Saturday, September 19, 2026
This trek might leave you scratching your head as to what I was thinking. I’m honestly still not completely sure what was going through my mind, but I think I am happy with the results. In a way, you could say that this trek was six years in the making but really only became an idea a couple of days ago. OK, I’ll back up a bit so that there is the correct context to how this session came to be. If you have been with me for a while, you will know that Toni and I moved out to Purlear, NC, in Wilkes County in the Summer of 2020. This was a new area to explore, and I’ll be the first to admit that I have really enjoyed my time getting to know the personality of the location. In that time, I have spent countless hours on the back roads and going down any country road that might house a barn or an old car. You have seen the results of those deep explorations into the area, and I continue to find really great locations that I’ve missed over the years.
The spot that I ended up at today was not one of those stories of getting lost and finding a great little spot that nobody has seen before. This is actually a spot that Toni and I pass a good 75% of the time that we are going out. It is on the most direct route from home to US421 and from the first day that we were out here, we have known about this spot. In fact, we usually make a comment or two about how good it smells since it is a wood treatment facility. It always smells like fresh cut wood when we drive past it. The smell isn’t what drew me in today though.
Over the last six years, the main building by the road that is actually the wood kiln has been aging with use. I mean this building is pretty much constantly in use and the steam is billowing out of the vents just about every time we drive through. It is that aging that has started to grab my attention as the staining on the sides of the metal building have started to appeal to my decay interests. It just so happens that a couple of days ago, I was out in the Miata and driving by the yard looking at the state of the kiln. Between the cylindrical vents and the staining lining the sides of the building, I was starting to see some interest to it that I thought might make for some interesting photos.
I didn’t really have any direct thoughts about it after making that observation, but it was in my head as a potential location. The week ahead was supposed to be rainy and I really wasn’t thinking about going out for photos. I was actually letting myself rest creatively for a bit. I have been rather busy with the camera here lately going on treks and I also had a very successful branding session that was done on Monday with the photos delivered on Tuesday. I’ve also been working on putting together prints for Hampton House Art and Framing for one of their commercial clients. There just hasn’t been that much time to really think about going on a trek when I stop to think about it.
However, yesterday evening, I got the final word from Hampton House about which prints they were needing for the client. I would get that taken care of first thing in the morning as it would involve some retouching and creating an invoice for them. With getting up early and getting started with photography related tasks, I started to think about whether or not I would be able to roll out to the lumber yard to see about getting some photos before the rain started up in the afternoon. I would be up early enough to make that happen and it was looking like the weather was going to play well with about 60% low clouds in the sky.
When I woke up, I got breakfast taken care of quickly and got downstairs to get the print order put together and ready for printing. Once that was done, I put the invoice together and sent everything where it needed to go. It was still pretty early in the morning, and the rain was looking like it would be holding off for about three hours. That was plenty of time for me to get the photos that was wanting with the building. I told Toni that I was going to head out and try to get a few photos and found out that she needed me to go to the store to get a few things for dinner since Sierra was coming over to eat with us. There was still time to get all of that done before the rain arrived, so I grabbed my stuff and headed out the door.
The lumber yard wasn’t really that far away, and I was there in pretty short order. According to the business information, they were closed on the weekends, so my intention was to make sure that there were no signs indicating that I couldn’t be there and get the photos without getting in anyone’s way. I know that there are tractor trailers that move through the yard as well as heavy machinery. I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way, and I didn’t want to work in an overly hazardous situation. By waiting until they were closed, I figured I would be doing everyone a favor.
When I arrived, I could see a couple of vehicles by the shop office and there was a technician there at the truck. There wasn’t much activity going on, but I did see the steam coming out of the vents on the building. Just to be safe, I went over to the office and asked the tech if he minded if I did some photography around the building. He wasn’t comfortable giving me a response and took me inside to talk with the owner. That conversation went really quick and I was given his blessing to get whatever photos I wanted. I was still glad that I had waited for the weekend because I would not have felt right about being out there with the normal activity going on.
Now that I had the official permission, I went and parked my truck by the building, but still out of the way because I didn’t want to cause any issues by being on the property. I hadn’t really thought through the photographic possibilities in any real detail, but I was pretty sure that I was going to need my long lens. The parts of the building that I was most interested in were high up on the side where the vents were located. Any other areas would be areas of detail and would still benefit from the long lens. I added a polarizer because I wanted to get as much saturation as I could get and with the clouds in the sky, I wanted to be able to see the contrast with the blue and the white. My goal was to use an ND filter at some point and let the clouds blur by as I used a long exposure. Before I got that far, I needed to find a composition that would work for that kind of shot.
After getting the camera put together, the first order of business was to figure out which direction the lighting was the best. As I was walking towards the building from where I had parked, I noticed that the sky was very bright and almost hurt my eyes. This was a good indication that the contrast would be too much since I was looking at the shadowed side of the building. The sun was right behind the building from this angle, and I felt that my better bet would be walking to the other end of the building and looking at that angle. As suspected, that angle was significantly better in terms of light and contrast on the building. This was the angle that I chose to work from for the different compositions that I came up with during my time here.
This was the first time that I had been this close to the kiln, and I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to compose the images. I knew that I wanted to focus on the shapes, colors, and contrasts with the building. This meant that I was going to be shooting in color for the most part because the rusty tones on the metal siding were just too good to pass up on. The sky also had enough blue to really contrast nicely with the orange colors of the metal. The vents were going to be my visual anchor, and the rest of the photo was going to be organized to serve that end.
