Wednesday, April 22, 2026
I’m going to get this out of the way right out of the gate. I’m sorry. There, I’ve said it. Now there is no need for you to say that you don’t like the photos or start asking if I haven’t been taking my meds, or maybe that I should start taking my meds. I get it, this is not what you come to this blog for. This is neither landscape nor decay. There is no real story being told with these photos and when it comes right down to it, I really don’t know what I am going to say about these photos in the blog. I’m just as confused as you, and for that I am deeply sorry.
Now that we are past all that unpleasantness, I would like to explain myself to those of you who are still lingering around to watch this train wreck unfold. As the title suggests, this trek was all about proof of concept. That is a creative way of saying that I had lots of plans this morning to get out and wash the truck but decided against it since I would be using it a fly swatter going down the highway tomorrow. Might as well clean the bugs off once rather than replace the ones freshly cleaned off of it. The afternoon was going to be spent out in the yard mowing the 200 blades of grass that have decided to grow despite there not being much rain to sustain green life. That left me with some time to kill during the morning and, of course, my thoughts went to photography since I stayed inside yesterday and had to prove to Netfilx that I was still watching.
The weather, as I’ve mentioned has been pretty stable with the sun blazing down on the landscape without a cloud in sight. I had a few hours of clouds and good light a couple of days ago and took advantage of it when it happened. That one turned out pretty good as far as treks go and despite the least favorite time of day to be photographing, I still managed to get several pretty solid photographs. Today wasn’t going to give me that kind of leeway in lighting, so I was going to have to embrace strong light for whatever I wanted to photograph.
There was the rub….I had no idea what I wanted to photograph. Usually on bright days like this I would take a photo walk and use the contrast to my advantage. That works on the weekends, but during the week things are just too busy to be working with a tripod in the middle of town. I could go to the school nearby and work with those buildings, but school is in session and they are also putting together a rather large event there for the weekend. I was at a complete loss as to what I wanted to shoot.
I stayed in bed for a while thinking about it and pondering different things that I could shoot. The last thing that I wanted to do was to go out and find great compositions with no interesting light or shadows to support them. I wasn’t able to come up with anything that would take advantage of the light that I had to work with. Maybe I could just go out and scout for a while to see if there was something that I could shoot when the clouds did return to the forecast. Yeah, I could do that and would be back and done long before it was time to go mow.
That just didn’t quite settle well with me though. For some reason I really wanted to capture something with the camera, but I was stuck as to what that would be. Through breakfast and my morning routine I considered my options. I about just stayed at home and started on the yard earlier than normal. It was then that I had a wild idea. I had tossed around the thought of photographing road markings a while back but never really did anything with the idea. All of a sudden, it came back to me, and it was tinted with one of my goals for the year to see things differently. I didn’t have to just photograph road markings; I could photograph how I saw them. Well, I saw them as road markings of course. I used to draw them on crash reports when I was a Police Officer. There really wasn’t a different way to see road markings…or was there? Speaking of goals for 2026, using the wide-angle lens to better effect was one of them. This has caused me to rethink perspective in my photographs and have even used the lens very close in for some dramatic compositions of normal things.
Hmmm, could it be that simple? Could I just change the perspective and show the road markings in a different way which might possibly be interesting to look at? It was worth a try, and with that the concept was born. Now I had to figure out where to go in order to get road markings. Yeah, yeah, I know….I can stand in the middle of the road and get them pretty much anywhere. As I’ve mentioned though, this is a weekday and the middle of the day. I know better than to stand in the middle of the road to get a photograph. Well, most of the time I do, and today was one of those days that I didn’t feel like being run over, cussed at, and possibly arrested. I needed something that wasn’t going to see any traffic that had road markings. You can see the difficulty in that request because to have road markings, you kind of need traffic on a somewhat regular basis.
I thought about the movie theater in town and went to the satellite view to see what markings they had. It appeared to be just straight arrows which didn’t have quite the interest I was looking for. I moved around to some of the different larger parking lots, but everything was going to have traffic flowing through it. Then it hit me…churches are not particularly busy on Wednesday mornings and by the nature of the flow of traffic during services, they sometimes need those road markings. This was a possibility worth exploring more so I started to go to the different churches in the area and looking to see what kinds of markings they had.
I found one not too far from home that had a variety of markings that might work for me. There was also a larger church with even better markings off of US 421 that I preferred as a location. Those were the two larger churches that I could find close by that had something more than just straight arrows. It was enough to get me excited about going out to see if this was going to work. I had the concept, and the location. I had already thought about the way I wanted to edit them being high contrast black and white images. I wasn’t sure how I really wanted to crop the images or even how to frame them, but that was part of why I wanted to shoot this subject. I wanted to see how it would look through the camera and what I would decide to do. I was looking for proof of concept at this point, and even at that, I knew that this was going to be a very strange trek to say the least.
With my camera in tow, I started off to get some gas and then to drop by the first church that I had scouted virtually. When I got there, the markings that I was expecting to greet me weren’t present at all. I started to wonder if I had the right church because the pavement wasn’t new. There were just no markings. Further in, there were some, but most of them were just the straight arrows. There was one dual turn arrow, but it was right at the entrance and there were cars there that I didn’t want to get in the way of. After I looked around the parking lot for a few minutes, I realized that there was nothing here for me to work with.
