Sunday, January 1, 2023
Happy New Year everyone! I hope that you have all enjoyed the Holidays and are looking forward to the new year. If you have read my Behind the Camera entry from this morning, you are probably surprised that I can still type. I think that was the longest entry that I have done, but fortunately, I started it a couple of months ago so there wasn’t all that much typing involved in the closing days of the year. However, that is not to say that I haven’t been quite busy here lately. In addition to having family staying with us, I’ve been rather busy with photography. On the day after Christmas, I had a portrait session to do which yielded about 10 edited images. On Friday, I took advantage of some clouds and went out on a short trek that became even shorter thanks to the rain. After getting that trek taken care of, I transitioned to getting ready for another family portrait session that ended up with another 11 edited photographs. But wait…there’s more. Since I had the studio set up for photos, and our Granddaughter was here, I went ahead and added another photo session to the books. I’m just not cut out to photograph a five-year-old because she wore me out during our roughly hour long session. Of course, there were lots of photos from that hour which I also had to edit and get ready. There were an additional 26 photos of her, but the edits were really quick which helped. I ended up wrapping up the preliminary edits by 10pm and got everything turned off in the studio to head back upstairs for a bit of rest.
You might be thinking that after the week I’ve had, the last thing I would want to do would be to go out and make more work for myself. Well, that is kind of what I do when I am self-employed. I’m a nice boss, but I do like to see productivity from my workers. Of course, both of those people are one in the same, so you feel my pain. Something that I started doing years ago when I was riding a bicycle was make a point to go out on New Year’s Day and go on a ride of some length. I’ve gone in the cold, the rain, the wind, and occasionally a sunny day, to log those first miles of the year. It set the tone for my training and kept me from looking at a “0” mileage ridden for the year.
Well, as a photographer, many of the same self-imposed, silly rituals still apply. I’ve mentioned how hard it is to get the first photo of a trek many times in these blogs. It marks that transition from a non-creative to a creative mindset and once I get that first photo in the bag, the rest of them come a bit easier. The same can be said for a new year. All of a sudden, I have nothing in my portfolio from the current year. It might be a day, a week, or a month before I get that first new image of the year. The pressure is real when I start thinking about it like that. If only I could get that first one in the bag, so at least I know I have something from the current year in the collection.
Well, just like when I was riding a bike, the answer is almost too simple. Just go out and do something, anything. That was what I set my mind to do when I was finished with the edits on all of the photos from yesterday’s sessions. Looking at the weather, there was a good chance for fog through mid-morning which was a good thing for a photographer, not so much for a cyclist. I love working with the fog and while I really didn’t want to go out, I knew that it was a unique opportunity weatherwise. I just had to figure out where I wanted to go.
I still haven’t heard back from the property owner in Jonesville that I am hoping to talk to, and I felt that while the weather would be great for the cars I want to photograph, it would be in poor form to show up at sunrise and knock on the door. Another idea that I have been mulling over for a while is a return to the Forester Nu-way store in North Wilkesboro. While I pass it many times during the months, I haven’t bothered to return for a new photograph of it since November 2020. I guess a lot of the reason behind that was the fact that when I shot that photograph, it was one of the most talked about photos I had shot in a long time. I didn’t want to mess with a successful image, but the more I looked at it, the more I saw thing that I wished I had done differently.
The photo had a lot going on with it from composition to color rendition. That particular morning the light had this beautiful magenta quality that supersaturated all of the colors. Of course, I ran with that and made the colors a bit more vibrant through the edit. It was a dramatic photo, and obviously one that got a lot of attention from viewers. I just started to wish for a calmer version of the photo with colors that weren’t quite so hot. The idea that I had come up with was a long exposure showing the clouds moving across the sky. I loved the idea, but I was going to have to worry about passing traffic during most any time the light would be right for the idea. That concept still wouldn’t address the background buildings of downtown which added another layer of complexity to the composition. I still liked the idea, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to think that fog would be a better option to work with.
Looking at the weather and seeing a significant amount of fog forecasted for the morning, I started to consider the old gas station as my destination. I knew that it was going to be a single composition and it wasn’t going to be an epic trek like I have had so many of lately. I was fine with that because my main goal was to get that first image in the bag. The shorter the trek, the better I would like it because in all actuality, I was tired and didn’t want to spend the day in front of the computer once again. My plan was to get up early in order to do my morning stuff before heading out at 7am to get to the store right as the light was building. It wasn’t a long trip so there really wasn’t that much of an investment in time with this trek which also worked well for me. I just had to get to sleep so I would be able to wake up at 5:45.
