Monday, March 18, 2024
It feels like just a few hours ago I was sitting here writing out a blog where I had tried to photograph five different locations, but only had luck getting permission at one of them. As I left the blog, I remember saying that the weather was looking promising for another attempt this morning. If I’m being honest, I was doubting that I was going to go out again since I was getting to sleep kind of late and had just finished up with a very successful set of photos. When I started to wake up this morning, I was actually hoping for sunny skies as an excuse not to go out. However, there were some clouds overhead just as predicted. The weather showed clear skies, but I was seeing the thin layers that my cloud app was telling me should be overhead.
When I got done with my morning routine, I looked outside once again, and checked the weather. It was looking to be about like yesterday, with increasing winds into the afternoon. Looking ahead, there was either sun or rain, with no clouds in between. If I was going to get back out to try the other locations, it needed to be today. I made a quick call to the property owner with the two Chevrolets that I was trying to photograph. Once again, the call went straight through to voicemail. I figured that the best option was to try and go out there again. Having talked to my friend that gave me the contact information, I now knew that he lived in the house which had been a question before.
All the way out there, I was considering the cars and the existing lighting. The sun was popping in and out with a certain amount of regularity. I was hoping for softer light to capture the cars, and the more I thought about it, the more I started to think about the old Chevy pickup that I had attempted the day before. I thought that I could probably get a better composition with it, but that was largely due to the fact that there was a large container behind the two cars that I didn’t really care for. I knew that the truck could stand the sunlight better than the cars and with the clouds supposedly getting a bit thicker closer to noon, I decided at the last minute to try the truck first.
I went past the turnoff to get to the two cars and continued on until I saw the back of the truck through the trees. I pulled into the driveway and saw a new car parked by the house. My hopes spiked as I got out of the truck and went to knock on the door. I heard a dog barking, but no other movement. I saw no reason to knock again, so I waited to make sure and eventually got back in the truck to leave. I wasn’t sure if anyone was home, or if they just didn’t want to talk to me. Either way, I wasn’t going to get anywhere at this location. I was back on my way to the first spot to try that again.
I made my way down the rutted road once again and to the open gate with plenty of notification to stay away. I drove on in and went up to the house as I had the day before. This time, I got out to go really give knocking a try. The front door still looked unused with leaves and storage around the door. Knowing that the house was occupied, I went to the back door where there was a dog sitting on the porch. Fortunately, he was friendly enough and I was able to get to the door and knock.
I heard activity inside and eventually I heard a voice behind the door asking who it was. I introduced myself and how I had gotten the address. The door eventually opened up and I had my chance to speak with the owner finally. He was quite nice, and we chatted for a few minutes before I was heading back to where the cars were parked. Now that I had permission to be there, I had to figure out my compositions. That wasn’t going to be easy because of the proximity of the cars to one another and that container that was positioned behind the cars.
I walked around without the camera at first to get an idea of where I could set things up and what compositions might be available. I knew I definitely wanted to get an overall establishing shot of the pair because it was just too cool to see them this close, and in such similar condition. I found an angle that I liked which showed both of the cars and found that by getting down low I could possibly cover the container with the foreground car if I used a wide enough focal length. It wasn’t a sure thing, but I had a starting point at least.
Once I had grabbed my camera with the wide-angle lens attached, I came back to the spot where I thought things would work out best. I started to play with the position of the camera until I was satisfied that the container was fully behind the car. Now came the fun part where I had to work out the exposure. I was shooting into the sun, and even though it was behind the clouds, the light in the sky was much brighter than what was on the cars. Looking through the live view at the histogram, I could tell that there was just too much dynamic range here to get a good exposure. I went back to the truck and grabbed a 2-stop soft ND Grad and slid that in behind the polarizer. That helped, but it wasn’t quite enough to balance the scene. I went back and swapped that filter out for a 3-stop version. That seemed to do the truck and allowed me to lift the darker areas which included the two cars.
I only made a few exposures here as I tweaked the camera placement to provide as much separation as I could between all the elements. When I was finally satisfied that I had a workable photograph among the frames, I started to look for other compositions. The 16-35mm lens had very limited use here and I found that it just wasn’t capturing what I was looking for after the initial composition. I went back to the truck again and swapped that out for the 24-70mm standard zoom. I figured that I was working in close which would necessitate the wider angle when compared to the telephoto that I have been using very successfully with this type of photography.
