Thursday, July 31, 2025
Well, the actual process of shooting the images didn’t really take long. In fact, I was probably at this location less than 30 minutes. There was only 20 minutes of actual work with the camera based on the timestamps. It wasn’t even a long time in the planning stages, though I have been planning this trek for several days now. It didn’t even take me long to get here after leaving the garage as the spot is just over two miles from the house. In all fairness, I took a scenic route to get here because this was not my intended location. So why did this one take a while?
Well, if we go back to the Summer of 2020, Toni and I were just getting moved into our new home in Purlear. As we were getting situated, I was spending my free time exploring around the area to see what I could see. It is always good to know what is close to home for those times when you don’t have long to work with, or if the weather is absolutely perfect and you need something quick to shoot. At some point in that scouting phase, I ran across this old Orange GMC sitting by a house. I liked the truck as it was the right era for what I like to photograph, and it had a little decay to it. I wasn’t all that happy with the surroundings because there was a nice brick house just to the side of the truck and there was a lot of elements that I thought would get in the way. It did resonate with me though, and I would drive by and check it out from time to time.
Over the years, I realized that not much was changing with the property. The grass was getting mowed, but it was getting obvious that the house was not lived in. However, there were still a lot of things that I didn’t really like about the scene. There was stuff in the bed of the truck, and some kind of high lift jack under the front bumper. There were other cars scattered about the property, and it really looked like there was going to be no chance of getting permission to access the property to get close enough to work detail shots on the truck. The only thing that I had was the overall photo which would include the house which didn’t really fit the truck.
I think it was about a year or so ago, Toni came home after having to take a detour from her main route and had driven by this scene. She told me about it and described what she had seen. It had been a while since I had been by there, so it took me a little bit to realize that I knew exactly what she was talking about. In fact, I think I drove out there a day or so later and it was only then that I fully recognized what she had been telling me about. Sadly, it still wasn’t really hitting me as a photo, it was just missing something, or I was expecting something that it wasn’t going to provide.
However, for a decay scene to strike Toni as being interesting, there had to be something to it. Throughout the Fall and Winter, I remember driving past it from time-to-time expecting things to come together. I thought that with the Fall leaves, the orange truck might look better, but it never materialized into something that I wanted to shoot. Even in the Winter, the house became too dominant in the scene and since it was brick, there was only a limited amount of decay that was present to help tell the story. I kind of let it go at that point because there was just nothing that I could grab onto with the scene that made me want to pull out the camera.
Fast forward to much more recently with my last trek and some light painting close to home. That kind of got me thinking about doing some more light painting, and one of the locations that I had thought about for that night happened to be the remains of a building about a mile and a half from home. This is another one of those spots that I have thought about photographing since we moved in but never have. The idea of light painting is something that I had considered with it before, but I was a little hesitant to give it a try because of a trespassing sign posted on a mound of dirt on the side of the property. As it turned out, I had a great time with the old store off of 421 and that was all I had time to capture that night.
Since that time, I had been considering going back out to try the building and wanted to figure out how to get in touch with the property owner. As I was looking at Google maps, I could see that it was possible that the house to the West was related to the property based on the mowing patterns. This was actually kind of great news because there was another spot that I had been thinking about photographing on the other side of the house. It was a shop with several old cars scattered around it. I wasn’t sure how much photographic potential was out there because it was all a bit far from the road to really see any details. However, it was something that had grabbed my attention several times over the years. If I was really lucky, the resident in the middle of the two properties would actually own them all. If that was the case, I would be able to potentially get permission to get two different locations photographed. That became the theme of the last several days.
The weather has been pretty steady for about the last month with most days starting off very sunny with the clouds coming in during the early afternoon. The clouds will usually bring in storms and lots of rain before clearing out and leaving sunny skies once again. My options for photography have been to shoot under the sun, or in the rain with very little time to do anything in-between. Starting the day after my last trek, I have been waiting until the afternoon when the clouds would come in so that I could go out and ask permission to shoot the two properties. The plan would be to get the shop and the handful of cars as the sun was going down. As sunset approached, I would move up to the old building and set that up so that I could do some light painting at blue hour. The problem was, every time the light started looking good, the rains would come in and pretty much ruin that idea. I hated to waste an ask and just not have the right conditions to shoot it for both evolutions that I would want to do.
