Tuesday, March 31, 2026
I wasn’t sure if I was going to get another trek in before the month was out, but the weather seemed to be cooperating with me for what I have been interested in doing for the last few days. You see, about a week ago, Toni and I were out in the Miata and happened to be driving by a location that I have been by many times over the years. I had never even known that there was a house there beside the road because of the trees and brush that had grown up around it. At some point not too long ago, someone had come by and cleared the trees and the brush around the house making it very visible for the first time since we have been out here. When we got home, I did get onto Google Maps to look at the street view just to make sure that I wasn’t losing my mind, but that confirmed that it had been well covered for quite some time.
I couldn’t really remember what the house looked like since we had passed it so quickly, so I ended up going back out there a few days later to give it a more critical look. What I found was a pretty standard house with lots of evidence of decay and neglect which made it a perfect candidate for some photography. The problems that I could see was that there were power lines running above the house which might cause some problems, but I was sure that if needed I would be able to remove them in post. The other issue that I had was the wood chippings that were all around the base of the house from where they had cleared the property. Based on the condition of the house, I could only assume that the property was being cleared to be sold and the house would be gone soon enough. That was the biggest problem that I could see because I knew that I wasn’t going to have much time to work with this house. Even if it wasn’t going to be torn down, something was going to be changing with it in the near future.
All this meant that I was going to have to act quickly. While I was out looking at the house critically, I was checking out angles to see what kind of light would be the best for it. Of course, I defaulted to a cloudy day with some visual interest in the sky. Looking at the directions I was looking at, I wanted morning light with the sun coming in from the left rather than in the frame in the background. If I was really lucky, I would get some dark clouds overhead with the sun peeking through those clouds to the left of the scene. I was doubting that I would get those kinds of clouds in the morning as the stormy skies are usually more in the afternoons. However, I had a decent understanding of what I wanted to do with the house which gave me enough to get started with a plan of action.
I started to take note of the weather conditions in the mornings looking for clouds that I could use. I knew that I was going to need pretty good coverage to make sure that I had interest in the direction that I was shooing. I was just going to have to go with whatever the sun was doing beyond that as I would have no control over how much light was pushing through in the scene. Of course, as luck would have it, we have had a string of pretty sunny days here lately and that has effectively prevented me from getting out to do much, though I did manage to sneak out for a bit of a scouting trip that ended up with a photo of a barn and an old MG.
Yesterday morning, I had planned on getting up early and giving it a try, but when my clock rang, I found that there were no clouds in the sky until the afternoon. That wasn’t going to work, and the clouds were not going to be thick enough to work for another location that I have been mulling over for a couple of weeks. It was this morning when I woke up and looked at the forecast that I saw roughly an hour between 8-9am that there would be clouds in the sky. It was not a huge percentage at just 65%, but when I looked at my cloud app, it was showing the clouds in the low and medium altitudes which would provide nice interest and not just an overcast. With the fate of the house unknown, I decided to get up and head out that way while the sun was still low and making pretty light over the scene.
I arrived right around 8am just to make sure that my chances were as good as could be. Parking was a bit harder than I suspected because there was just not enough room on the shoulder to pull out of the roadway enough to be safe. I ended up parking in the driveway of another house that was across the street that was obviously vacant, but not quite ready for a photo just yet. Now that I was safely out of traffic, I went back to the rear of the truck to get the camera built. Since I am working on seeing in wide-angle terms, I decided to fit that lens. This was not just an arbitrary decision though. It was going to be a functional lens for what I was needing to do. In order to get under the power lines, I was going to need to get in close. To be in that close, I was going to need a wider focal length, and I knew that what I was going to be using would be in the rage of that 16-35mm lens. I also added a polarizer just to pull some of the glare out of the glass and to add a bit of contrast to the sky.
Using a polarizer with a wide-angle lens is not the best choice, but I figured that I had enough clouds in the sky to make it work out. What I was worried about was the polarization effect in the sky which will show dark banding in certain situations wider than about 35mm. In case I ran into this issue, I also had a new trick in Lightroom that would even out the tonality in the sky, but if I didn’t have to use that I would be much happier. I just needed to see how it was all looking through the camera.
When I got to the other side of the road and started to work on the location that I wanted the camera, I had to work around piles of wood chips in order to find a good place to put the camera and tripod. This added a bit of difficulty as most of the piles were around the area that I needed to work. After a bit of a compositional dance, I managed to find the spot that I wanted and started to figure out the exact positioning of the camera as well as the elevation that I needed.