Now that I had the standard zoom attached, I went around and tried different compositions dealing with isolations of the front clips of the cars. I met with some success, but nothing that I was excited about. Here I was facing two ’57 Chevy’s and was having a very hard time coming up with a meaningful composition. Maybe things were just too cramped to get it right, but I kept finding points of interest that I felt would make good photographs. After about 10 minutes, I decided that I wasn’t happy with the standard zoom and went back to the truck once again to get the telephoto lens. It felt like overkill for the close quarters that I was having to work in, but once I got back around the cars, the views changed tremendously.
The first shot that I worked was of the headlight on one of the cars. It was a composition that I had shot many times before, and this lens was perfect for it. Unfortunately, I felt that the previous attempt was with a better subject than this, so I was still shooting duds even with the change in lens. I went around to the areas that I had spotted points of interest and tried to frame them up with the longer lens. It finally clicked when I was got to the driver’s side of the front car. The window was broken in such a beautiful way which I felt would frame the instrument cluster quite nicely. It hadn’t worked out with the other lens, but now, I could see things coming together.
I got the camera in the right position and worked out the framing as well as the depth of field. Eventually, I had something that I really liked, or at least thought that I would here in the field. I shot a couple of versions just to have options when I got home and felt that things were looking really good. I noticed while shooting through the front window, that the rear window was broken out which opened up the whole interior of the car. The seats were long gone, and I had a clear view of the dash which caught my eye.
I started to look around for a composition and found that the part that interested me the most was the Chevrolet badge beside the clock. I could also see the wood panel laminate coming off of the dash which was another interesting point. I started to make a composition around that and found that I liked the long, streamlined look of the dash under the broken windshield that added so much texture to the scene. I framed up a shot and started to look at it from a balance point of view. The windshield carried too much of the space, but if I tilted the camera down, I would get distractions from the floor. The easiest fix for that was to go to a 16:9 crop in camera which accentuated the shape of the dash as well as putting the emblem in a great spot for the golden spiral.
The exposure looked to be really tricky, but when I started to look at things in the live view, there wasn’t quite the contrast that I had expected. I did end up shooting a few different frames here as the sun changed intensity which affected the contrast levels even more. Once I felt I had the right combination of lighting and lower contrast, I picked the camera up and moved on to the next spot. I was starting to feel confident with these cars after kind of a slow beginning.
Not wanting to ignore the car in the background, I went back to it for a second time after working it with the standard zoom to no avail. I wasn’t sure I would have the room to work with the long lens, but I figured that I would give it a try since I was here. I went back to the areas that I had shot before but stepped back a little further to give the lens room to work. To my surprise, the compositions were coming to life with this lens much better than they had before. I was also able to stay clear of the reflections in the chrome with this lens which I’m always thankful for.
I played around with the front of this car for a while and tried to get a few different views of the headlights. There was one that I really liked in the field that was a vertical shot from the center of the car. There was a nicely curved tree in the background that framed the section of the car that I thought would make for an excellent composition. The only problem was that there was some brush that was creeping up the front of the car that kind of ruined the visual progression through the frame. I tried to edit it in several different ways, but never felt like any of them truly worked. Had I not had similar compositions from this style car, I would have pressed the issue, but I knew it wasn’t going to be as strong a composition as what I had shot before.
However, looking at the driver’s side headlight bucket, I saw an opportunity to capture a unique photograph using the bullet trim on the hood with the empty socket. This would give a very biased visual balance to the composition with the chrome pulling the eyes right to that section of the hood while I left the headlight in the shadows. By limiting the depth of field, I was able to amplify the disparity between them and keep the eyes on the chrome while still telling the story of the car itself. When I shot this one, I was thinking that it was going to be in black and white, but when I got home, the color version was just too good to give up. I liked the hint of teal paint beneath the deep rust of the metal. It all just worked so well and has become one of my favorite photos of the day.
As I was getting ready to pack everything back up in the truck, I took one more look at the Chevy by the woods and saw a photograph where the front of the car was largely framed by the needled trees around it. I found a spot to place the tripod that would give me a clear view of the car and framed it up. I liked how it looked with the longer lens and started to really fine tune my position and the composition. After a minute or so, I was happy with how things looked and started to make exposures. The breeze was kicking up a little at this point, so I had to be careful with the moving vegetation. That was an easy fix because nothing was blowing too much at this point. When I was happy with the photos that I was seeing from this composition, I turned the camera off and started to make one last walk around the cars to see if there was anything else that I might want to capture.
