do that workshop again in 2025, but I will need some more interest in it than I received this last time. If you would like to join me on a workshop like that, please let me know. It is about time to start putting the new batch of workshops together.
Thank you for joining me on this trek, and I apologize for dumping so many photos on you at once. Hopefully, you have enjoyed the account of the morning as well as the photos. It is now about a quarter after midnight, and I am very sleepy. This went faster than I anticipated, and I kept it reasonably short considering. If you have fallen in love with any of these photos, I would love to talk with you about matching you up with a print. Let me know which one or which ones you would like, and I will get that process started. If you don’t have the wall space for a print but want to show your support, consider buying me a virtual coffee as I don’t actually like the taste of coffee. You can do so by clicking the “Donate” button below. It can be as little or as much as you would like, but these tips do help me with these treks as print sales have been rather slow this year.
Keep your eyes out for my next Tuesday’s Tips where I will be covering the five things that I wished I had known earlier in my photography journey. We have pretty much finished the Lightroom tutorials, and I am now getting into other tips that might be of more interest for you. Drop by the channel and see what has been going on.
Until next time….