There were some large logs from a tree that had been chopped down that filled the foreground nicely and gave context to the chipped wood that was all around the house. It was all part of the story of this house, and I actually liked the evidence of the recent activity around it. Normally, I would have wanted to show the house in a state with the vegetation all grown up around it, but this interested me. It brought to mind all of the thoughts that I had been considering about this house after seeing it for the first time. You could tell that the house had been here for a very long time and was showing a lot of signs of decay and neglect. However, you could tell that the property was getting cleared which begged the question about what was going to happen with the house. As you know, I love to ask questions with my photography, and this is just the type of question that will keep the interest of a viewer.
Now that I had the composition figured out and had verified that I had made the right choice with the lens, I had to wait to see what the clouds and the sun were going to do. There was a lot of blue sky above and the sun was only covered by some small clouds which were moving fast enough. As the sun started to peek through the clouds, I fired off several shots as the light changed and found that the clouds above the house were also changing position rather quickly as well. This gave me another compositional card to play as the patterns in the sky changed up gradually from time to time
As I was looking at this scene, I really liked the colorful setting with the fresh wood chip piles and the Spring greens under the cloudy blue sky. I could also see this as a black and white scene that would put more emphasis on the textures in the sky and the house itself. I was torn as to which I wanted to do as far as a presentation went. As you can see, I am still a little torn on that question, but I didn’t just take the same photo and process it differently. These are actually two photos, five frames apart taken during one of the periods of time when the sun was really coming out nicely. There were subtle shadow changes across the scene, and I decided whether to do color or black and white based on those differences.
In all, I shot 17 frames of the house over a period of nine minutes. I didn’t stay long because I could see no benefit to staying an extended amount of time. The light wasn’t changing that much, and it wasn’t going to get any better than it was currently. There were really no other compositions that I felt like shooting of the house either. This was a great subject for an overall, but the only other element that I could bring into the scene was a tree to the left that was taller than the house and created a bit of a scaling issue with the scene as a whole. I was satisfied that I had the photo I wanted out of the 17 frames and wanted to go and check out a car that I had also spotted a few days ago before heading back home.
I’m thinking that this car is a Chevy from the ’40’s, but it might be a Plymouth. I’m just not completely sure and won’t know until I can get closer to it. I had scouted it a few days ago and found that it would look good with morning light and clouds for diffusion. I wasn’t sure if the current conditions were going to work or not but felt like I might as well check it out while I was out and about with the camera. It wasn’t too far down the road either.
When I got there, I could see that the car was well in the sunlight and it looked like it had been painted red at one time. When I had seen it in the shadows the other day it looked like it was just predominantly rusty looking. Now, I was seeing some color and that made it even more interesting to me, but the light was much too harsh on the car with the sunlight. Looking at the clouds, I was doubting that much was going to be changing with it over the next little bit. This was something that I was going to need overcast skies for without a doubt. I was also not sure if I was going to be able to get permission to shoot it or not. I wasn’t going to find out today and waste the ask when the lighting wasn’t in my favor.
With the sunlight kind of strong, I was really thinking about heading home and processing the photos from the first part of the day. I didn’t have a problem working on one or two images from a quick trek. It would actually make for a pretty quick morning, but I really wanted to get a few more photos in the can before I called it a day. The composition had been pretty much the expected one with the house and really didn’t stretch my creative muscles all that much which left me feeling like I didn’t really do anything. I wanted to really get involved with a scene and try to figure out different ways of seeing it. The problem was the light that was happening which is really not my preferred lighting scenario. However, I do know that I can work with it when needed. I just needed to figure out what I wanted to shoot.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was out in the area of Boomer and passed by an old building that I had photographed years ago. I’ve always checked this building out as I have passed by and even stopped the following Spring from that first session to capture the building with a pink tree out front. With Spring getting started early this year, I had noticed that the tree was starting to bloom a couple of weeks ago and that got my mind rolling about possibly returning to the building to get some new photos. Of course, I started to think about how I could capture this building and tried to come up with different ways than I had done in the past.
Now that I was driving around looking for something else to photograph, I thought that the building might make a good subject and would be a good chance to use the wide-angle lens again. It wasn’t too far from where I was, so I headed in that direction not completely sure what I was going to find. Since the blooming had already started, I knew that there would be a very good chance that the tree had turned green by this point, but that was only going to be the icing on the cake if I had the color to work with. I knew that the building was interesting all on its own which kept me full of anticipation on the way out there.
When I got there, I was delighted to see that the tree was still in full bloom with lots of pink in the branches. It looked a good bit larger than I had remembered it from years past. The building hadn’t changed much, but the sun was in a position that I hadn’t quite expected. I had really thought that it was going to be illuminating the front of the building, but it was firmly on the left side. My favorite angle on the building which showed off the different sections of it was on the shaded side and to capture the building as a whole, I would have to have the sun in the sky overhead. This was going to make for a terrible exposure to say the least. I needed something better to keep the detail in the building and to show off the tree.