I felt that I had everything shot that I would want. I had used all three of my primary lenses which usually means that I have worked a subject completely. I was thinking that I would have examples from each of the lenses which excited me. The ironic part was that all of the photos that were shot with the 24-70mm ended up on the cutting room floor. This surprised me since for many years that has been my workhorse lens and was my ride or die for doing this kind of photography. I guess I have really transitioned into shooting with the long lens now because only the wide-angle zoom showed to be useful here as a secondary lens choice. I’m certainly not complaining because it just means that my compositions are evolving rather than staying the same.
It had taken some work, but I had finally gotten out here and had my day with the two cars. There weren’t as many photos as there had been from the Buick the day before, but that was because these cars were largely overgrown which limits my fields of view. The car that was most visible was missing the rear quarter panels which kind of killed a lot of options right from the top. They weren’t the easiest to work with, but I’m quite satisfied with how the photos turned out.
Not wanting to call it quits for the day, I decided to try the old Chevy truck one last time. If I didn’t find anyone at home this time, I was going to write it off for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t but a few miles down the road and I was there once again. The same car was in the driveway that I had seen earlier in the morning and nothing looked as though it had changed. I went back to the same back door I had knocked on earlier and didn’t hear much of anything inside. I waited there for a minute and just as I was about to leave, I head footsteps walking towards me. I was greeted by the lady of the house who advised that she didn’t mind if I took some photos of the old truck. I was very glad that I had tried a second time because now I had the ability to get a few photos of the truck.
Now came the part where I had to get the compositions figured out. I started off with the first thought that I had come up with the previous day. I got in close with the wide-angle lens and positioned myself down relatively low to the ground. This pushed the house on the other side of the fence down lower on the horizon so that it wasn’t as visible in the frame. It also put more of the sky overhead which I felt worked well for this truck. The issue that it caused was a really nice tree overhead was being broken up by the cab of the truck. I felt that I really needed to have the whole structure visible which meant a slight reposition of the camera, as well as raising it up a couple of inches. That put the tree in the right place, and the house wasn’t terribly visible in the background.
When it came time to work out the exposure, I found that as it had been earlier in the day, the sky was overly bright in comparison to the main subject. I grabbed the same 3-stop grad and slid it in behind the polarizer. That did what I needed it to do, and the exposure looked great on the histogram. I made three different exposures with slightly different framing just to make sure that I had what I wanted. When that was done, I was free to look for isolations on the truck.
Surprisingly, even with the great patina, I didn’t find anything that I was particularly interested in shooting. I felt that the isolations were going to be too complex with the calico appearance of the body. The more I looked, the less interested I became. I think that it came down to the fact that the truck appealed to me as an overall composition more than anything else when I first saw it. That was what I was wanting to capture, and that is what I had done. My mission here was finished and it was time to call it a day. I had 47 frames on the camera, which was a tad more than yesterday, but to be fair, there were three times as many cars on today’s menu.
All the way home, I was thinking that I should have four or five good images, so when I went through the initial culling, I was shocked to see that I had nearly 20 images that worked well enough to look at closer. I whittled that down to nine that were the strongest, and during the edits cut two more because they just didn’t quite strike the right chord with me. That left me with the seven photos that you see here which I feel are all very solid images. They were definitely worth going back out to Hays again to make additional attempts.
I also had the chance to check out the Cadillac which I had tried to work the day before. There was a rollback parked next to it now, and the more I looked at it, the less I felt that I wanted to shoot it. I might get the urge again in the future, but I was content to leave it alone today. The small junk yard that I had spotted the day before was a location that I wanted to leave for another day. I could easily get tied up in there for a very long time and I knew that the sky wasn’t going to hold all day. I did take a moment to look again at what was in the yard to start getting ideas for how I wanted to tackle the shoot for when I actually made it out there. I’ve got some ideas; I just need the weather and the permission.
I hope that you have enjoyed going along with me on this trek. It was a short one, but another successful one. If any of the photos speak to you, consider purchasing a print. There is just no better way to enjoy photography than in a physical form. If you don’t see the size you are interested in, or you want a different type of media rather than photo paper or fine art paper, just contact me to discuss options. I have a nearly unlimited number of ways to deliver your print. Your purchase will go a long way towards allowing me to continue with these treks. If you don’t have room on the walls, or you are satisfied viewing the photos on your device of choice, consider making a small donation and buying me a virtual cup of coffee. To do so, just click the donate button at the bottom of this blog and choose an amount to send. Every bit helps, and is greatly appreciated.
Until next time….
