Monday, September 15, 2025
No, not for me. I’m good, I promise. It was an interesting twist to the day though. Let me start at the beginning and get everyone caught up before we talk about being a mobile pit crew.
I haven’t been all that active here lately and with good reason. I’ve actually been working on four different portrait shoots by getting creative ideas together and getting props and some supplies that will be needed for each of the sessions. My studio is kind of a wreck right now as I have two full sets built with a third about to go up here in the next few days. It will be operating at capacity for a shoot that is scheduled at the beginning of October. I’m also working on two different location shoots, one of which will be using strobes and is looking like there will be a second part to it in the studio after the location portion. The last of the planned shoots will be a themed shoot that is going to be really cool, and I just got the smoke machine today for a bit of added atmosphere for the shoot. I’m looking forward to these sessions, but they have been keeping me rather occupied for the last couple of weeks as we are getting things dialed in.
On the other hand, the weather has been pretty mild outside, especially compared to the very volatile weather patterns that we saw through most of the Summer. The heat has subsided, and the daily rains have gone away. In fact, most of the days are pretty much sunny at this point. While this is less than wonderful for a photographer, I’m not complaining at all because it has given me the opportunity to do a lot of driving of the Miata which I have been missing through the rainy months of Summer. I do still need to keep my skills up behind the camera and need to keep the creative momentum going so that imposter syndrome doesn’t take over before the upcoming client shoots.
With that in mind, I started to look at the weather forecasts and saw that Monday morning was looking like a good time to go out. There were clouds forecasted, and I started to keep an eye out on what kinds of clouds they might be. By Sunday morning, I was able to tell that there were going to be high clouds with some lower altitude ones mixed in for a bit of texture. This was going to be the case from the mountains into the Piedmont, so I had plenty of options on where to go.
One of the first places that came to mind was an area of the Blue Ridge Parkway that I have shot before at sunrise which gives a great view of the distant mountains but isn’t an overlook at all. In fact, most folks will just drive by it and never even notice it. I’ve gotten some really good images from there and have recently thought about a few different ways that I might want to shoot it which was part of the reason for selecting this location. The other reason was that I haven’t done much in the way of landscape photography through most of the Spring and Summer. That is normally the time that I focus on landscape over decay but this year, I just couldn’t break away from my decay subjects.
Sunday evening, Toni and I had gone into Winston to have dinner with our youngest and her boyfriend and during that drive down 421 I spotted an old feed mill that I have shot several times but never satisfactorily. It wasn’t looking all that bad, but the fact that several portions of the building have fallen over kind of detracted from what it used to look like. Nevertheless, I could see potential in the building and that got me thinking about giving it another try. The weather would likely be great for a moody sky before sunrise. This isn’t one that I wanted a lot of color for, just soft textures in a dark sky at the end of blue hour. That thought kept rolling around in my head through the evening and by the time we got back home, I was looking at the weather in Yadkinville.
There were more layers of clouds over the valley while the upper elevations around Boone were going to be primarily high altitude clouds. It would seem that I could go either way and be successful because the clouds were shaping up to do the perfect things for both situations. I figured that I would let the sunrise forecaster settle the debate for me and pulled it up on my phone. Oddly enough, it was showing little to no color over the mountains for sunrise and a decent amount of color around the area of Yadkin County. This was kind of opposite from what I had expected to see from the cloud forecast, but I was only able to see up to 6am this point. I was going to have to wait another hour to be able to see what was going to happen at sunrise.
The more I thought about it, the more I really wanted to do landscapes and figured that even if there wasn’t much color, I could get some different kinds of photos from what I have been capturing. On the other hand, a little color during that last phase of blue hour is always interesting and the way that I was wanting to shoot the old mill was going to be rather interesting. One thing that I have learned doing decay photography is it makes no sense to wait to take photos because the subjects can be gone in the blink of an eye. But I was still wanting to work on landscapes. I was at an impasse in a manner of speaking.
When I got out of the shower, I looked at the sunrise forecaster once again and could see up to 7am at this point. It appeared to still be the same with limited, to no color over the mountains and good color over Yadkin County. It was looking like I was going to be shooting the feed mill, but I was going to wait until 4am to decide once the current weather was known. I went to sleep batting around both ideas and that kept me awake through much of the night. I was actually up around 3:15 or so, well before Toni’s alarm was going to ring. I tried not to wake her, but she was up before her alarm rang leaving me to figure out where I was going.
I checked the phone and saw that there was fog in the mountains which is great, but I was not prepared for fog and had no idea what to shoot. I knew that the view that I was after would be a no-go in the fog. There were good clouds over Yadkin County, so I made the choice to go out there and get the mill photographed at the end of blue hour. I was excited and happy to have finally decided where I was going. I just had to get up and get ready.
