Friday, Aug 9, 2024
Here we are at 10pm starting a blog from a trek that started at 4am…well, it was supposed to start at 4am, but for some reason my alarm didn’t ring, so I actually got started at 5:30. I might be getting ahead of myself here because it has been quite some time since we last spoke in relation to a trek of mine. In fact, it has been almost a month since the last blog I wrote about new photos. I’ve been out since then, but only once and there were no photos that were worth anything from that short outing. I had gone up to Rendezvous Mountain close to home to shoot a small waterfall that I had seen in the late Spring during a hike with Toni. It was an attempt to get back on the board with new photos and so I could feel like a photographer once again.
I had thought that things were calming down for me, but that was not quite the case. I think that I’ve mentioned that Toni and I have been helping our youngest get moved into a new house while helping to sell her previous one. That has been taking up most of my time and energy for the last couple of months, but on the last trip out to Winston my 4Runner left us stranded which was the first time that has happened to me in over 35 years of driving. To say I was unhappy about that would have been an understatement. The fix was simple, but required it being towed out to Outlawed Restorations which was right at 6 miles from where we broke down. I returned the following day with the parts needed to fix it and I was back up and running within an hour or so. There have been no issues since, but my confidence in the truck has been shaken quite substantially. With the miles racking up on it, and it starting to show its age, I had been considering what a replacement might look like leading up to the breakdown. As we were sitting on the side of the road waiting on the hook, Toni said that the truck was as good as gone. She knows me well, and I started to put more time and effort into researching a replacement.
To make a long story short, I ordered a brand-new pickup equipped just like I wanted it and then started to make plans for the modifications to make it work right for me. It was looking like the truck was going to come in towards the end of August and I already had parts being shipped to me for the build to get started. This has been taking pretty much all of my time as I researched suspension parts, wheels and tires, and other bits and pieces. With things pretty much on hold as I waited for the truck to be shipped to the dealer, I figured that it was time that I put a bit more energy into photography while I still remembered how to work the camera. With the recent tropical storm clearing out, I saw the chance for some interesting skies. When I looked at the extended forecast, it was looking like Friday morning would be the time to go as the remnants of Debby moved out of the state.
By the time Thursday night rolled around, I was seeing a good chance of fog along the Blue Ridge Parkway around Boone. I started to make plans for going out to Thunder Hill, Price Lake, or around the Cone Manor where I knew I could work with different amounts of fog relatively easily. My alternate was Stone Mountain which didn’t have fog but had more or less partly cloudy skies that could be rather dramatic if the timing worked out right. In order to get to the Parkway in time for the light to work out, I was going to need to be up by 4am and leaving by 5am. That would get me at the locations before first light so I could determine which was going to be the best bet. Should the weather not look favorable when I woke up, I would plan on leaving a bit later and going to Stone Mountain to get some interesting sky photos with the granite landscape beneath.
I guess you could say that I was really thinking along the lines of a landscape photographer and not a decay photographer for once. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I have been working on so many little details here lately like spring rates, tire fitment, and disabling the start/stop feature that I was just not in the mood to work details on a rusted vehicle. I knew that if I started working with a decay subject, I was going to get drawn into the details and I just wanted to step back and look at a much broader scene than that. Grand landscapes are not my specialty because I just don’t see in that way, but after several weeks of obsessing over details, I just wanted to let a scene unfold in front of me. I also wanted to spend some time in nature and away from the automobile. Doing some landscape photography was just the ticket, and both of the intended areas would allow me to capture the types of scenes that I was needing.
Knowing that I was going to be getting up early, I headed to bed a little after 10pm. I heard the clock chiming 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, 12:00, 12:30, and I’m pretty sure 1am, although it could have been 1:30. At any rate, I was really thinking that I would hear the alarm and convince myself that I didn’t need to go out after all. I was prepared for that, and had accepted that I might just skip another trek and continue my streak of being non-creative.