Getting the angles on the building were really not nearly as easy as I thought they would be. I really would have benefited from getting closer to the vents and using a wider-angle lens for a bit of perspective distortion. That wasn’t possible though, and I was only able to get the scaling that I needed with the long lens from ground level. I had to pay attention to the verticals and make sure that everything lined up the way that it should. I could have really used a tilt/shift lens for this and I think that would have made the geometry work out better overall. That is a lens that I don’t have, and even if I did have one, I would likely have a wide-angle version which would not have worked here at all. The answer was to shoot it knowing that I was going to be doing some perspective transformations in post processing.
Thoughts like this are why I stress trying to get it right in the field, and that includes knowing how you intend on processing the image so that you can make sure that you have all the raw materials to be able to do that. In this situation, I needed to overshoot the composition so that I had room to adjust the perspective a little bit without cutting into the composition. I’ve made this mistake plenty of times in the past and knew how to avoid it now.
About the time that I was getting in rhythm of things, the original tech that I had talked with came driving by. He was interested in what I was actually photographing, and we talked about what I had seen with the building for a bit. He is a Wilkes County native, and his family has been here since the area was colonized. He too has an appreciation for the older and historic scenes in the county, so we had a lot to talk about. That conversation did eventually come to a close and I went back to work with trying to find the right composition.
There was more difficulty in finding a composition that I really liked than I had suspected when seeing this kiln from the road. I’m sure that part of the problem was that I hadn’t really assigned my brain the task of working this scene creatively. It was more a matter of just feeling my way around the angles and seeing what worked and what didn’t. I’ve recently heard about some details about the Czech photographer, Josef Sudek, that started to echo in my head. When things were going well in the field and he wasn’t really having to think about what he was doing, he referred to that by saying “the music was playing.” I had never heard that phrase before, but it perfectly sums up how I feel when I am working through all the technical and creative elements at a rate that is faster than my mind normally functions. It just seems effortless. This was not one of those times where the music was playing. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t even a podcast playing in the background. No, I was very aware of what I was doing in order to put these compositions together. This is not my favorite way to work, but it does happen from time to time. I just worked through it and hoped that I would start to hear the music eventually.
As I worked through the different compositions in my search for the one that would be done as a long exposure, I saw a guy coming out of the kiln which I didn’t expect. I really figured that it was just running on autopilot at this point. He challenged me as to what I was doing which really didn’t surprise me at all. I made sure to quickly share the fact that I had spoken to the owner which relieved all of his concerns really quickly. We then started on a very interesting conversation about how the kiln works which is much more involved than I ever would have suspected. We also talked about the current state of society and even a bit of discussion on personal safety in the current time of criminal activity. We covered a lot of topics and for a good bit of that time, he was showing me the control panels to the kiln and explaining some of the dangers of what he did there.
The kiln works at 200-220 degrees, and I was starting to feel that as I was talking with him. At first, it felt really nice because I am used to being in a house that is climatized for menopause and I am in a constant state of frozen in the house. Over the next 10 minutes or so, I started to feel like I was the one going through menopause as I was just sweating to sweat, not because I was doing anything. The conversation was really good though and I didn’t want to cut it short. However, I still needed to get to the store to get those few odds and ends for dinner and wanted to do that before it rained. I was also thinking that I had left my camera outside, and the bag was still on my tailgate opened up. If it had started to rain, I was going to be spending a lot of time getting things dried out.
With all of that in mind, I let Mitch know that I needed to head out. He invited me back at a later time to see the inside of the kiln and possibly get some photos of that as well. Not having a clue what it looks like inside, I figured I would take him up on that offer the next time I saw the doors open. For now, I was happy to get back out into the cool air of outside. The flow was over and the music wasn’t going to come to me today, so I did pack up the camera and headed out to the store. I managed to beat the rain getting home, so it all worked out quite nicely in terms of timing.
In the time that I was there, I had shot a total of 22 frames and thinking back over that experience, I really wasn’t sure that any of them would have turned out. I had been searching for the composition that would have worked with a long exposure, but never really did arrive at that composition. Everything that I had shot had been an experiment leading up to that goal, so I didn’t think that there would be any really great images in the batch, and there might not even be any that were worth processing or blogging about. Since I had time, I did import the 22 images into Lightroom and started to go through the culling stages.
This actually worked out better than I could have imagined. While I wasn’t sold on the images, I did have six that I wanted to look at further and see how they looked after processing. I worked through them slowly and tried to get the processing to match how I had seen the scenes in my head. There wasn’t a lot of work that had to be done with them, and before long, I had four images that I liked enough to consider making them keepers. I still wasn’t completely sold on the trek, but a lot of that was because I really had no preconceived notions about how the photos would turn out. I had just seen something that I thought had become interesting enough to photograph and wanted to give it a try. It was only after showing the four images to Toni that I got confirmation that they weren’t bad at all. In fact, she really liked the black and white photo that I had done to really pull in the drama in the sky. She was my final litmus test to determine whether or not I would go forward with any of these photos.
As you can see here, I have added all four of the photos to my collection. If you don’t like them, or don’t understand what I was trying to do with them, address your concerns to Toni since she was the final vote on whether or not I kept these or not. If you do like them, I’ll take all the credit (and share it with Toni). Hopefully you do like the photos and have enjoyed the account of my morning. It was a quick trek, but I’m glad that I went out there. If nothing else, I have connections that will allow me to visit there again and get some other photos at another time. I’ll just need to think things through a bit more to really work out how I want to capture this scene.
Until next time…
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