Thursday, August 13, 2026
Many of my treks happen by pure chance. Some of them happen because I happen to be at the right place at the right time. There are other times that it would seem that there are forces beyond my control that put me in the position to capture some of the photos that I do. This is a story of one of those times when everything just happened to fall into place at the right time to make this work out. I’ll back up and start at the beginning just so you can see how this all came together.
I guess it all started about a year ago when I was driving along one of my favorite back roads where I have found a lot of great subjects to photograph. I happened to spot something new at a location just outside of Booneville, NC. When I say new, I am obviously talking about new to me because I’m usually only interested in old. In fact, the older the better. For many years, there had been a ’80’s model tow truck parked by a building that I had been wanting to photograph, but never really found a way to do it that I liked. That truck was gone now, but I had a habit of looking over there every time I passed through after years of speculating a photograph. What I was seeing was a 1930’s model Ford, possibly a ’32 sitting on the other side of the driveway against a wooden fence. It was in decent shape for the age and was covered in a beautiful surface rust. It immediately grabbed my attention and imagination.
The problem was the location of the car. I wasn’t able to really figure out how to get a good photo of it because of its proximity to the house at the top of the driveway and the fence was only a background for about half of the car. I kept looking at it as I passed by each time and tried to figure out how I would want to shoot it. For about a year, I kept convincing myself that there was not a photo to be had there. I still liked the car and really wanted to give it a try though.
As the months moved on, many other things unrelated to photography had been going on. One of those things had been the trouble with Toni’s eyes which I’ve talked about several times here in the blogs. We are still dealing with that issue and there is no real resolution in sight at this point. Also, during that time, I had an eye appointment which ended up in a billing mess which prompted me to not want to go back to that eye doctor again and to seek out a new practice. I’ve found the one that I want to go to, but that is not really important. The important part is that I had decided since I still had a year’s worth of contacts from the last visit, I would go back one last time on the chance that I didn’t need to get new contacts. There was also the fact that I was much more versed in the problems of the eye that might not be readily recognized thanks to what Toni has been going through. Just to play it safe, I wanted to get a basic checkup if nothing else.
On one of our rare days when there wasn’t really any rain in the forecast, I had my appointment in Winston. It was looking like a great morning to take the Miata out for a nice long drive while the weather was good. This meant that I was going to be taking the back roads to avoid the highway. Of course, that put me going down that road where the ’30’s Ford was sitting. As I always do, I slowed to look at things to see if I could figure out a composition around the car. This time, I saw something that I didn’t recognize.
The shape was from the ’50’s, not the ’30’s, but it was where I always look for the Ford. It didn’t take but a few seconds to see that there were actually two cars parked there on the side of the road now. The Ford now had a partner with a Chevrolet that was roughly 50ft away up against the tree line. This car looked amazing and it was in a much better location. I could see the compositions that I would want to shoot here and decided that the location was finally worth stopping and asking. I just wasn’t in the truck and didn’t have my camera with me. The sun was also out which kind of ruined the chances all by itself as the shadows were terrible at this point.
I just continued on with my eye doctor’s appointment and decided to give it another look on the way home. The second look was even more promising than the first one because I had taken some time to think about the options in my head. I was definitely going to have to come back to this spot and try to find the owner and get permission to access the cars. I was pretty confident that I could do most of what I wanted to from the shoulder of the road, but I felt that the detail shots were going to be key with both of these cars.
I wasn’t sure when I was going to get my chance though because I also had to head out, the very next day, to my Dad’s to drive him to a different kind of eye appointment. He was having cataract surgery on his second eye and needed a seeing eye uber for the day of surgery and for the follow-up office visit the next morning. Because he is just under two hours away, I was going to stay the night with him and come back the following morning. That would pretty much finish out the week for me as I still needed to get caught up on the yard which was now needing to be cut again.