At some point, I did fall asleep and remember waking up to hearing something that sounded like talking, although without any discernable words coming out. I shook the fog from my head and heard it again. Toni was trying to tell me something. I remember saying “huh” and then she mumbled something that sounded like “what time were you getting up?” That was a silly question and one that woke me up after trying so long to get to sleep. I looked at the clock to see how much longer I had until 4:30 happened. The clock said 5:35 and I started to do middle of the night math….carry the one. Wait a minute, 4:30 has already passed. Crap!!!
Well, I might as well check the weather and confirm that I didn’t need to get up anyway. I still don’t know how my alarm didn’t go off, but it was no longer active on the phone. The weather in Boone was no longer looking foggy, just low clouds which wasn’t going to give me what I wanted. I would have had to have left right then to have a chance of getting placed before the light hit. That was out of the question, so I looked at Traphill’s weather. This was still showing partly cloudy with low clouds. With the lower altitude, this was going to be pretty good, and the gates didn’t open until 7am which meant that I had about 45 minutes to get up, fed, and out the door. It was about the time that I would have planned to get up for Stone Mountain, so I took that as a sign.
I thanked Toni for waking me and got ready to head out. It felt so abnormal to be getting up this early to get photos, but at the same time I remembered doing it several times a week for the longest time when I was doing a lot of landscape photography. All the way up to the mountain, I tried to get my mind around how I wanted to work the scene. I could see that the clouds were interesting in certain directions, but not all of them. I knew that my best bet was going to be parking at the upper trailhead and hiking out to the summit which is the better option for sunrise due to the direction of the lighting. The hike was also pretty easy and quick from this trailhead. It just missed a lot of the lower vantage points unless you wanted to really do some hill climb hikes.
I was the first one to the parking lot which was a good sign as it meant that I wasn’t going to be running into a lot of hikers. I just wanted some quiet time in nature to reset myself after so much time being spent planning and making changes. The bag was heavy on my back, but nothing like the return hike from the waterfall a couple of weeks before when the hike was nearly straight up a hill. It didn’t take long before I arrived at the first bald along the trail. This one wasn’t all that grand by any stretch, but did offer a view into the distance. The lighting was nice on it and the sky was muted and soft over the mountains. I was here, so I might as well get the first shot in the bag.
I knew from experience that the 70-200mm didn’t have enough reach to get a simple composition here, so I started off with my teleconverter attached to give me that extra reach. After fussing about with the composition and cropping for different aspect ratios, I landed on 222mm which was just outside of the native lens’ reach. There was nothing really special about the composition, but I did like the simplicity of it all and got several exposures as I watched the lighting change on the landscape. I didn’t know if anything would turn out from this, but it was something and I was already liking this better than the waterfall photos that I had shot recently. I did look at them again in the camera and saw nothing at all special about them, and they were actually quite bad. Things were starting to look up for me.
Not wanting to spend too much time here, I packed up and headed off to the next stop which was the spot that I wanted to work with the most. This is a great view of the summit of Stone Mountain, and I fully intended to get a panorama of the scene. I’ve shot them here a couple of times before, but it is usually in the winter, and I wanted to have something with some more color to it. Since it has been so long since I’ve shot a pano, I was really looking forward to it.
When I arrived, there was no light on any part of the landscape and the clouds over the summit were very thin. In short, the light was flat, and the sky was boring. Knowing that this was the best composition that I was planning on shooting, I went ahead and set up the shot. Instead of the pano, I went with a single frame composition using my standard lens. I found that the water runoff from the top of the hill was reflecting the blue sky nicely and I figured that I could get an interesting foreground with that element in place. I worked out the composition and then sat and waited for the light to do something interesting. From time to time, I could see the sunlight dancing across the distant landscape and occasionally getting close to the summit. I would press the button and get those shots when I thought that the light was at its best, and then would get another few shots right after as the light got better. It was a very tedious waiting game.