The more I pondered the situation, the more I really thought that this was just not going to be the time to work this scene and I would be better off coming back later in the day when the sun was in the right position. Knowing that the weather wasn’t going to be good for that this afternoon, I had to look to the future and ponder other options. This tree wasn’t going to be in bloom for long, and it was looking good right as I was seeing it. The thing with light is that I can plan on it all day long, but I have to adapt to what is actually happening when I arrive at the scene. I had the right subject with the tree and the building, but I needed to figure out how best to deal with the light that I had at the time.
Since I was going to be playing around with this scene, I decided to really play with it and chose my wide-angle lens once again. It was the safe bet for the overall compositions that I had shot in the past, but I wanted to see if I could use it for some tighter compositions and possibly some abstracts dealing with features on the building. After adding the polarizer, I started to look around the tree to see what angles I could use where the sun wouldn’t come directly into the lens. This was not as easy as I had hoped and there were a lot of compromises that had to be made.
What I did like was getting in very close to the tree and letting it fill the frame, using the building as a background of sorts. It was a different way of looking at the scene compared to how I had photographed it before. This was all about the colors and not so much about the elements in their accepted form. I had blue, magenta, pink, green, and some yellows in the scene and they all looked great together to my eyes. Of course, looking through the camera, I was only seeing a white sky, black branches, and shadowed details in the building. It was actually quite ugly to see in the camera, but looking at the histogram, I knew that I had plenty of information on both ends of the range to pull out all the details that I needed. I had to trust in the process and go on what I was seeing with my eyes in real time.
The end result turned into one of my favorites from this location for just the reasons that I stopped to shoot it. I loved the way the colors interacted, and I was very pleased with the overall composition. The building turned into a great framing background just as I had thought that it would. The tree turned into the main subject with the trunk actually being the primary focus. The color that I loved so much in the tree turned into a color cast through the scene with the light reflecting off of the blooms tinting the siding of the building. It was magical, and I thought it was much better executed than what I had shot four years prior in the Spring. That was more or less a postcard shot where the tree was just a supporting element for the whole scene.
Now that I had gotten the ball rolling with this subject, I felt like I could move forward with it and try for some different kinds of compositions. As I had mentioned, I had to really pay attention to what the light was doing in order to make the most out of this stop. The light was coming into the scene from the other side of building and that was where I needed to start looking for compositions. I hadn’t really spent that much time on the left side because it was not as visually interesting without the different angles involved. However, now that I was looking at it, there was no disputing that the light quality was much better on this side of the building. As I was becoming more familiar with the quality of light, I started to notice the shape of one of the trees next to the nearest windows. It might not have been as colorful as the other tree, but it was shaped in such a way that it framed the window. From this angle, I could also make out the blocked window on the front wall which I found to be interesting from a texture standpoint as well.
There was enough visual interest on this side of the building to give me reason to work out a composition to make use of the light that was at hand. I kept the wide lens on the camera for a bit of perspective distortion for added visual interest and started to put it all together into a composition. There was a good amount of moving the camera around to try out the different focal lengths and see which I liked the best. This brought with it framing options and how I would be able to incorporate the pink tree that I had started out shooting. It was still visible in the background and when paired with the blue sky, I thought that it worked very well in the overall composition.
I started off with a relatively tight crop of the building putting the focus on the leading tree framing the window and that blocked window on the other wall. I liked this view and felt that it was an effective composition, but the color of the tree in the background felt like an afterthought rather than a framing element. Since it wasn’t all that important to the scene and what I liked about this crop was the textures and the shapes of the tree in the foreground, it just made sense to do this one as a black and white image.
As the processing started in black and white, I quickly found that the sky looked amazing without any color as the clouds were pretty well centered over the building for added framing to that element. The deep shadows were more impactful in black and white and the staining on the walls looked fantastic this way. There was no doubt that this was the right presentation for this particular composition, but I was far from done here.
In the end, I shot a total of 11 different compositions from this corner of the building. You’ve already seen the second one that I tried, but I kept going, changing the camera position with just about every frame. Focal length and elevation became the biggest changes that I made with slight movements to the tripod location from time to time. Everything that I shifted greatly affected the whole scene thanks to the use of the wide-angle lens which exaggerated the perspective of the scene.
With the camera elevated just above eye level, the converging verticals faded away, and I was able to get a bit more of the background in the frame. What I liked about that was that I was now getting two different pink trees that turned into framing elements for the building. I still had the shapes and textures, but the way that the image was cropped now gave the colors much more reason to be present. Something else that I liked was that the sunlight was shining through the openings on the left and giving that block window a nice warm glow which added life to the image.