As I had done for the last surgery, I packed the camera just in case I found something out in Randolph or Guilford Counties that I might want to photograph. Hey, it happened the last time, so it was possible that it would happen again. I didn’t really see anything that was worth photographing during my time out there on Wednesday. While I was getting ready for bed that night, I was looking at the weather to see if I would be able to mow when I got home. What had been a pretty much sunny day was now looking like scattered showers and storms. This also meant clouds, and clouds meant good light.
That got me thinking about the chances of visiting those cars that I had recently decided were worth a few frames. It wouldn’t be too far out of the way to stop by there and I would have time after Dad’s appointment. In fact, to get the good light, I was looking at needing to get there around noon after the rain was done and when the storms were likely going to be popping up. Those had the smaller chance of precipitation, but there were still going to be clouds.
The appointment took a bit longer than anticipated, but we still got home in plenty of time for me to chill for a bit and plan out what I was going to do. While I intended to ask permission, I wasn’t completely sure that I would be able to find anyone at the house that I thought was associated with the property. In that case, I would be parked on the shoulder of the road and working quickly before I attracted the attention of anyone that might want to make me leave. I call this guerrilla photography, where I work very fast and get the shots before anyone knows I’m even there. It also keeps me from being a traffic hazard any longer than necessary when the truck is right beside the road. I do try and keep my practices responsible when I’m in the field.
After taking care of some business and making sure that Dad was OK for me to leave, I was on the road at 10:30 headed to Yadkin County. The sky overhead was very sunny when I left Dad’s, and I was thinking that I might not get the light that I was after. The newest forecast had moved the rain out of the hourly for the most part and left it with partly cloudy. This could mean good light, or the overly contrasty light that would not work with the cars partially under trees. I decided to hold off on my decision until I got closer to Yadkin County since I wasn’t going to need to divert from my regular route until I was pretty much in the middle of the county.
The closer I got, the more the clouds were coming in. The light was looking good and there was no sign of rain. Everything was still dry which was promising for me. Though, I had been interested to see what the cars would look like with a bit of sheen from the rain adding to the saturation of the paint. While that might have been a nice addition, I really didn’t want to be shooting in the rain because that adds so much complexity to the situation with needing an umbrella to protect the filter and front element. Things were looking up, so I decided to get off the main highway and get over on that back road to go and check the cars out.
It wasn’t too far off of the highway that I had to drive until I found my cars. The light was looking really good on them, even better than I had been hoping. The shoulder was not quite as good as I was hoping for with a bit deeper of a ditch than I remembered. I could get parked there, but I worried about tearing up the turf on the way out. There was a driveway to the right of the location, but I didn’t know where it went to which made me hesitant to park there. I didn’t want to block anyone while I was working. It made the most sense to go to the house that I figured was related to the property and see if I could get permission.
I got turned around and went back to the driveway where the house was. While I was driving past the house, I saw something I had never seen before here. There was a person walking in the front yard going to one of the vehicles that looked to be inoperable. Could I be this lucky? I got parked really quick and jumped out of the truck before he got ghost. As I approached, I announced myself at a distance, so I didn’t startle him as I saw he was working on the Jeep at this point. I asked if the cars and property beside the road were his. Surprisingly he said that they were not but offered no clarification on that statement. I backtracked a bit and asked if he knew the owner. He knew the name but didn’t know how to get in touch with him. This was not going well at all.
As a last-ditch effort, I just explained that I was a photographer and was interested in taking photos of the cars hoping that would get an answer that might help the situation. I could see the switch click in his head and at that moment I realized what it must have sounded like when I started asking questions. In my head, I was looking for the owner to ask permission to photograph these cars. In his head, he was hearing, that I wanted to buy one or both of the cars and he wasn’t going to get involved with that process. Since I simplified things greatly, I found out that he had no problem giving permission for me to photograph the cars and even let me leave my truck where it was parked safely out of the road. Just like that, my luck had changed.
