Monday, March 16, 2026
So, the other day I was driving down a road that I have been on many times since moving out here. I didn’t really think that anything was going to surprise me on this road, but off on the side, up the embankment I could see the top of what appeared to be an old house that was pretty well wrecked. I slowed and confirmed that I had seen what I thought that I had. I don’t recall seeing it before, but I did see a bunch of vegetation that was around it that was likely covering much of the view. It was something that stuck in my mind though, but it wasn’t something that I wanted to photograph on that particular day because it was really quite sunny.
A couple of days later, Toni and I were going out that way to get some dinner and I made a point of slowing down as I passed the house to get another look from the other direction. It was something that I absolutely wanted to photograph but seeing that the siding was missing from one of the sides and it looked to be in pretty bad shape, I needed to have the right kind of day and sky to capture its essence. My planning was complicated because I was really unable to see much more than the top half of the house. To get a full view, I was going to have to climb the embankment to get to the top. I wasn’t sure what was going to be meeting me up there, but it was certainly something that I was interested in finding out.
When we got home, I pulled out my phone and went to my map app so that I could possibly get a little scouting done of the property. I found it on the satellite view and there didn’t appear to be anything around it except for an outbuilding and a power pole as seen from street view. There wasn’t a good recent view, but there was one from something like 2004 where I could see the house a bit better. Apparently, that was around the time that the house was vacated as it was just starting to show signs of uninhabited neglect. The only other photo was from a couple of years ago and showed it covered by kudzu and pretty difficult to make out.
Over the next few days there was supposed to be some clouds in the sky, but each day that I was planning on going out there the clouds never really developed. Sure, there was a hazy overcast, but that wasn’t going to work at all. Yesterday, I was expecting some really good clouds with different elevations which should give me some visual interest in the sky by the afternoon. When I got done with the latest blog entry, I went upstairs to see how the sky was looking. I was greeted with a bright overcast sky, but I held out hope. Around mid-afternoon when I was planning on going out, the sky was actually getting sunny and that was just the wrong atmosphere for this house. I needed something much moodier and more somber to match the old house. It wasn’t going to work out with the weather that we had yesterday.
Of course, for the previous few days I’ve been looking at the forecast for Monday because I had a dentist appointment scheduled and was really wanting to take the Miata because it was going to be warm enough to do so. However, there had been a chance of rain and storms through Sunday evening which is what I was counting on for the clouds. That system had gotten pushed back and was now looking like it was going to be raining and storming all day long. There were even some severe weather threats in the forecast to deal with.
That pretty much killed any chance of the Miata going out and I was going to have to take the truck which was still very clean. I hated getting it dirty just for a trip to the dentist, so I started to hope that the rain might have some periods of drizzle that I could work some photography in before my appointment. Storms often give some fantastic skies, but the associated rain usually keeps me in. Since I was going to have to be out anyway, I might as well see if I could make it worth my while by getting a few photos. With the right sky, that house would make a fantastic subject for sure.
I ended up waking up a bit earlier than expected as Toni was leaving for work. Not feeling much like going back to bed, I went ahead and got up to do my morning routine and start looking at the weather. It was only 6am and my appointment wasn’t until 10:30, so I had plenty of time to mull over my options. It was storming and raining hard which meant that I had no interest in going out with the camera, but as the sun was starting to come up, the storms lessened. Eventually, the rain started to slack off to barely a drizzle around 8:30. This was earlier than I had planned on going out since it wasn’t going to take but a few minutes to shoot the house. However, there was no guarantee that the rain would hold off until closer to my appointment time. I made the decision to go on out and that would give me time to work some other locations if the weather cooperated. The sky was looking pretty good, at least from home.
I got my waterfall boots on which would be sure to keep my feet nice and dry and loaded up the camera. I was actually kind of happy that the rain had stopped when I pulled out of the garage. The sky was still looking rather ominous overhead, and I was feeling like this was going to work out very well indeed. Before I got to the end of our road, I was able to see further to the East which was the rough direction that I would be shooting in. There was a hole in the clouds, and the sun was shining through that hole. Everything about my scouting had brought me to the conclusion that I needed afternoon light with the sun behind me, but by this afternoon, the sky was likely to be clear again. My hope was that the clouds would be thick enough to cover the intensity of the sun. Here I was looking at the sun clearly visible through a large slit in the clouds. I started to doubt that the house would work out at all.
