Thursday, July 24, 2025
Welcome back! I’m betting you didn’t expect to hear from me again so soon after the “It’s only one car” incident from earlier this week. I’ll admit that subject got out of hand really quick and I had a lot more work to do with it than I expected. That isn’t to say that I’m not thrilled with the results. Far from it actually. I’m still really excited about how that whole experience turned out. It was supposed to be something quick to fill a little bit of free time, but it turned into something that I needed to make time to finish. As it turns out, I was in a similar position today with a little bit of free time to work with and I wanted to get an actual quick trek in before the end of the week.
The situation was this, Toni and I had an appointment in Winston, about an hour East from home, and she was going to be staying at Sierra’s house while she was out of town for a bit after that appointment. I also had a quick repair to do to Sierra’s car after changing the oil in it the other day. It was a quick fix, but one that I had to get a part for, and since we were going to be there at her house anyway to get Toni situated, I figured I could get that taken care of. We also stopped for a late lunch after the appointment which was shortly after noon. Essentially, I had the afternoon free and there were supposed to be clouds in the area which got me thinking about getting some photos while I was out there.
My plans started to change up when I was asked to go down to Huntersville early Friday morning to do another couple of headshots for a company that I’ve worked with many times over the past three years or so. This was going to involve loading up my portable studio and getting up earlier than normal to get out there in time to meet the client before their meetings started for the day. Fortunately, a headshot is a pretty quick event for me, and I didn’t expect to be there more than a couple of hours, but there was going to be travel time and time to get the photos ready for the client afterwards. I was going to need to get things ready to go before I went to sleep which kind of limited that free time that I was so happy to have.
Knowing that I had a bit less time to deal with, I needed something that I could shoot and process pretty quick, but I wanted it to be something worthwhile. There is a barn in Kernersville, not far from Sierra’s house that I had recently seen again when I was meeting her a couple of months ago for lunch. I had shot this barn one foggy morning when I had taken her to school in the Fall of 2019. Of course, by the time I got there the fog was gone and I was left with some harsh light to deal with. The photo turned out pretty good considering, but I did have to fight it in post to get it to look the way I was wanting it to.
I had visions of getting this barn on a very cloudy day with possibly some mist falling for a bit more atmosphere to it, but I was open to other lighting situations should they present themselves. Knowing that there wasn’t much option as to the basic composition, I really wanted to get something different from what I had done the previous time. I purposely didn’t look at the previous photo for the details of the lighting, I just knew the base composition that I would most likely go with.
Looking at the weather, there was going to be more clouds than sun around the time I would be heading home, so I figured that I would stop by the barn and give it a quick try before getting on the highway. Throughout the day, it was actually pretty bright and there weren’t many clouds. It was also very hot, but not as hot as it was supposed to get the rest of the week. After I got done replacing the PVC valve in Sierra’s car I headed up the road to the barn with hopes that the light would look good when I got there.
I was seeing clouds in the sky, but they weren’t all that impactful for the light, and the sun was rather bright over the landscape. It seemed the closer I got the brighter the sun became. I had been expecting clouds, but it was looking like I wasn’t going to get them. When I arrived at the barn, it was sitting there just as quiet and peaceful as always. The trees were producing pretty good shadows over the barn and while this was kind of the light that I was looking for, it somehow seemed boring. The sky that was visible through the trees wasn’t overly bright though which was a big benefit compared to last time. I almost didn’t stop because the light wasn’t what I was really after and the mood didn’t fit what I wanted. However, there was no denying that I was here now, and the light was useable at least. I didn’t have time to go hunt for anything else to shoot, and it seemed like a waste to have dragged the camera out for nothing.
The decision was made to stop and give it a quick try. If I didn’t get anything useful, then I wasn’t really out anything because I was out here anyway. If I did manage to get something, that was a bonus for the day. The first step was debating what lens I wanted to use. I could have used the telephoto lens which would have allowed me to cut the sky out completely, but it would have forced me to really fill the frame with the barn and make it more of a postcard shot. I didn’t like that idea because the flat lighting on the scene didn’t need a postcard composition. I needed to open up the frame a bit more, not so much to include the sky through the trees, but to capture a tree that had a unique shape to the right of the barn. It wasn’t a dominant element, but I liked the shape and felt that it made for a nice framing element to the scene. There was also a section between the barn and tree that seemed to go a bit deeper into the woods which would give me some depth to the scene. With all that in mind, I went with the standard zoom, but I made a deal with myself that I would avoid the 50mm range with it. I needed to have a perspective different than what I was seeing with my eyes to add just a bit more dimension to the scene.
I worked around the area and tried to find the right spot to place the camera. After some working with the angles, I found one that allowed a tree limb to frame a window on the side of the barn rather than bisecting it and allowed me to include that oddly bent tree to the right. It felt familiar to me, and I figured that this was pretty much what I had shot before, but I continued on with it. I had my polarizer attached and it allowed me to remove some of the glare from the leaves on the tree to the left and the roof of the barn. The colors saturated a good bit as well. When I shot a test image, the bits of sky showing at the top of the frame were blowing out more than I wanted them to, so I reduced the exposure to where I knew I could still recover the shadow detail, but not so much that it would lose crispness in post. That got me much closer, but there were still sections that were blowing out.
