Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Man, that title really sounds negative, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m starting out by saying that this trek probably won’t work. You know, I stand by that thought even now. By the way, “now” is currently 12:04am and I am starting this blog. This isn’t because the trek was some epic adventure with tons of photos. It isn’t so much that it was started late in the day either, but it was. I really wish that today had been full of epic locations, but as we have found out, epic is largely overrated when it comes to photography, at least in my opinion. So, what exactly happened today? Well, I’m going to need to fill you in on a bit of a backstory to get started. Actually, a couple of backstories.
Here goes….
Looking back probably the furthest, we would go back roughly five years when Toni and I moved out to Wilkes County, and I started exploring. In my travels out in the area of Goshen I spotted a red Nissan Hardbody which was probably a 1990 or something close to that. I could tell from the wheels that it was an SE-V6 and it was a king cab. Why is that important? Well, that was the truck that I wanted more than anything as I was finishing up high school and starting college. That was the truck that really got me interested in pickups after having spent all of my driving life behind the wheel of a sport compact car. Anyway, I could see this truck up on the hill and could tell that it was no longer being used. It was faded and there was some rust showing, but it was a Nissan and therefore would not really interest my viewers who have come to expect American cars from decades before 1990. It was just a truck that I would pass by and remember those formative years in my driving life. Of course, I ended up buying a 1990 regular cab Hardbody pickup during college and drove it for many years. If you will remember, my current daily driver is a Frontier which is a direct descendant of the Hardbody truck. I’m still a fan of Nissan trucks to this day because of the Hardbody.
Over the years, I have been watching the red SE-V6 slowly age and pick up more decay cues. I’ve also been photographing more and more imports that are showing various states of decay and while they are not as popular as my classic American subjects, they all do hold a special place in my heart which makes them very much worth photographing. It helps to mix things up as well, so I’m not stuck in a rut of shooting tri-5 Chevys and Ford Galaxies. Here recently, it has been harder and harder to pass this truck by without thinking about getting some photos of it. I’ve even started to look at the property critically. I have known for a long time that I was going to need permission to photograph the truck because it was parked very close to the house with at least three cars parked in front of the house. From the distance that I could see the truck from the road, I wasn’t even sure if I could get an overall photo of it, or if I would have to work on isolations instead.
The other evening, Toni and I were coming back from dinner, and we passed this location which prompted me to point it out. I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t going to be able to get a good photograph here, and if I was going to try, it would have to be in the afternoon, and preferably during a pretty cloudy day for some interest in the sky. As we went passed it, the sun was hitting it and there were some clouds overhead which got me thinking that that might be the way to shoot it, but I was going to need to work out a time in the afternoon when I could make it out there with good weather when I might find the owner home. I was still making excuses, but I was at least thinking about how to photograph the truck after all these years of just enjoying the sight of it as I drove down the road.
The next story in our history lesson of things that I have thought about photographing is the story of a Jaguar SUV which is not all that old at all. If I had to guess, I would say that it was less than 10 years old. There is no way that a jag like this would interest me, but here we are talking about it. It was more the scene that it was a part of that got me interested. I took notice of it shortly after spotting the Nissan several years ago, but I don’t remember exactly when. It was parked in a commercial property lot next to a building that was now vacant. There was a sculpture of a Bald Eagle on the driver’s side of the SUV which was made out of stone. It was odd, and I wasn’t exactly sure why it was there. Just in front of the SUV was a small building that served cool treats which was probably a good business to have near the lake like this is. The Jag had been there for a while because there was a lot of organic film all over it and you could tell that it had been sitting there untouched for quite some time. For the age, I was very confused, and still am.