I did continue on despite my misgivings about the possibilities for a photo. I’ve mentioned this phenomenon before in the past where there seems to be a calling of sorts pulling me to a particular location even when logic would dictate that it won’t work out. It has been a while since I’ve felt that strong pulling, but I recognized it when it started to happen. I was out and I probably wasn’t going to get another sky like this anytime soon. It was worth the try, if for nothing else to get a better scouting done of the property.
The entire time I was driving out there I was looking at the sky to the East and hoping that the hole would close up. The closer I got to the house, the more it was looking like I was going to be fighting that sunlight which I knew would throw the exposure for a loop since I needed to have detail in the shadows of the house. It wasn’t until I had arrived at the house that I saw that the hole in the clouds and the sun was slightly further to the left than I had anticipated. This put a decent angle on the house from what I could tell from the road.
Not wanting to waste any time, I got parked on the shoulder which involved straddling a ditch. Every time I have to do something like that to get safely out of traffic, I am very thankful that I have my truck set up the way that I do. It would be all too easy to get stuck or cause damage to a low bumper doing these things. Now that the truck was out of traffic, I went around to the bed to get the camera pulled out and built. Having not seen the location in person yet, I was only guessing about how I was going to compose the shot. Typically, I would have fitted the standard zoom which would give me the most flexibility in terms of framing, but that little voice in my head that had prompted me to continue out here despite the sun issue was telling me that my goal for the year was to get better with the wide-angle lens. I wasn’t going to be shooting abstracts or details, so that seemed to make a pretty good choice in my mind. That was the lens that I fitted and since the rain was still stopped, I added a polarizer just to pull the glare off of the tin roof.
There was a slight path going up the hill that brought me to the house. It was pretty much as I had expected with a very thick undergrowth covering what used to be the yard. The outbuilding was far enough off to the side so as not to cause me any issues. The power pole was further away than what I had anticipated as well, which made for a much easier time composing the shot. Most importantly, the clouds were filling back in and there were only a few hotspots in the sky in the passing clouds. The overall effect of the house and the sky was just what I had been after, and I was so glad that I continued on with the trek even though it wasn’t looking favorable.
Looking at the scene, I wasn’t sure if I would like this in black and white or in color. I had previsualized both based on the little bit of visibility that I had seen of the house from the road. Now that I was here, the colors looked amazing and everything complimented each other, but at the same time, I saw some great potential in a high contrast black and white to really pull out the detail in the sky. I figured that since I was only shooting a single subject, that there would be plenty of opportunities to work with both presentations. The main thing was that I didn’t waste the dryness as the storm was passing through and that I started getting the composition figured out.
I caught myself before I dropped the tripod at a point where a 50mm lens would have worked and pushed in much closer to the house. I wanted to get down low to accentuate the brush on the ground, but that blocked too much of the house and didn’t feel right. Ironically, just above eye level felt right for this scene and that was where I started from. What was left was figuring out the angle that I liked the best. There were aspects of the side and the front of the house that I liked and depending on how far I moved from right to left, that emphasis changed. I liked both and found that there was a in implied visual pathway to the right when I focused more on the side of the house. I ended up shooting both versions during my time at the house.
The issue that I ran into was pushing the exposure as far to the right as I could. In order to get the detail in the house, I had to start clipping the highlights according to the image review. This was all going to be done with the histogram which I was confident was more accurate than the image review with the blinkies in portions of the sky. There was no room for error and with every moment, the hotspots in the sky would change. This meant that I was making many exposures to get different looks in the sky as well as hedging my bets on the exposure that I had chosen. Some of the shots were likely going to be too much to recover, while others were pretty safely going to be recovered. It was game of volume, and I needed to have a lot of options to choose from when I got home.