I was in bed by 11:30, and just laid there until it was time to tell Toni Happy New Year. Then I went right to sleep. Yep, we are wild and crazy kids that love to party for the holidays. The clock rang at 5:45 and I remember looking at it like it just stole the last hot dog on the tray. I considered my options. I could disregard the alarm and go back to sleep, or I could get up and get started with the New Year. I checked the weather real quick just to make sure that there wasn’t a national stay in bed order in effect. No such luck, and the fog was looking like it was going to be right for what I had planned. I still didn’t want to get up, and I didn’t. 6am passed and I was still very comfy in the bed, and then 6:10 came. At this point, I knew that I would regret not getting out there as planned, and it would ruin the whole year. Well, that might be a bit dramatic, but I knew that for an entire year, my first photograph would have come after the 1st which was not acceptable. With that, I rolled out of bed and got ready to roll out.
I left just before 7, without getting anything done in the studio as intended. That was why the Behind the Camera was late going out. As I rolled out of the garage, everything was dark, but I could see clouds in the sky. There was no fog anywhere to be seen at the house, but I knew that where I was going would have a higher potential for fog as it is lower in altitude than the house. As I drove down Boone Trail, I was seeing more clear skies than anything which bothered me. I already had a photo of this old gas station under colorful clouds, and I wasn’t wanting to duplicate the intense colors that I already had. Nope, I wanted a more subdued image, and was likely going to make it a black and white presentation. Fortunately, the closer I got to downtown, the more fog I started to see building up. It was actually pretty thick in places, so I had a lot of hope that it was going to be just socked in when I got to the store.
It wasn’t quite that thick when I arrived at the old gas station, but there was plenty of fog around and it was just thick enough to cover the background buildings to further simplify the scene from what I had captured before. I got parked and pulled out my camera with the 14mm lens as that was what I was hoping to use for this shot. I walked around with it and decided that the perspective distortion was too dominant with the composition that I wanted, and it made the image a little too dramatic for what I was trying to capture. I switched over to my 16-35mm lens which was the same one that I had used the last time. I made the changes to the composition that I had in mind which included overlapping one of the power poles with the support on the left side of the building. I also elevated the camera a bit more to give separation between the roof and the railing of the upper deck. I didn’t get quite as close in so that the antenna would not stretch so far to the upper portion of the frame. A calm atmosphere was what I was after, and I needed to avoid dramatic choices in order to make that happen.
Once I was happy with the composition, I started to look at the fine tuning of details. There were traffic lights on either side of the building which I really didn’t want visible in my composition since they would just be balls of light floating in the fog. I was able to eliminate one to the right by shifting slightly to the side and masking it with the back right pole. There was still one light left, but that was going to be easy enough to clone out providing the fog maintained roughly this same density. On the opposite side, there were a pair of lights which were positioned to where I only had the railing by the road that could be used to mask them. Of course, that was only going to work for one light position, so I changed the elevation of the tripod slightly to place the green light behind the railing because it gave off the softest light and I figured that the slight glow from that light would not be as visible as the red or yellow lights would be. Yep, these are the details I stress over with a composition.
With everything set, I changed the camera to black and white because at this point, the color was doing nothing for the scene at all. I had no filters to start with and just started to make exposure when the traffic lights lined up with what I needed from them. The light wasn’t changing all that fast, so the exposures were happening pretty slowly. This gave me time to evaluate the scene and make small changes. One of the first changes that I made was the addition of a polarizer because I was starting to see the pavement getting brighter than I wanted it. I knew that I could cut that glare and bring back the patterns of the pavement for a more interesting foreground with a slight twist of the filter. As soon as I put it on, I liked what I was seeing and committed to the filter. My shutter speed went from 2 seconds to 4 seconds with the filter which was getting a little long since I was timing against lights and traffic. I just boosted the ISO by a stop and was back down to 2 seconds which was also getting faster as the light levels increased.
The next change that I made was in regard to the perspective introduced by the wide-angle lens. I knew that I was going to be correcting that perspective in post and wanted to make sure that I had a bit of extra room around the image for the transform to take place. This is what I talk about when I say that I shoot for how I plan to edit. I didn’t want to crowd the composition when I fixed the verticals, so I just gave a tad more room around the frame. By this point, the sky was starting to get kind of bright in relation to the ground, so I wanted to avoid that kind of high contrast capture. The easiest thing to do here was to add a 2-stop soft ND Grad which was placed just over the top half of the sky as I intended on darkening that quite a bit in post anyway. This allowed me to maintain the correct exposure on the ground and building while protecting the highlights in the sky. Again, I was shooting for how I intended on editing.