At some point, I stopped there and thought about getting a photograph but just couldn’t figure out a composition that I liked because I was going to have to include the Eagle which, at the time, I considered a distraction. I hadn’t quite learned about the power of “and” which I have talked about a couple of times recently. Essentially, it is a concept where you take your main subject and start to add elements to it that help with the story. It gives you more depth to the photo and makes it more interesting. Of course, it can also ruin a photograph if you add elements that distract or confuse the issue, so there is a very fine line that has to be walked. In the case of this scene, I was pretty sure that adding in those other elements would be detrimental to the oddly aging Jag.
It was on the same trip through the area with Toni when I again looked at this scene and pointed it out to her. We talked about it, and I mentioned how I had been thinking about including more of the scene because none of the elements really went together. The fact that the newer SUV was in the condition that it was in was confusing enough that the other two elements didn’t really add to the confusion, but they did add to the visual interest and created a more involved story. Toni became very interested in the scene and started to ask the same questions that I have wondered about for years. We all know that I love to create photos that ask questions, and this was shaping up to do just that.
The final backstory is one that has started within the last year. I’m not sure of exactly when I spotted this subject, but right on the edge of downtown Wilkesboro, there is an auction company that has an AMC AMX parked out front on the sidewalk. The car caught my eye the first time I saw it because I just don’t see these cars hardly at all. It was in decent shape with a fiberglass hood that had a huge scoop on it. It really looked the part, but with it right up against the building windows with items on display I didn’t see much of a way of photographing the car as a whole. Because it didn’t have much in the way of patina on it, I wasn’t all that interested in shooting isolations on it either.
I pretty much dismissed the car for the first several months that I saw it. However, every time I drove through town, I would look at the car and wonder about how I could photograph it. It was interesting, but not quite what I would normally shoot which kind of turned me off from it. There was always that part of me that wondered how long it would remain sitting there because in this business, subjects tend to leave quickly and without warning. This one was already staying longer than I would have imagined based on where it was located and the fact that it was obviously for sale.
There were a few times I would come through town and park near it and look critically at the scene to see if it would be worth coming back with the camera at another time. Every time I did that, I convinced myself that it wasn’t worth the return trip, yet every time I went, I would think about it for days after. It was another one of those haunting scenes for me and one that I just couldn’t shake. I figured that I was going to need a nice cloudy day for this one because it was partially under an overhang which provided some shade, but only on a portion of the car. This was another one that would have to be photographed in the afternoon unless the clouds were really thick because the sun came up behind the car and set in front of it. To get the best lighting, I wanted some front light on it.
So, there we have the three backstories that have bearing on today’s trek. I’ve been contemplating these three locations for about a week now while I’ve been waiting for the right conditions. I’ve also been telling myself that these are going to be a waste of time to go out and shoot. The fact that I kept thinking about them was making me really want to go and give them a try. It had gotten to the point where I wasn’t able to think about any other locations because these three had occupied my brain for so long now, and I have been dialing in my concepts more and more over the past month or so. I was going to have to scratch that itch and work the scenes before I could move on and work with anything else. That much was getting obvious.
Knowing that I was going to be needing some clouds, I have been waiting for a nice cloudy day, but as we have talked about many times over the last month or so, the weather is pretty much bright sun until the storms come. If there are clouds, there is rain close by. If there is no rain, then there are no clouds. That makes it very difficult for me to want to get out and do any photography since I really love working with clouds for most of what I shoot. The last several treks have kind of made me reconsider that preference though. I’m not saying that I have started to enjoy photographing in the full sun, but I have started to get better at using that hard light for my photos. It really is a matter of if I want to get out and shoot, I’m just going to have to work with the light that I have.
On Monday evening, I was looking at the weather and it was looking like there would be clouds starting around the middle of the day with storms coming in shortly after that. It was pretty much the same forecast that I was getting so used to, but it was a starting point of possibly being able to go out and get some of these locations shot finally. When Tuesday morning finally rolled around, I had to go and get the truck inspected and registered, so I was out early in the day to see nothing but clear skies. My original idea was to take the camera and see if I could shoot anything early on in the day. When I saw how bright the sky was, I just put the bag back on the shelf and decided to not even worry about it.