There was still the other church that would possibly have something to work with. It wasn’t far off, so I headed in that direction still hopeful that the idea would work out. It didn’t take long to get there, and I found the parking lot as expected with a couple of different dual turn arrows that I could work with. They were not the typical arrows and were done with an odd stencil, but the break between the triangles and the split quickly turned into a positive from the abstract point of view. It would help to break up the shapes and create some separation between elements. All of a sudden, I started to think that this could work out.
After I parked the truck, I got out and started to look at the arrows in a little more detail and a little more critically. All the while, I was trying to convince myself that it is worth photographing the mundane, which is something that I do quite often. The question that was coming to mind at this point was whether or not white paint on a black road was just too mundane? I suppose that is possible, and you are probably thinking that is the case after looking at the photos here. However, there was something in my gut saying that I needed to give this a try. I had no pressure on me as I had other things to do this afternoon if the concept didn’t pan out. I wouldn’t need long to figure out if this was going to work, so I went to the truck and grabbed the camera.
I fought the urge to get the long lens, or even the standard lens and chose the wide-angle lens which would give me tons of distortion, but at the risk of showing the background which I didn’t want to include. I also had to be aware of my shadow which hopefully would be workable from most angles since it was nearly noon. With the sun straight up in the sky, I would have to stand on top of the markings to cast a shadow for the most part. I wondered if it was necessary to use a polarizer for these but remembered just how much glare an asphalt surface will produce. Since I was going for a high contrast black and white look, I decided to fit the polarizer. It should help with the blacks and there was no downside to it since nothing in the frame would be moving. Shutter speed wasn’t a concern at all for me for this subject which was a nice change of pace from so much of what I have been shooting here lately.
With the camera built, I stepped over to the dual direction arrow that was furthest from any activity and started to look through the viewfinder from all the different angles. This gave me an idea of what the lens was able to do with the designs. I found that I really liked the perspective and with that distortion, I found that I could do some interesting crops to change shapes and place the visual weight at different points within the frame. I saw potential with this, even more than I was hoping for. The polarizer did make a huge difference with the pavement, and I also switched the camera over to black and white mode to get a better understanding of contrasts that I was dealing with. Since I wanted the blacks to go nearly black and I still wanted a little detail in the whites, I didn’t expose as much as I would have normally based on the histogram. Instead, I exposed to the left to allow more detail in the paint while letting the pavement go very dark. That really helped me define the shapes that I was looking at as well as understanding the negative space that I had in the frame.
The wide-angle lens created a situation where I was no longer looking at the arrows, but rather I was seeing shapes. The separation that the stencils had created furthered that experience. It was all looking surreal through the camera and I was actually liking this a lot. The shift in perspective was the magic ingredient for this, and it changed what I was seeing through the camera and created something beyond the subject. The arrows were still mundane to look at, but through the camera, they became something else entirely.
I didn’t stay out here long at all, but I did go through every angle that I could think of and even swapped out my lens for the telephoto lens. Oddly enough, I used the long lens not to isolate or reach out, but to include more of the scene over what I was capturing with the wide-angle. This is one of those things that I am hoping gets ingrained in my head through the year when dealing with focal lengths. It is far too simplistic to look at a telephoto lens and think long reach, isolation, compression, and that sort of thing. At the same time, you think about a wide-angle lens as being able to include so much more in the scene. This little exercise has proven to me that the opposite can be very true with these lenses, and I was floored at how simple that concept came across doing this kind of photography. These are the benefits of doing simple goals like I do during the year. They always have a way of becoming the beginnings of big changes in how I work as a photographer.
So far this year, I have learned to understand the wide-angle lens much better than I have before, and now I am really understanding the connection between the wide and telephoto lenses that used to be what I would reach for if the standard zoom wasn’t enough on one end or the other. For the first time, I am really seeing that those two “just in case” lenses make the perfect pair for so much of what I shoot. Looking back over the years, I see how much I leaned on that standard zoom, and I realize just how limited I kept my options with that lens. My eyes got really opened during the year that I forced myself to use the long lens and that became my go to piece of glass. Now that I’m concentrating on the wide-angle, I’m seeing how well it complements the telephoto. We aren’t even four months into the year and I’m making huge strides in that goal.
I think it is safe to say that I am also making strides in the aspect of abstract photography. When this trek is really boiled down, that is what I was capturing here. It was all based on figure/ground and learning to use negative space in creative ways. Just another fold in the learning points for the day.
After just a few minutes in the parking lot, I had shot 13 frames. It wasn’t many, but the light wasn’t changing, and nothing was moving so there was no need to reshoot images. I took my time to get the compositions right and that made it easy to get keeper after keeper. Now, whether or not you will like these photos is anyone’s guess. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that you are left scratching your head at what you are seeing. If that is the case, I would love to hear it. I really am interested to learn whether or not these photos are well received and what the reaction is. It is something very new for me and I’m kind of putting it all out there for whatever response they get. This is my journey, and these photos represent another step on that journey which is why I feel that they deserve a blog entry even though there isn’t much to say about taking pictures of road markings.
Until next time….