I was pretty much stalemated at this point and found myself sitting in front of the television much more than I would have liked. It also worked against me that by the time that I would be comfortable going out with the lighting, it was pretty late in the day and I kind of wanted to just stay home. I’m much more productive in the morning when it comes to photography. That allows me to wind down at the computer as I edit and type the blog. Between my afternoon laziness and the constant storms that would roll through, I ended up not doing anything at all as I was just stumped on the idea of shooting the two locations.
Now, yesterday would have potentially been a decent day to give it a try, but I was busy with getting Toni’s car cleaned up after having been out in the elements for the previous week. Now that she was back, I needed to get the tree sap off of it, and just generally get it freshened back up for her. The afternoon was spent doing some online mentoring with one of my clients which pretty much finished out the day for me. By the time all that was done, I just wanted to take a nap, which I did.
As I was getting my morning stuff done this morning and closing out the month, I realized that the clouds were coming in a little earlier than expected. Looking at the forecast, the rain wasn’t supposed to start until about 2pm, and according to Toni’s weather app, it wasn’t going to happen until 4pm. This would give me plenty of time to shoot around the shop and the few cars that I could see from the road. I could also determine if the old building was theirs as well and hopefully come back when it got dark later on. If nothing else, I really needed to drive by there and check it out again with a critical eye to determine if what I was wanting to do would actually work. With the light outside looking great, I decided to give it a try. I mean the camera had been in the bed of my truck for several days and I either needed to use it while it was acclimated to the ambient temperature and humidity, or I needed to get it back inside the studio.
I decided to go for it and I grabbed my socks and shoes before rolling out to the house where I figured the owner was located at. The three cars I have become accustomed to seeing there were present and I slowed down to look at the shop down the hill from the house. It really did look like there was a relation in the way the yard was cared for, so I was pretty sure that this house was the key for both properties on either side. I contemplated the area around the lower shop and decided that since I was out and had good conditions, I would try to get permission.
As I approached the house for the second time, there was now a white Honda Ridgeline coming out of the driveway which I had never seen before. I slowed and waved at them to try and get their attention. I didn’t pull into the driveway because that would have been seen as an aggressive move on my part based on where they were in the driveway at the time. I put my signal on and pulled into the parking area for the building next to the house and hoped that they would realize that I was wanting to talk with them. They didn’t and continued on down the road. Since I had never seen the truck before, I hoped they were visitors, and the owner was still there.
A minute later, I was in the driveway and going to knock on the door. There were two doors that could have resulted in making contact, so I ultimately knocked on both of them but heard no signs of any movement inside. There were lights on inside which made me hopeful that the house was actually occupied. The cars out front gave me other indications though. From the road, the cars looked to be in better shape, but it was looking more like these cars didn’t move anywhere anymore. With nobody answering the door, I went back to the truck.
I could have just called it a miss and headed home, but the light was still looking really good, and I wanted to get something shot before I got home. I started driving back into town and as I was getting to the main intersection, I thought I would go and check on the location that Toni had suggested, and I had been watching for so long. It had been a while since I had been by with the intention of actually doing some photography, so maybe that mindset would be the determining factor and I would at least be able to give it a try.
It didn’t take long to get there, and when I started looking, I still wasn’t all that impressed with the scene. However, I was here and had gotten in my mind that I wanted to photograph something. The light was good, and I liked the tree with its deep green leaves. Without anything else coming to mind, I pulled off on the shoulder and got out to look at the angles. There was no doubt that the house was vacant, so there was nobody to ask permission. However, it was close enough to the road that I was able to work from the easement for the most part, so I didn’t have to have permission.
None of the angles were ideal as they all forced compromises with how I organized the scene. From my initial assessment, I figured that shooting the scene from the rear of the truck was going to be the best because I could get the tree in the shot as well as the house with enough separation to make the composition work. I grabbed the camera and the standard zoom because I was close enough that I didn’t need the reach of the telephoto and I wanted to be able to get the tree and the sky which was going to happen around 50mm or so.
I set the shot up from the rear of the truck and shot several variations, but I wasn’t all that impressed with any of them. I moved more to the right and got a more broadside composition on the truck which made the house look better, but the truck started to lose its visual importance in the scene. I went further to the right and was now shooting from the front corner of the truck. This put the tree over the house which blocked portions that I liked about the house. However, the truck was in a much more flattering position and the sky was looking better in that direction. It was a brighter sky which meant that I was going to have to dial the exposure back a tad with the help of a soft ND grad filter. This allowed more exposure on the truck while keeping the sky at bay.