I was on my way at 5:45 to give me plenty of time to work out the shot because I was planning on doing a panorama of the scene and needed to get some of the details worked out before the light started to take off. All the ride out there, I could see the moon shining in the sky which was a pretty good indicator that the clouds were not all that thick. However, off to the East, I could see clouds over what was hopefully Yadkinville. I exited from the highway and took the little side road that I had been on so many times before and hoped that this was going to be the time that I nailed the shot I have been after since at least 2014 when I think I shot this for the first time.
I pulled into the little cul de sac and turned the truck off. I looked over to where the building was and saw that the field looked kind of thick with weeds. I got out in the pitch black of night and walked up to where the field started and realized that the vegetation was roughly armpit high. It was thick too. I pulled out a flashlight and looked for a trail through the field to the building, but there was no such luck. I remember from times passed that this field is full of ruts and holes which I would be unable to see as I bushwhacked through the field. Not wanting to destroy anything by walking through the field, I reluctantly gave up on this location. There wasn’t even a clear view of the building from the edge of the field where I could get to. There was just no way to get a good composition.
I really wished that we had exited off of the highway to get a closer look yesterday when we were out this way. That would have saved me a trip this morning, and I could have gone out to the mountains to work a completely different kind of composition. Oh well, lesson learned for next time. For now, I had about 20 minutes before sunrise started, and I needed to find something to justify being up this early in the day. I got in the truck and started off on a route that I remembered taking many years ago that brought me to an old barn between two really large oak trees. I had found this on a similar morning when I wasn’t able to shoot the mill and rolled up on the barn just as the sky was getting good. If I was lucky, I would have a repeat of that occurrence.
I wasn’t that lucky. There, I got that out of the way.
I did keep driving as the sun came up. There was a little color, and the clouds seemed to soften out a bit as the light level got brighter. I’m not going say that I wouldn’t have gotten the shot that I was after at the mill, but I will say that the sky wasn’t all that great for what I had in mind. That eased the pain of having to abandon my only plan for the morning. I was driving well South of Yadkinville at this point, and the sun was starting to light up the landscape.
Just as I thought that I wasn’t going to find anything to shoot, I saw barns on both sides of the road. On the right was an old tobacco barn with a quilt on a small addition built onto the barn. It had a large tree growing up right in front of it which kind of obstructed the lines a bit. The tree was pretty at least, and the more I looked as I slowed, the more I liked what I saw. The barn on the other side was a red barn situated very close to a smaller white barn that turned out to be attached. They were both close to a house just beyond them but there was potential with these barns as well. Figuring that this would at least get me started with the day, I pulled off on the side of the road and grabbed my camera.
Since the sun wasn’t fully up yet, I left the polarizer in the bag and just used my standard zoom without any filters at all. The tobacco barn was a good distance off of the road, but it was a wide-open field that I didn’t feel concerned about being in. I wanted to get in close for a bit of perspective distortion to make the barn stand out more in the frame since there was a tree partially blocking my view. When I got into position, I framed up a horizontal composition that kept the brighter sky at bay. The sun was just barely up, but I was shooting in the direction of the sun which made for a lot of bright points in the clouds above and through the trees. Shooting horizontal helped to keep the brightest areas out of the frame while I focused my attention on the barn.
While I was shooting this barn, Toni called me and said that she was going to pick up the nurse who had suffered a flat tire on the way to work. She was only a few miles from work when the tire gave up the ghost, so it wasn’t going to be a long trip for Toni to go get her. I asked if there was anything that I could do and there wasn’t. Still in my mode of getting the shot, I continued with what I was doing, but as I was continuing to work the barn, I started thinking through the situation. Obviously, the car had been left where it was parked, and the tire was still flat. Toni getting her for work only solved a portion of the problem. I realized that not everyone could change a tire and figured that might be an easy fix to the situation so I texted Toni and asked if the owner was ok with me going out to the car to change the tire. She was and said that everything that I would need would be in the car which was unlocked. As soon as I finished up here, I would go and take care of that and then help them figure out how to get the car back to her.
Before I called it quits, I wanted to try something with the red barn on the other side of the street. I took the camera over and started to work out a composition that minimized the RV parked in the barn as well as the house on the other side of the two barns. I also found a third barn that was tucked in behind the tall white one which I wanted to minimize in the composition as well. I just wanted there to be three primary elements in the photo which would be the red barn, white barn, and the large section of vegetation that was growing to the side of the red barn. Once I found the composition that I liked, I started to look at the sun’s position in the sky and found that it was in a good position for a polarizer. I went back to the truck and grabbed that filter and happened to think about the brightness of the sky. I went ahead and slid in a 3-stop grad filter while I was there and went back to the camera to put it all on.