By the time I got home, the weather had been pushed back a few hours, and the clouds were looking pretty scarce until later in the afternoon. I spent most of the day sitting in my recliner looking out the window and trying to figure out how I could go out with the sky looking as clear as it was. I kept checking on the weather to see if the hourly changed any, but all I could manage to find out was that the clouds would come in between 2-3pm along with some strong storms. It was looking like a bust, and Wednesday wasn’t looking much better with rain through most of the day with clear skies when it wasn’t raining. Fortunately, it wasn’t like I needed any new photos added because let’s face it, I’ve been very productive over the last nine months or so. I can’t remember a time when I have added this many photos each month, consistently, like I have been doing. I was having to accept the fact that I was really wanting to try these locations so that I could move on from them. The chances of success might be slim, but I was to the point I had to know if I could make anything work or not before I think about anything else.
With that in mind, around 2:15 or so, I walked down to the end of the driveway to see what the sky was looking like in the direction of these locations. There were clouds moving in pretty heavy from the West, and I could hear thunder. It also looked like I was seeing falling rain to the West which meant that it was going to get wet here very soon. During the long walk back up the driveway, I had pretty much convinced myself that I wasn’t going to go because history was telling me that the rain was going to make it very difficult to do any photography and the fact that I wasn’t really holding out much hope for these subjects meant that I didn’t need anything making them any harder than they already were.
When I got back into the house, I had changed my mind and figured that I had good light, and I might as well give it a try. If I got rained out, I could try again tomorrow, or the next day. I just knew that for now, I had good light to work with. After getting my shoes on and giving Toni a kiss, I was on my way. Once I pulled out of the driveway, I saw a couple of rain drops on the windshield, but didn’t worry about it since I was going to go into Wilkesboro to check out that AMX first off. It would have been about 20 minutes behind in getting the rain, and it was probably just now getting the clouds overhead.
The closer I got, the brighter the sun got, and the lighting wasn’t as good as I had seen at home. I thought about changing my destination but figured that I would only be at the AMX for a minute or two because there was every chance that there was too much activity going on around it, and if the light looked like this, I would probably not even stop to shoot it. I mean, this is like the fourth time I’ve been by this car and thought about shooting it only to keep on driving. What was one more time?
Well, when I got there, I pulled into a spot on the opposite side of the road and went ahead and turned the truck off. That was a first, as we getting out of the truck and crossing the street to really look at the car. There were aspects that I really liked about the car, and I figured that I would be able to get some isolations of it if nothing else. It was worth a shot. The clouds were coming, and I imagined that I would have good light momentarily. I went to go and check with the owner since this was during business hours, but the doors were locked. Everything looked dark inside, so I figured that they had closed early. Since there wasn’t much in the way of the car, I decided to go and get my bag and start working it.
Since I knew that I wanted to focus on the fact that this was an AMX and not just a Javelin, I started looking at compositions that were based on the AMX emblem on the grill. There were hood pins installed for the fiberglass hood that also told part of the story which I wanted to capture. To do this, I pulled out the telephoto lens which would make getting these isolations a bit easier. The first composition went pretty well and only took me about three frames to get it dialed in. The second composition was a vertical one and took much longer to figure out.
It was the vertical shot that had an intensity that I absolutely loved. It was a very different composition for me in that I cropped through the hood scoop, omitted the headlight, and cropped at the top edge of the chrome bumper. It really was just an experiment which I had to try in order to omit many of the distractions with the location I was shooting in. By the time it was all said and done though, I had a very impressive black and white image that I do believe will be in the running for my yearly list of significant images. The more I look at it, the more I love it, and the more that I think it is my favorite composition from this car. I know that it was this one which made me think early on that I was glad that I had stopped to shoot this car finally.