The yard had a natural dip as it went to the road which I was able to use to my advantage for getting a little bit of a lower perspective on the scene. I liked the look of the scene but needed to do something with the way that the truck was overlapping the window of the house. That required raising the camera slightly, but I really liked the result and framed up a composition that was vertical to really get the scope of the tree in the frame. With the grad filter still in place, I was able to get a pretty even exposure over the scene which was what I was after.
In short order, I had the photo captured and I was pretty sure that it was going to turn out nice. It was the first one that I felt was really working, but I wanted to get a bit more detail with the truck. When shooting it vertical, the truck took up so little of the frame that I felt I was cheating it a little bit. I flipped the camera to a horizontal orientation and moved in a bit closer to the truck. I was still trying to keep my distance and be respectful of the property, but I was able to get a bit wider angle on the lens which made it easier to fill the frame with the truck. Most everything else was kept the same with the composition down to where the window was placed over the hood of the truck.
In both of these compositions, the house was obscured by the tree, but I actually kind of liked how that worked since the truck was in front of the house as well. It kept the house firmly in the background and didn’t let it become a more dominant element. It was these two compositions that finished up the day and left me with 36 exposures in total. During the culling process, it was only these two that made it through the three phases of eliminations. I wanted to do one in black and white, but I really loved how the colors looked in the scene which overruled that desire. This was just meant for being shown in color.
As occasionally happens when writing out the blog, I was going through the missed compositions in my mind as I shared my thought processes with you. When I started talking about the initial compositions that I shot from the rear of the truck, I could picture them in my mind, but I wasn’t disliking the concept as much as I had when I had gone through and culled the images. As I was coming to a close with the blog, I couldn’t shake the thought of the first few images that I had shot and wanted to go back and take another look at them.
When I got back into Lightroom, I didn’t even have any stars next to the first 13 images which included the compositions from the rear and the ones from pretty much directly on the side of the truck. Man, I had dismissed a whole though process early on in the culling process. I had to give them another look. I started with the first image of the day and actually kind of liked the composition. The sky didn’t look all that great in the RAW image file, but I remembered there being some detail to work with when I was shooting it. I kind of glossed over the next several frames to see if there was something that I might like better but didn’t find anything at all. I went back to that first frame and pulled in one of the other edits that I had done just to see how it would look when done in the same manner that I had with the other two keepers from the day. It was like I uncovered something and what had been kind of a drab photo turned into something that I really liked. I went through the local adjustments as well as adding some more which suited this particular photo and was left looking at one that was certainly worth keeping.
As you can see here the visual weight is significantly moved over to the house rather than the truck. The shift in focus was why I had dismissed it early on as I was looking for a photo of the truck and not the house. However, when I realized that I had photos of the truck as a primary subject, the house became something that I wanted to know more about. It was this first frame that allowed me to tell more of the story of the house with the truck as a supporting player in the scene. I think that this works in conjunction with the other two photos, but kind of explores things from a different perspective. The color all still looked so good together so there was no real consideration to making this a black and white print.
What do you think? Is this late addition of the first frame shot worth adding to the collection? The more I look at it, the more I like it. It is doubly interesting to me because when I showed it to Toni, she said that the photograph made the house look bigger than she remembered it. It looked like a mansion in the photo. This was just minutes after I had titled the photo. That was when I knew I had the title just right.
Thank you for joining me on today’s trek as we close out July. Don’t forget that I have a new Behind the Camera coming out tomorrow where I am answering four of your questions. It should be a good one, so watch for that email saying that there is a new blog entry being published. Oh wait…you aren’t subscribed to the blog? All you have to do is add your email to my list by clicking this link and then confirming that you wish to receive updates from this website. You will only get notified when there are new blogs being published and you can remove yourself from the list at any time. It is the best way of keeping up to date with all of the new photos being added. If you are relying on social media, it might be months before you see the new photos.
As always, if any of these speak to you and you would like to see them displayed on your walls, I would love to help match you up with a print of your very own. There really is no better way to enjoy a photograph than in a physical form. Digital displays really rob you of so much of the experience as colors might not be accurate, contrast might be off, and most monitors are grossly overexposed due to the brightness being cranked all the way up. Do yourself a favor, if you fall in love with one of my photos, or one from any photographer, you need to see it in print to really get the full effect. You won’t be disappointed.
Until next time…