There was no doubt in my mind that this was going to be color image because of the placement of the two trees. That was how I processed it and while I did have some issues managing the contrast from the sunlight, I am really quite happy with the outcome of this one. It has a nice Spring feeling to it while focusing on a decaying subject which is just the kind of dichotomy that I love in my images. The bit of sunlight coming through that window also intrigued me with this photo. It was that window that I chose to focus on next as a matter of fact.
I liked the textures of the glass with the alternating vertical and horizontal blocks. Many of them were cracked as well, which added visual interest. I had worked on a photo of this window before, but never really did care for how it came out. Of course, I had shot it pretty well square on which turned the image into a pretty static view of the window. I knew that it needed some extra interest, but I wasn’t quite sure what would satisfy that requirement.
Looking at the window, I started to think about the power of “and” which just describes that stage where I am looking for additional elements to go along with a main subject to form a more interesting composition. There was a vine that was falling down the wall to the right of the window that I found particularly interesting as it broke up the texture of the wall with a shape that went along with the cracks in the blocked glass. The composition still felt very static when shot from straight on and I didn’t even spend any time trying that concept in the camera. I needed something more to make this work. The next “and” that I added was after moving to the right and finding a nice diagonal element to the series of blocks. With the wide-angle lens, I was able to get in close and have the window opening the lines towards me. While adding that “and”, I found another one in the form of a reflection that just barely showed up to my naked eyes looking at the scene. It wasn’t until I started to work out the exposure and play with the polarizer that I was able to see the details in the reflection.
It wasn’t a great scene that was being reflected, but I did find the colors absolutely wonderful. The sunlight on the ground was creating a warm pathway with the sky divided up into blue and white. By adjusting the white balance, I was able to see the colors as much richer than the shaded side of the building I was shooting. The reflection was now my primary subject and the story behind the photo. The wall of the building and the blocks of glass themselves all became supporting players in this scene. I have really come to love images like this when I can see them and photograph them. The main subject is something that isn’t actually there. Most of the time this is executed through the use of shadows creating shape, but here it was the reflection which was abstract and represented through color which could only be seen with the polarizer twisted in a certain direction. The differences in color temperatures helped to define the two planes of view and further separate the elements.
I was so excited about this photo while I was capturing it, I grabbed a quick shot with my phone and texted it to Toni to let her know what I had found. I knew that I had something special here and I was beyond excited to get home and see how it turned out.
After the culling process was over, this was the first image that I processed. There was never a point where I wasn’t excited about this one. It just kept getting better and better with every adjustment that I made. Everything that I did was designed to accentuate those aspects that I loved about the scene when I was there. It all came together just like I had envisioned it when looking through the camera and seeing this world unfolding. There is no question that this is my favorite image from the day. In fact, I am pretty sure that it is going to be in that final list of the year where I talk about my significant images. I’m not positive, but I’m willing to bet that we will see this one again. Why am I so sure? Let’s just think about my goals for the year.
This is one of those images that satisfies both of my goals quite well. Since I was shooting with a focal length of 19mm, this certainly falls into the realm of being done with a wide-angle lens. Also, since the main subject is a reflection in the blocked glass, there is a very strong abstract look and feel to the scene which is goal number next. It would seem that this one photo falls into both camps equally as well. It also satisfies the broader goal of mine of learning to see things differently. This is not a normal kind of composition for me but is one that I have often enjoyed. In fact, during a photo walk workshop a couple of years ago, I was very impressed with a photo of a reflection that Richard did and that idea has stuck with me ever since. It is just not the way that I normally see which makes this so appealing to me, and it was really fun to be able to “see” something like this during one of my treks and then be able to capture it.
There are also so many details in this one frame that have become hallmarks of my photography which I can look at and love. There is the use of diagonals with the window frame and the window blocks. There is the decay aspect that is brought in through the staining and the hanging vine. The use of texture is ever present, and it is all capped off with the use of color theory. It is completely unique in my catalog, yet very familiar at the same time. If that doesn’t equate to significant, I just don’t know what will.
I do appreciate you joining me on this trek today and I hope that you have enjoyed the images. I shot a total of 50 frames and ended up with these six that I decided to hold onto. There was only one compositional concept that I didn’t follow through with and that was the last one after the blocked window photo. It was another view of a smaller window with the pink tree in the background, but I didn’t really like the execution, and I think that it needed more clarity of thought prior to the capture. I’ll try it again another time and see if I can make it work better.
In the meantime, I am still working on two other locations that I am wanting to photograph. One will be a morning shoot and the other will be an evening or blue hour shoot. Both will need clouds, and that might happen over the weekend depending on the rainfall that is on the way. Keep your eyes out and hopefully one of those will happen soon enough. I’ll also be back here tomorrow with the latest Behind the Camera where I will be talking about getting to know yourself.
Until then….