I thought about getting the camera built and getting started with the photos while leaving the bag in the truck. I quickly decided that was not a great idea since I wasn’t exactly sure how things were going to look once I started dialing in the compositions. I wanted to keep my options open with lenses and filters in case I ran into a situation where I needed some flexibility. I did load up the standard zoom lens to start with though as that was going to give me the most flexibility and allow me to decide if I was liking the wider angles or the tighter telephoto shots.
I was most interested in the Chevy because I knew that there were compositions to be had there, but the Ford was closer. That meant that I was going to get started with the Ford. That turned out to be quite easy as the first good look that I had of the car was from the rear of it and I found that the background was very nice from that angle. I loved the colors of the car against the grass and trees as well. It just seemed to be a shot that composed itself, so who was I to argue with things.
After getting the composition dialed in, I started to make exposures. I knew pretty much instantly that I had a keeper in the first few frames. The only issue that I was running into was the breeze which was making the grass move. Since there was some tall grass in the scene, I wanted to make sure that I had everything pretty well frozen, so I keep cheating the shutter faster and faster.
Once I had the easy shot taken care of, I wanted to see what I could do with the front of the car. This was the composition that I had been having the worst time figuring out because of the fence to the side of the car. It didn’t cover the entire length of the car which made it an odd background. The worst part was that beyond the fence was the house with several Jeeps parked in the yard as well as some other items that had nothing to do with the Ford. This was going to be the hard part of the day. I played around with the different focal lengths and positions until I realized that there was no way to get the entire car in the frame. I wouldn’t let myself quit though, not since I had the permission to be here and work around the cars.
What I decided to do was crop the frame into the car around the front door. This kept the attention on the more interesting part of the car while allowing the fence to block the view beyond. It wasn’t perfect, but I liked the compromise and stuck with it for a few different variations. In the end, I had enough to play with the photos in both color and black and white. It was the composition that showed the “Keep Out” sign that ended up becoming black and white. The decision was based completely on that sign because I knew that I was going to need to add lots of contrast to that sign to make it pop in the composition. In color, that would have been a hard visual sell, but in black and white, it was no problem.
The more interesting composition without the sign was left in color because the colors actually helped in defining the subject from the background. both versions were effective in their own ways and I’m glad that I had enough different frames to think about doing them in color and black and white. I really think that the way that I decided to work the two compositions was the right way for each one respectively. I was now three deep into my keepers and had only shot nine frames. I was on a roll early on with this location.
Now that I had an overall composition of the car from the rear and two partial crops of the car, I felt that it was time to move in and start working on the details. Since the fenders were something pretty unique to the car, I wanted to capture that shape along with the vents in the side of the hood. This was actually a harder composition to figure out than I had suspected, but once I realized that I needed to cover the handle with the fender and use the latch as a framing element, I had a good starting point for the image. Now, when I shot this, I was thinking about it in black and white, but when I started to process it, I found that the colors worked better and helped the image to make more sense. There was a bit of color shifting involved to get the color palette where I really wanted it, but there was no doubt that color was the way to go here.
After looking around briefly for more isolations to capture on the Ford, I decided it was time to go and get acquainted with the Chevy a little further down the road. This was the car that I had been able to see the composition from the road and I went right to that point and started to frame that photo up as I had previsualized it. The only questions that I had to answer for myself was how high to place the camera. I had the angle and the perspective figured out, just not the visual level that the camera needed to be at. That was figured out soon enough though and I had another keeper in the bag with a different car.
I saw a lot of character with this Chevy from the tires that had been ripped from the wheels to the little weed that was growing from the front bumper. Even the bend of the bumper caught my eye. In fact, I was so taken with the weed growing out of the bumper that I decided that I would do a bit of an abstract photo of that weed. For that, I was going to need to get in very close to the front of the car and start to work out framing of the greenery. I wanted the car to be of a secondary concern to the vegetation while leaving enough of the car to make it identifiable since it was a very odd setting for a plant of any type.