While waiting for the sun to do its thing once again, I received a phone call from a local number. I answered it fully expecting it to be a spam call asking about my US Medicare benefits, but the (real) person on the other end asked for me by name. It was the dealership and I was expecting to hear that my truck had been shipped and would arrive in a week or so. Within a few moments, that turned out not to be the case. It would seem that Nissan had shipped the truck much earlier than expected and it had arrived ten days early. So much for my being ahead of the game and waiting on a shipping notification for getting the last of the parts ordered. I was now looking at taking delivery of the truck very soon.
Knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to get it today as I had a book signing event to go to later in the afternoon. I’ll talk more about this later on, but the book is Photography in Ashe County by Kim Hadley and Doug Monroe. It is available now on Amazon, so be sure and get your copy! Anyway, there was no way I was going to be able to take delivery of the new truck today, so I set that date for first thing on Saturday. That meant that I was going to have to get everything ordered for the suspension so that could go on relatively quickly. There were also a few other things that were going to have to be worked out, and there was an issue of sliders that I thought could be put off for a bit longer that now were going to have to be decided on a bit quicker. I could do none of that from the top of the mountain with less than ideal connectivity with my phone. I had to make a choice, abandon this trek and take care of business, or continue with it and deal with the truck stuff in the couple of hours that I should have before needing to leave for the book signing.
I opted to stick with the photography since I was actually getting some photos that I was interested in for the first time in a very long time. I was right in the middle of the scene that I had imagined taking shape and the light was starting to work out nicely. The only problem was the shadows on the foreground that were not going to lift. The lower portions of it were in the sunlight and that was a distraction for me when it came to a panorama. After getting the camera set up for the pano, I could see that wasn’t going to work out like I had hoped. The shaded foreground was a great element in the single frame photo, but the lighting wasn’t working at all for the pano. Instead of lingering here to see if things changed, I packed up and went on down the trail to the next spot.
I spent some time looking around the actual summit of Stone Mountain but found nothing worth shooting. My mind was distracted pretty badly at this point as I was working out the logistics of picking up the truck and starting to install the parts that I had scattered in the garage for it. I probably should have called it a day and headed home so that I could deal with all of that…but I didn’t. Instead, I continued on to the last bald before getting to the stairs that would bring me down to the Hutchinson Homestead below. I’ve had some luck here in the past as the angles are a bit more friendly on Wolf Rock and Cedar Rock in the distance.
When I got there, I wasn’t seeing anything at all that I wanted to photograph, so I slowed down and started to look for a single element that caught my eye. After some walking around, I found a red spruce tree sitting along on the granite surface. It had obviously been starved of water during the recent droughts, but the color stood out against the monotonous green of the distant landscape. I spent some time walking around the tree to find a background that I liked along with a chance for proper lighting on the tree. Once I figured that out, I pulled out the wide-angle lens and started to find my camera placement that would give the right scaling to the scene. Once I had that figured out, I added a couple of filters and dialed in an exposure based on the sky. Everything below the sky was still very underexposed and boring, even the red tree. It was going to need light, but there were clouds over the sun, and it was looking like they were going to be there for a while still.
I decided to patiently wait for the light to do something interesting. That took a good while and I found myself thinking through specifics on a lift, window tinting, and what load range tires I really needed. When it comes to planning a build on a vehicle, I’m like a dog with a bone. I remember being like this with the Miata, but it was a simple build in comparison to the truck. Working through all of the different phases and elements of the build had pretty much completely occupied my mind forcing everything else out. It was a struggle staying focused on the photography, and I was painfully aware of how it was affecting the day.
Fortunately, I was patient, and the sun did do what I wanted, at least for the most part. I was able to get a few shots of the tree in full sun which looked good, but when I saw the image review pop on the screen, I saw something that I didn’t recognize below the tree. I opened the image up and zoomed in only to find that my shadow was very obviously a part of the foreground. I liked the composition too much to abandon it but decided that I needed less sun on the tree so that the shadow would be softer. Again, it was a matter of waiting and once the light looked right, I would duck out of the way while pressing the remote shutter release. I was able to do this about a half dozen times as the sun made appearances, and after a good long while I knew that I had to have at least one photo where everything lined up well enough.