The next composition that I wanted to work was one dealing with the AMX emblem on the C pillar. This was a bit more difficult to work with because there was no patina which meant that I had to include something else with it for the sake of visual interest. I started from an elevated position and realized that I needed my standard lens to make this work. After the switch, I went back to composing the shot and found a vertical composition that I kind of liked. The scaling was off due to the perspective, and I tried to work through that without any success.
While I was trying to work that out, a man came up to me and asked about what I was doing. It turned out that he was with the auction company and we chatted for a bit about the car and how long it had been there. He let me know that it was for sale and gave me the price that was being asked for it. I think it is a little low, so I’m not going to mention the price here, but I really think that the car is worth what they are asking. Anyway, he was happy to let me take all the photos I wanted of the car and even offered to let me get inside of it and to raise the hood. The interior was in good shape, so it didn’t really appeal to me photographically, and I wasn’t really interested in photographing the motor either. What I wanted to capture was just what was there on the surface. That was what had interested me about this car for so long and I was already getting along quite well with it.
When I got back to work with the C pillar, I decided to try it from a lower standpoint to change the scaling between the elements in the frame. This put me closer to the wheel which made the body panel smaller in relation. This worked out better, but there were more distractions that were present behind the car from this direction. I did some careful framing and finally came upon something that I thought would work out nicely.
This is one of those images that was a victim of the culling at the second stage, but I came back to it after getting all the preliminary edits done. It turned out better than I had thought it would after going through the processing on it. There are things that I wish I could change about the image, but based on how I had to shoot it, this was the best option. Had this been a car that I had shot previously, I probably would have skipped this altogether, but the fact remained that this was an AMX and just not something that I have had the opportunity to shoot before which makes it unique enough to put up with some issues with composition.
It was around this time that I started really trying to figure out a way to do an overall composition of the car. I started to look from the passenger side since I now had the permission to move the table that was in front of the car. There wasn’t enough room between the car and the building to get a good angle for an overall shot. However, I did start to take notice of the American Flag that was flying on a light pole beside the car. That got me thinking about another kind of composition that just included a portion of the car.
I figured out what angle would look best for the car and the flag but then realized how many power lines were in the scene. Yeah, I could remove them in post, but that would be a lot of manipulation and there would be evidence visible from the visual surgery. I decided to make the power lines a part of the photo and worked on positioning the camera and framing the image in a way where the lines framed the flag and provided triangles in the photograph. Things started to come together, but I wasn’t sure that it would work as well as I had hoped. That judgement was going to have to wait until I got the images home and started to work on them.
When I started working on this one, it looked pretty good during the culling stages, and I eventually got it into post where I started working the image. I started to like it more and more as I made little adjustments here and there. By the time I was done, I felt that it needed just one more detail which I feel compelled to tell you about. The light above the flag seemed kind of lifeless in the photo and didn’t really make much sense. I have several ways of turning lights on in post and decided that this one would benefit from such treatment. A couple of adjustments later and there was light which helped to draw the attention to the flag. Everything seemed to work together in the photo and the flag really told the story that I was wanting here. What I love about this photo is the fact that so little of the car is present in the frame, but you know enough about it from what you see to fill in the blanks. The vast majority of the scene is all about the location and the setting which adds so much more to the story. It gives a small-town vibe which fits the car yet doesn’t really reveal the time period that the photo was shot.
The rest of my time with the car found me focusing on the hood once again with a couple of abstract compositions that were destined to be done in black and white. I chose to focus on portions of the hood while I utilized the glare to my advantage to really sculpt the shapes. To get the glare to work in my favor like that, I adjusted the polarizer to a point about midway along the spectrum so that I added the contrast to the surfaces that I wanted as opposed to just removing all of the glare from the scene. It worked well, and I was able to massage that contrast in post with curves to bring you the images that you see above.