I went back to the truck and grabbed a 2-stop ND grad which would darken the top portion of the frame slightly but would allow me to recover the now deeper shadows of the trees while keeping the highlights at bay. It didn’t affect the histogram much, but any more would have presented issues with the processing of the photo. I could have done an HDR blend here as there wasn’t much breeze, but there would be movement in the leaves which I would have to address in post which could add as much as an hour to the processing. As we all know, I like to get it as close to right in the field, and for this image, a single frame would be a closer starting point.
Now that I had the exposure worked out, I started to trip the shutter as the light changed. I also realized that I could make out the traffic passing behind the barn so I needed to time the exposure when there wasn’t a shiny car showing through the leaves that would give strange highlights in the background where the sky shouldn’t be. This increased my frame count pretty dramatically, because every time I thought I was pressing at the right time, a car would enter the frame. As I was doing all of this, the clouds were starting to thin allowing the sunlight to shine through.
The interesting thing about the sunlight was it wasn’t quite hitting the barn as I had imagined it would based on the previous morning that I had shot it. The sun was further behind the trees than I expected which kept the spotlight off of the barn. Instead, the light was coming through in a dappled manner across the entire scene. Normally, I don’t care for dappled light which covers a subject that has interesting textures. It usually over complicates things, but in this situation, I felt that the dappled light actually helped add some interest to the scene.
After having previsualized this scene on a cloudy day with maybe even a bit of rain falling, I was starting to really like the sunlight adding some interest to the foreground as well as highlighting bits of the barn. It helped to counter the bright spots where the sky was showing through the trees by giving something with comparable brightness for the eyes to be attracted to. One of the first rules of “seeing” a photograph is that the eyes go to the brightest part of the image first, and in this situation, I needed more light on the barn. The dappled light provided just that.
After 16 frames, I was sure that I had something that I was going to be happy with. I was actually counting on it being that last image that I shot because the traffic had stopped flowing behind the barn, and the light was about as intense as I could stand for it to be. There was a bit of blue in the sky to help define the white areas as clouds rather than lost pixels. It seemed to all work out in that last frame. Not seeing anything else that I wanted to shoot, and I was ready to remove myself from the ant’s feeding ground, I packed things up and headed back to the highway and home.
An hour later, I was bringing my gear inside and starting to upload the day’s photos. Essentially, I had one basic composition, with three slight variations, and two different lighting scenarios to look at. I did my normal culling from last to first and that last shot was the first one to get a star assigned to it. It checked all the boxes that I thought that it would. As I went through the previous 15 frames, there were none that I liked any better. It was the quickest culling I think I have ever done with only one frame getting a star, that meant that what I was going to process was evident. I spent the next 20 minutes working the file to fine tune everything, but essentially, it was pretty close to being ready right out of the camera. Most of what I did was adding some micro contrast to the barn and smoothing out the effects from the grad filter.
The final image was closer to the original one that I had shot that I had wanted, but there were enough significant differences that made this attempt worth the time. The biggest difference was that the season had the trees greener than when I had shot it before. I remembered using a color profile that accentuated the oranges before which gave the photo a very monochromatic look. It worked for the image, and I still like it, but I like the color contrast between the barn and the green of the trees much better. This composition also includes that interesting tree which is just not visible in the other composition due to framing and the light. The barn looks largely the same as it did all those years ago, and much to my dismay, I had that same dappled light across the scene despite this being from two very different times of the day.
Probably the biggest change between the two images is how I processed them both. I had done a lot to the first one when compared to what I did with this second one. Not pushing the pixels as much to get a slightly better photograph always makes me happy because I try not to overdo the post processing portion of the photography and if I can do very little in post, I am much happier. It isn’t an award-winning photo by any stretch, but it was one that I enjoyed shooting, and I could tell that I was much more proficient at how to capture it this time. That is proof of personal growth behind the camera and that is always a good thing to see evidence of.
I’m glad that you decided to drop by and join me on this short trek. I hope that you enjoyed the photo that resulted. If you did visit the other blog and saw the first attempt at the barn, let me know what you think of the two and which is your favorite. The different color palette will be the clincher between them in most decisions. Of course, if you really love this photo and would like a print to hang on your wall, of either version, please let me know, or you can order directly from the gallery store. I’m certain that the newer image will print better because there was much less done in post to make it the image that you see.
Time to get the truck loaded up for the headshot session tomorrow. Remember if you are needing headshots done, I can do them here at the studio in Purlear, NC, or I can come to you within a reasonable distance. Headshots are your public face and what you present to the world. I’ve seen far too many headshots being done with cell phones and done in a way that just screams “selfie”. Don’t do that to yourself. Get a professionally done headshot and put your best face forward.
Until next time….