I probably should have called it a day at this point, but I went over to the far edge and looked at an area that I had shot a couple of years back when preparing for a workshop. I knew that there were some pretty good angles to be had, and I wanted to see if I could take advantage of them in the current conditions. At first, I didn’t like anything about the scene, but after spending some time walking around, I started to focus my attention on an area of the granite that was a bit lighter than the surrounding area and had some erosion mixed in. There was a way to shoot that feature with the two balds in the distance which made it just interesting enough for me.
Keeping the wide-angle lens on, I got the composition figured out as well as the camera placement. The exposure looked good here, but I was going to need some light on the scene to really make it work. Sadly, it was looking like the clouds were going to be consistently covering the sun at this point based on the shape and direction of movement that they had. With hopes that they would thin just enough, I stuck with the composition and tried to make exposures as the light would increase on different parts of the landscape in the distance. Nothing was really looking fantastic, though I really liked the composition that I had picked. Because of that, I stuck with it longer than I probably should in hopes that I could get good light to add to the good composition since I didn’t have a great subject. If I could get two out of the three, there would be a decent chance that the photo would work.
After standing here for about 20 minutes, I finally decided to call it a day. I had shot about 10 frames of this scene with different lighting in the distance. It wasn’t getting any better, and the clouds were showing that it was going to get worse. I had other things to address before the weekend hit, and I needed to get off the mountain to do it effectively. My day was done, and it was time to put my mental energy on the last phases of the build prep.
When I got home, I put the battery on the charger and imported the photos into Lightroom as I normally would have done. Then it was time to get on the phone and start making calls to get things in motion that I thought would still be a week or more away. During times of being on hold and waiting for return calls, I started to cull and process the images. Out of 61 frames, I found one of each composition that I liked well enough to edit. I also imported the four frames from the waterfall that I had shot earlier. My initial assessment of it was still very accurate. It was not a good photo, and not a good subject. They were all quickly dismissed.
After returning home from the book signing and from dinner, I started in on the edits with a bit more focus. It took some time to really get into the groove of doing landscape edits and I found that having done my weekly Tuesday’s Tips videos has helped me stay current with editing techniques as without them, I am pretty sure that I would have been much rustier than I was. Once I got rolling, the edits came pretty quick, and I chose to do two of the scenes in black and white because the color was just too overpowering for them and had nothing to do with why I shot the photo. The two that were left in color had palettes that furthered the stories of the scenes and helped the photos. I was reasonably happy with them all, but the two color photos were my favorites. Toni stepped up and came to the defense of the black and white ones which convinced me that they should be included as keepers.
In the end, I had four out of 61 frames that were strong enough to be keepers. While that is not a great hit rate, I did spend a lot of time with each composition capturing different types of light on the scenes. This always increases my frame count and is usually well worth it in the end. It was in this case because in each of these photos, it was the light that made them work. It wasn’t even a close contest and only required me going through the culling process twice to get down to the four images that you see here. It really was that clear cut.
I thank you for joining me on the trek today. I do apologize for the lack of activity over pretty much the entire summer. I’m really hoping that things will start to turn around and get a little more frequent once again. I know I am really looking forward to some time that I can really dedicate to photography as I once could. I appreciate the support that I have received during this slow time, and I’m glad that many of you find my photography worth waiting for. I hope that these photos are on par with what you have come to expect from me. They didn’t come as easy as they once would have, but I think that they are quite successful considering that early on in the trek I got thrown for a loop which took way more of my attention that I could spare.
Don’t forget to check out the book that I have been featured in, and if you order from Amazon, be sure to use this link as I get a few pennies from the sale without it costing you anything extra. I’ll talk more about this book later on, but it has been something like two years in the making and I am very excited and honored to have been a part of it. It makes for a nice coffee table book, especially for those of you with ties to the NC mountains.
Until next time….