By this point, the sunlight was getting rather strong, and I was getting hot. I had also been out here for about an hour shooting this car and figured I had everything that I might need from it. I got everything packed up and started back out on the road again. I could see that there were more clouds to the South and West which was where the other two locations happened to be. Since I was out and had already had a good amount of success, I decided to go and check out the Jag and see if the clouds were thick enough over there to set the right lighting on the scene.
When I arrived, the light was good with the whole scene in shade with no highlights or dappled lighting. I pulled off on the side of the road and started looking at the scene critically once again. It was a difficult scene and there was no getting around that aspect. However, there was an interesting story here and one that I had no answers for seeing it in its entirety. It was seriously quirky enough to justify some photos just for the conversational sake. There were signs posted on the property indicating that trespassing wasn’t appreciated. I was aware of these signs since I had spotted them a couple of years ago when I had pulled in to consider a photo before.
Not wanting to push my luck, I considered my options which might keep me off of the property. I could park across the street and shoot from the shoulder of the road. In order to do that, I would have some very tall weeds to contend with blocking the best angles. I could get just inside of the median which would still be close to the easement on the shoulder of the road but would be on the property. That was the only way to get the angle that I needed. Looking at the property, the signs had been there for a very long time, and it looked like they were possibly there for when it was in business. I figured that it was worth the risk to be in that gray area at the edge of the parking lot knowing that I would not get anywhere close to the car or the buildings. I would also work fast and in a very visible manner in case anyone was looking.
I grabbed my camera with the standard lens and started to figure out the composition. I started with one that showed the SUV and the Eagle on the left with the lemonade stand on the right side of the frame. It was a simple composition and something to get me started. I then moved to the front of the SUV and shot a more intimate view of just the vehicle and the Eagle. From the angle that I chose, I ended up including a portion of the building which I found to be not nearly as much of a distraction as I had figured. I actually kind of liked the building in the frame.
That prompted me to do another variation of the overall composition from roughly this same angle which included the building. It allowed me to show more of the sculpture, and the lemonade stand became a very nice bookend for the composition and worked well with the main building. I used a large portion of the driveway as a foreground knowing that I would be burning it quite a bit in post to show the depth in the scene. The first attempt at this had been less pavement and more trees, but that somehow seemed boring for this composition. I much preferred it with more pavement in the fame. I just had to be careful and not bisect the frame with my main elements which had to be lined up horizontally due to their positions. With this in mind, I put the line of interest slightly above the center point in the frame to keep the visual balance in place. It also helped to calm the scene down a bit which was a good thing considering how complex the elements and implied story were.
I didn’t stay here long at all and was back on the road after only a few minutes. I let Toni know that I was on the way back home and had gotten two of the locations shot. When she reminded me that she had an appointment that she was just now leaving for, I took note of the light which was a bit brighter than it had been for the Jag. Since she was going to be out for a bit, I decided to go and see what the Nissan looked like since it was only a few miles down the road. After I got turned around, I was on my way really thinking that the sky wasn’t going to work out. The clouds had started to clear out now and there was a lot of blue in the sky. The odd thing was that there had been no rain with this bunch of clouds, and I was very thankful for that.
When I got to the Nissan, I slowed and looked at it. The sun was shining on it, but it was low enough that the light wasn’t really harsh at all. It looked kind of flattering and the sky overhead had some clouds for interest as well. I was here, so I might as well go ahead and ask if I could get some photos. There was a single driveway with two houses on it. I went to the furthest house since it was the one closest to where the truck was parked. It didn’t look like the front door was one that was customarily used, so I opted to go around to the back door which I found open with a storm door in place.
Feeling pretty sure that somebody was home, I knocked on the door and waited. I could hear some movement, but wasn’t sure if they had heard me knock. I went up to knock again and a man was coming up to the door. He opened the door and said that he didn’t move too fast these days which I can appreciate. I introduced myself and let him know what I was wanting to do. He had no problem letting me photograph the truck and I went back out to get my Nissan parked out of the way.