If you are interested in the numbers, I shot a total of 31 frames at this one house divided into two different compositions based on the angles. I did the massive repeating of frames with each composition so that I had options when I started the processing. The first step was to cull the images down and I ended up deciding on one from each angle which turned out to be frames 14 and 26 which were only four minutes apart. These turned out to have the best skies and no exposure issues in the highlights.
Since I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go black and white or color here, I decided to do one of each so that I didn’t have two very similar photos in the end. The one that I selected for the black and white was the one that had the visual pathway going off to the right which I would be better able to show off in the black and white version. The other photo that was more centered on the front of the house was done in color because I knew that the color option would come with less contrast allowing more detail to be seen on the porch.
In the end, I love both of these photos, and they are just what I was hoping for when I had seen this house from the road not that long ago. It all just came together beautifully after waiting for several different days and then just going out in the middle of a storm to get the photos. In the short time that I was there, it did start to rain on me as I was getting the last couple of frames shot. It wasn’t bad at all, and I was able to get back down to the truck without having to wipe the lens off which is always a bonus. I was satisfied, but I still had a long time before my appointment, so I needed to figure out what I was going to do with the time.
The rain was now falling pretty good, and I don’t like to work in rain like this which kind of made me just want to go home and get the camera out of the back of the truck. However, the rain had been coming and going and there was that little voice in my head that strongly suggested that I keep on going in order to find something else to shoot. With the sky looking so good, I thought about a spot in North Wilkesboro where there is an old Dodge parked by a treeline. I’ve shot that car several times and I know that a good sky makes all the difference with it. If only the rain would chill out long enough for me to get some photos worked out. I could even do some abstract photos with it using the water that was surely dripping off of it.
Well, when I pulled into the parking lot where it had been parked ever since we moved out here, I saw that there was some box trucks parked nearby. I slowly moved through the parking lot looking for the Dodge, but it was gone. I looked around to see if it had gotten moved, but there was no sign of it at all. This was not the end of the world because I had many photographs of it and the rain was still falling pretty good. I just pulled back out and started to drive back to the house. I didn’t really think that home was going to be my destination as I still had time to work one more spot before my appointment, but I needed to figure out what that one more location was going to be.
As I was driving down the main road headed back out to Purlear, I started to think about a tree that is off of a dirt road which might look good under an interesting sky. The problem was the interesting sky had kind of faded into a deep overcast with the rain. That wasn’t going to work. There was a barn that wasn’t far from home that I had shot a few times which also looks good under a stormy sky. I wasn’t sure how the sky was going to look by the time I got there, but it was worth a look.
When I got to the barn, there was nothing that jumped out at me about it. The sky was featureless and the photos that I had shot of it before were just better than what I was seeing right now. I just continued on down the road and figured that I would redirect and head to the dentist. As I was making my way down to the road that I was going to need to get on I happened to remember a red barn that I had spotted one morning when going for a sunrise on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I had only seen it with my headlights, but it looked really nice that morning. A couple of days later, I drove by it in the daylight to check it out again. I decided that it was just too new and in too good a shape to photograph. I also didn’t much care for the compositions that I would be shooting of it as they just felt like postcard images. Since that time, I have driven by the barn many times and my opinion hadn’t really changed. Of course, that opinion was based on shooting it with a standard or telephoto lens. I hadn’t really considered doing it with a wide-angle lens…until now.
I wasn’t far from the barn, so I just made my way out to it. I had about 30 minutes to work with which should be enough time to make it happen. I found that the barn was not too different from what I remembered it looking like. The sky wasn’t all that great as it was still rather overcast. There was something about the scene that felt right though. The white fence out front had a very similar pattern to the ventilation on the front of the barn, and I could see this being a good black and white photo which would allow me to do some creative burning in of the sky. I was here and for the first time actually inspired to get the camera out which hadn’t really happened over the last five years.