By this point, I was getting really excited about the image because with all of the filters that had been added, I was seeing something really close to what I had envisioned for this location. With the sun getting brighter, I was seeing the colors start to pop on the building and the sky had a slight cool tone to it which I really liked. The color palette was spaced out to be pretty much a quadratic arrangement which worked for the scene quite nicely. I started to think that this could be done as a color image at this point because of how the colors all fell in place amongst themselves. I switched the camera from black and white back to color (neutral picture style) and began working with the white balance to get the image as close to what I was wanting as possible. It was looking quite good in the live view, and I was really thinking that color was going to be the way to go for this scene.
With the lighting changing quickly at this point, I was rattling off exposures every time I had a green light and no traffic. There was a strong foggy look to the scene through the live view that I wasn’t seeing in reality. I had recently started to feel a moist breeze blowing across my face which caused me to consider a light mist hitting the filters. Sure enough, both the polarizer and grad were covered with the mist and fogging over. While it looked fine in the image review, I knew that I was going to have water spots in the photo if I wasn’t careful. I pulled the filters off and took them back to the truck to clean them off. I put it all back together and put them back on the camera. I kept an eye on the amount of water that was landing on the filters, but there was really nothing that I could do to prevent it since it was blowing in sideways, straight into the lens.
The breeze also introduced another problem that I had to address. There was a wire hanging from the antenna to the left that was starting to swing in the breeze. My exposures were down to 1.6 seconds at this point, but that was still plenty slow enough to show the movement of the wire. I walked over to it and spun it around the pole a couple of times so that it stayed fixed for the future exposures.
The mist was falling heavier at this point, and I was only able to get a few photos captured before it was time to clean off the filters again. Seeing that the light was getting brighter, but the quality wasn’t any different, I decided that instead of trying to clean off the filters, I would just pack it in. The brighter that the sky became, the harder the exposures were to make, and the more dynamic the lighting was becoming. Since I wanted to keep this photograph simple and calm, I was pretty sure that I was at the end of the usable light.
I had been out here for about an hour as the sun came up. I had shot 39 frames during that hour. Of those, I pulled in two to edit. One of them was the black and white and the other was the color. Since I was shooting in RAW it really made no difference at all because they were both imported as color images. However, the use of filters was different between them, and the light levels were different as well. I processed both images as I had intended during the capture. I did the black and white first since I was leaning towards that one being the best. I did like the black and white one and a foggy scene always looks good in monochrome. However, when I started work on the color image my opinion changed. The colors just worked fantastically together, and those colors brought with them an atmosphere that the black and white was missing. The color version told the story that I was after much better than the monochrome, so I committed to that one and finished up the edit on it.
This was the only photo from the day, but it happened in the first eight and a half hours of the new year which was my goal. I’m really happy with how this one turned out and I think that it has a completely different story as compared to the original photo from this location. I’ll let you be the judge and tell me which one you prefer. This one falls in line better with the style that I have been developing over the last year or so which has more muted colors than I have done in the past. Well, that might not be completely true as I have 26 images with a bright pink dress against a blue background that is just full of energy and vibrance. Of course, that matches the personality of the subject quite accurately. At any rate, if you are interested in having a print of this first image from 2023, I would love to start making prints of this one very soon. I think that it is a natural for my Baryta fine art rag paper and know that it would look amazing in that presentation. Maybe your choice would be a metal print, which this would also be amazing on with the smooth transitions of the sky. Rest assured, no matter how you order your print, you will have a piece of me that represents all of the little choices that I have made to arrive at the final image.
Also, keep me in mind for your portrait needs. I’ve got a full studio with a small heater just to make sure you don’t get cold during these cooler months. I have very quick turnaround times and I strive for a quality that matches what you are accustomed to seeing with all of my photos. Let’s start discussing ideas for you shoot and let’s make it special for you!
Thank you for tagging along with me on this trek. I hope you don’t mind the extra details that I went into for this single photograph. I just thought that it would be a great chance to really go into what kinds of choices I make for just a simple photograph. If you would like to learn more about how to make these choices, consider joining me for a mentoring session. These sessions are fantastic learning opportunities as you have the chance to ask questions and I will put together a lesson plan customized to your needs based on a short conversation over the phone or video chat. Get in touch if this is something that interests you and we can put together a plan of action that will allow you to grow as a photographer.
Until next time….
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