I had chosen well, and the exposure looked good and there was great contrast in the sky thanks to the polarizer. I fired off a few exposures as the light changed, and then I moved my position a bit to change the relationship between the barns a bit. I eventually landed on a composition that I really liked and got a couple of frames of it as the light changed. I didn’t see anything else that I wanted to do with these barns, so I went back to the truck to pack things up. I did take a last look at the tobacco barn and found that sun was hitting the leaves on the tree that was in front of the barn which looked really nice. It wouldn’t take but another minute or two to get that shot so I pulled out the grad filter leaving just the polarizer which was needed now.
I went back to the barn, but this time I framed up the composition as a vertical shot to emphasize the tree more and give it an important place in the composition. The composition was looking great, and I was glad that I had come back for another shot at it. I didn’t stick around long because the light was pretty stable at this point, and nothing was moving. I was also thinking that I wanted to go ahead and get that tire changed so that we could get her car back to her as soon as possible. With that in mind, I packed everything up and plugged in the location to GPS for the car.
She had left her car right at 20 minutes away from where I had ended up this morning. Had I gone to the mountains like I had considered, I would have been roughly an hour and a half away. Fate put me in the right place on the right day to help out it would appear. When I arrived at the car, I found it to be as advertised and was able to locate all of the tools needed to remove the tire from the underneath of it and complete the tire change. I might add that I did it in a total of 15 minutes from lifting the hatch to closing it. It was longer than my record of 10 minutes for a Civic on the side of Bryan Blvd in the rain, but not too bad considering I was in no hurry, and I wasn’t in traffic. The only issue that I had was the fact that the tire only had 20psi of air in it which was nowhere near the 60psi it was supposed to have. This wasn’t an issue because I carry an air compressor in the truck, and I was able to get that taken care of in no time.
Now that the tire was all take care of, I went to pick up Toni to come back and get the car since the owner wasn’t able to leave being the nurse on duty. About 15 minutes later, the car was back at work with the owner and ready to take her home at the end of the day. The light was now pretty much gone for me, and I figured I would just head back home after I got some gas. It had been an interesting morning for sure considering that none of my original plans had worked out and I ended up being AAA with a Canon for once. That is a little bit of cop humor because many times we were referred to as AAA with a gun because a good portion of what many did, myself included, was change flat tires for motorists. I got very efficient at doing it in all kinds of weather, and it was kind of fun to revive that memory this morning.
After getting gas, I decided to take the back way home instead of getting on the highway. I was hoping that I would be able to find just one more location to shoot before getting home. The light was getting softer the further West I went, and I wanted to take advantage of that. I did find one place with several cars that interested me, so I pulled into the driveway to knock on the door. As I got out of the truck a dog came up from the neighbor’s house and promptly marked its territory on my rear wheel. I got him to move away as I went to the door. He decided to check out the other side though and doused that wheel as well as I knocked. There was no answer and not wanting to have four wet wheels, I decided to leave and see what else I might be able to find.
A short distance later, I spotted an old Plymouth Satellite sitting on the side of a yard not far from the road. It wasn’t ideal and was in pretty good shape in terms of rust, or lack thereof. It was good enough to shoot though, so I pulled into that driveway and went to knock on the door. There was no answer and the web that stretched across the door showed me that more than likely this was not a very active house. I considered the location of the car and realized that I could get a shot of it from the shoulder of the road without getting permission. With that in mind, I pulled back out in the road and went to the back end of the property and parked on the shoulder. I got the camera out with the long lens and started to get a composition figured out. It was going to be a pretty basic composition because there were no other elements to add to the scene other than the trees behind it.
When I had it figured out, I started to make exposures as the clouds moved over the sun changing the intensity of the light. I also played with the polarizer because the setting that darkened the glass on the car left glare on the leaves, but when I took the glare from the leaves, the car had some really bright areas that I didn’t like. I ended up working a compromise between the two extremes that worked pretty well. Not wanting to overstay my welcome, I didn’t linger any longer than I had to in order to get the shot. With that in the bag, I got back in the truck and headed home.
For my rather eventful morning, I had 31 frames stored on the memory card and had changed one flat tire. By the time I had finished the edits, I had four keepers from the morning which was actually pretty good for the subjects that I had shot. It was great to get back out there again and get some new photos in my collection. There will be more clouds this week, so hopefully, I’ll have a chance to get out to the mountains to get that sunrise that I probably should have gone for this morning.
Until next time….