I got pulled off of the road and went to grab my camera. That was when the rain started falling again with a purpose. It had been a light drizzle until I opened up the bed to get the camera. I wasn’t going to give up now, so I pulled out the umbrella from my bag and got it ready. I built the camera under the tonneau to keep it dry and moved it over to the tripod with the lens cap still on. Normally, I would have fitted the polarizer, but looking at the scene, I didn’t see that it would make that much difference and it would give me three different surfaces to worry about water drops rather than just the lens element itself. I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to fit and I just left the lens without a filter.
Since I was using the wide-angle lens, I knew that my umbrella mount wasn’t going to work because the umbrella would be much too low and would get into the frame. I just had to hold it which made every movement with the camera much more difficult. I started to move around right on the side of the road so that I could incorporate the fence into the shot. Eventually, I found a good angle and got a quick test shot to see if the depth of field was sufficient. It looked good, but I wanted to elevate the camera a bit more to drop the fence lower in the composition. After I did that, I grabbed a second exposure and really liked how it looked. I figured that I would probably be flipping the image horizontally in post to allow the fence to swoop up to the barn in kind of an embrace. By flipping the image, I felt that the residential house in the background would fit into the composition better as well. That was what I ended up doing in post and it worked out quite well.
I also stuck with the idea of doing this composition in black and white because it helped to mask the house better and as I had figured, I was able to address the sky better without color. The overall image turned out quite nice, and I was really happy that I had stopped to get a few photos of this barn while I was out in the rain. I really think that it was the atmosphere that made this image work, and while the effect in the sky was wildly different from the house I had shot earlier, it was just as effective for this scene thanks to the inclusion of the fence for that bit of extra interest in the photo.
A few frames after what became that last image, the rain stopped and I was able to put the umbrella down and get to work with both of my hands getting another composition set. I had liked the idea of including the fence from a distance, but one of the hallmarks of a wide-angle lens is great depth of field when you have a foreground that is nearby. I wanted to get closer to the fence and shoot much wider than the 24mm that I had been working with. By getting in closer, I was able to visually shrink the house in the background and move it behind the barn so that the barn appeared all by itself. The fence was larger in relation, but by having it close to the edge of the photo, it was cropped down to a smaller section for better overall balance in the scene.
This was the composition that I really liked the best and spent the most time with. The sky was starting to come back to life again now that the rain was done falling. The existing rain on the ground really saturated the greens of the grass and I liked the dampness that was showing at the bottom of the barn walls. The tall tree at the top of the field was a great bookend framing element matched with a smaller tree over to the right. The trees were at different levels, but both were taller than the barn which gave me a triangle to the composition while the fence formed another triangle in the bottom left. These geometrical elements worked very well with the overall shape of the barn and created a unity in the frame.
When I got the images home and started to work them, this was a surprise favorite of mine from the day. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as the old house under the stormy sky, but the colors all seemed to work and there was a sense of calmness that this photo created. Unlike the previous one, I didn’t flip the image because I liked the fence introducing the barn rather than appearing on the right side which felt more like a distraction. This photo was just perfect as shot in terms of composition and I happily left it just like it was.
I only stuck with this barn for nine frames which was plenty for me to get what I wanted to work with. The keepers were the second and eighth image if you are keeping score. That brought me to four keepers out of 40 frames which isn’t that bad considering why I was going through so many exposures to get started with the day. Dramatic skies often force the shutter count higher than normal because you are really looking to get the best organization of clouds in the final image. The clouds were softer and not changing as much around the red barn which was why I didn’t need to shoot that many frames to get things worked out. Most of those were just variations on the composition as to how I was including the fence.
I do hope that you have enjoyed this trek as well as the photos that I came back with. It thrills me that the entire time I was using the 16-35mm lens and not really giving it all that much thought. It all felt so natural for me, and I think that is a good sign that I am really getting used to that lens. That is one of my goals for this year, and it would seem that getting more comfortable with using a wide-angle is still progressing faster than the abstract work that I have been working on as well. I’m going to keep on working with both of those goals through the year, but I’m happy to say that they are both coming right along. The last couple of treks should show the progress that I am making on both of those skills.
Until next time…