This was the first time that I had been this close to the Hardbody and started to really see the difficulties that I was going to have to deal with for any photographs. I decided to pick my telephoto lens because I might be able to sidestep the house and still get a good angle and composition. I thought that I might be able to go with a wider-angle to use the truck to block the house, but I really didn’t think that would work all that well. I grabbed the camera and the telephoto lens before mounting the polarizer to it. I then started to walk to the truck and wondered why I wasn’t seeing the long white lens on the camera. I stopped and looked and realized that I had grabbed the standard zoom for some odd reason. I really had it in my head that I was using the telephoto, but something had overruled that decision and here I was with a lens that looked nothing like what I had decided to put on. Instead of changing things up, I decided to roll with it and trust that my subconscious knew something that I didn’t.
I walked around the truck and found an angle that I liked at the driver’s side front quarter. The light was good, and I was able to block out the house well enough to get the shot. I really liked how it turned out, but it was a bit boring to look at. I figured that it was because of the even lighting on the truck which prompted me to go to the shaded side. Once again, I was able to block the other house and my truck from view by getting in close and low to the truck. Since this was the shaded side, I was having a hard time with the exposure latitude. I ran back to the truck to get a grad filter which I slid in to control the sky. This worked out well and I figured that I liked this composition much better than the first one.
At this point, I started to look for isolations on the truck, but really didn’t find any. It was a bit too modern to have the same personality that the older cars do when it comes to picking out details. The fact of the matter was this was a very blocky truck which is part of what I love about it, but it wasn’t photographing very well in bits. As I moved around, I got to thinking that I really did like the light that was falling on the driver’s side and wanted to try a different angle for a composition.
I got in closer than I had before which allowed me to fill the frame more with more perspective distortion. I dropped the camera down very close to the ground which completely eliminated the house and cars from view where I had seen a bit of the house in the windows before. I moved the camera around an inch here and an inch there to get things just right in the frame. I still had the grad filter on which looked fine in the live view, but I could tell from the histogram that it was reducing the exposure too much. With the light falling on the scene as it was, there was just no reason to use the grad, so I removed it and ran it back to the truck.
I shot a couple of different frames of this composition and then went back to looking for isolations. With nothing else jumping out at me, I packed everything up and headed home. I actually beat Toni back to the house by a few minutes which was nice. That way I could meet her when she got home. The original plan was to jump on these photos Wednesday morning, but she convinced me to go and see what I had from the day while she was getting dinner ready.
It didn’t take long at all to download the 35 frames that I had shot over the three locations. Except for a couple of those frames, I wasn’t convinced that any of them were any good, so I was going to be happy with getting two or three keepers from this small stack of digital negatives. I started to cull through them and ended up with 14 frames to look further at, and those turned into ten that I wanted to process. By the time that dinner was ready, I had processed five of the images and had started on the sixth of what was looking like eight total keepers. I finished those up after we ate and then went back upstairs to watch a movie with her. When the movie was over, I decided that I wanted to look at two of the images again to see if I wanted to keep them, so I went back downstairs to check those out.
Both of those additional images were processed, but in the end, I only liked one of them which you have seen in this blog. It is that quarter panel shot which was added at this late stage of the game bringing the total keepers to nine out of 35 frames. To say I’m impressed with how these turned out would be an understatement. Throughout the day, I wasn’t convinced at all, that any of these would work. Each of the locations worked quite well and now I am able to move onto something else knowing that I have succeeded with these.
Thank you for joining me on this trek and I hope that you have enjoyed the photos. Remember, if you are interested in purchasing a print, I have actually reduced the prices on most of my stock sizes to make them more accessible to you. My goal as a photographer has always been to make prints, not just feed the social media machine. This is the true way that a photograph should be enjoyed because it is the only way that you can really see the full resolution of the image and see the colors as intended, not how your device chooses to represent the colors. Let me know which print is right for you and we will get that order started!
Until next time….