The bend in the bumper made that pretty easy to accomplish as it created a triangle of sorts which framed the little plant. The only question that was left was how much of the car did I need to make that frame work out. The issue that I ran into was that there were three slats in the grill that I needed to include because to only include two of them was boring and started to make that element look like a distraction. Having three of them followed the rule of odds which is one of the only rules that I routinely follow because it just works so well in terms of framing up a composition.
After some wrestling with the angles, I finally had something that I felt worked very nicely. It kept the three slats in the frame, the triangle element with the front bumper while not including enough of the bumperette to pull the attention away from the plant, and the greenery itself was shifted from the center of the frame for a bit of visual tension. There were a lot of different angles considered here, but this is the one that had the elements organized in the most appropriate way for what I was looking for out of the photo. The frame counter was up to 19 frames at this point and there were six keepers out of those which was pretty good if I do say so myself.
By this point, I was pretty satisfied with the results that I had seen from the location. I knew that I had the safe images shot and it was time to start getting creative with the compositions. In order to really stretch that creativity, I needed to establish some things. I needed a list of things that were working and things that were not so that I could really put together something that found a new kind of success. The biggest problem that I was seeing was in the color of the Chevy. It was largely green as were the surroundings. This made it difficult to cut out from the background in terms of color contrasts. I did like the textures on the car with the lichen and moss that covered it. This was the element that was giving the car the color that was causing me so much trouble though. Without a lot of chrome on the car, there were limited ways of capturing the texture on the car when it came to forming interesting compositions.
As I always do, I started to look at the headlights which were actually missing, but the chrome trim was still there and that gave me a point of contrast. I needed to figure out something that didn’t have much in the way of the background in the shot while still showing the textures of the body’s surface. Most everything that I came up with seemed so overdone and they all lacked that punch that I was after. It took me a little while to piece together a new compositional idea for this kind of car, but eventually I got there.
By going relatively wide with the lens, I was able to get in close and make the top of the fender really prominent as a foreground. By cropping through the headlight trim, I turned that circle into a subtle curve to introduce the foreground fender which turned into just a shape at the bottom of the photo. The background was made up of the windshield with the hood looming in-between as another shape within the frame. It was a little overly complex though and I thought that the attention was actually being pulled off of the textures that I loved so much. It was while I was getting the composition set up that the answer made itself known.
After getting the rough composition figured out, I started to work on the focus point and figured that since it was that fender that I was featuring for the texture that I would focus on that portion of the car, just behind the chrome trim. When I saw that in the viewfinder (remember that we are always looking through the lens at the widest aperture), I really liked the shallow depth of field effect. It made the fender stand out along with the texture while the rest of the frame became a part of the story rather than making the entire car the story. The problem was that the depth of field was too shallow here and I was losing too much of the texture on the fender. I needed more of the image in focus, but not so much as to bring out the detail in the windshield and trees behind.
With the Depth of Field preview button pressed, I started stopping down the lens to see when the overall blur for the background was best. That turned out to be at f/11 which is usually a great aperture for getting everything in focus near to far. Because of how close I was to the headlight trim, the depth of field was very limited, especially with the focus point so close to the camera. I doubt I would have been able to get the entire frame in focus, but I really liked how it was looking at f/11.
There were a number of different exposures made here with some different depths of field used, but it was this one, which was number three out of five which made the keeper list. I had only shot a total of 24 frames by this point with seven new images to show for the time and effort. By being a little more selective in how many frames I’m shooting, I am getting very consistent with having a hit rate around 33% on these treks which is pretty amazing.
The best part, however, is that I wasn’t quite finished with the trek. In fact, I felt like I was just getting warmed up. There will be more to come in the next chapter, so keep your eyes out for that get published soon. You should be seeing it at some point tomorrow, and hopefully before the middle of the day. There are still a couple of my favorites coming from this trek, so you don’t want to miss this next installment.
Until then…
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