Wednesday, June 25, 2025
But it wasn’t as quick as I thought it would be.
If you will remember from yesterday’s blog, I had stumbled upon a couple of Volkswagens very close to the barn that had had photographed. I had tried to make contact with the owner because I was going to need to be well within the property to take some photos. I just didn’t feel comfortable doing that without having their blessing, so I left a message at the phone number that was posted on the door. It wasn’t until I arrived home that I got a call back, and by that point, I was mentally prepared to be doing some editing on the photos that I had just shot, and didn’t feel like driving back out there which would be another hour round trip. I knew that there were possibly going to be some clouds coming in during the next few days as the storms were back in the forecast once again, so I asked if I could just come back sometime in the next few days. He had no problem with that, so after I was done with the editing process, I started to look at the weather.
This was one of those locations that I thought might actually work in the sunlight, but I did want some clouds in the sky just in case I needed some diffused light. If I had a good cloudy day, I was sure I could get some compositions to work because that is the kind of light that I love working with. After looking at the scene, I just had a suspicion that the sun might actually help out a bit. Looking at the forecast, the sky was going to be totally clear through the morning with some gradual clouds coming in right at noon, with the storms starting up just before 3pm. The clouds that would make the difference would be coming in around 1pm, which would give me about an hour to work before needing to head home to avoid the storms.
As I remembered what I had seen, there didn’t seem like all that much to work with. There was a VW microbus and a Beetle which interested me. The van was parked next to a later model car which didn’t really help tell the story of the VW, but it was pretty much situated by itself on the side of the gravel parking lot. It was a very nice blue and white color with plenty of rust on it for some added interest. The Beetle was parked next to the building and had some debris around it which would make photos difficult, and the tall grass around it would limit the isolations that I would be able to get. I figured that I would need about 30 to 45 minutes to shoot everything that I was wanting here which really wasn’t that much time. If things would go to plan, I would be home around 2pm if I left here around 12:15 or so.
When I got done with my morning routine, I went upstairs and started to pay very close attention to the sky. It was totally clear, but I could see some hazy high-altitude clouds trying to come in. The hourly forecast was still looking the same, but the storm chances were starting to get pushed back a little bit. The clouds were also not showing to be as thick as promised earlier. I looked ahead to the next couple of days and found that the conditions were going to be pretty much the same which meant that I might as well give it a shot today while I was in the right mindset to photograph these two vehicles.
The time ticked by and when 12:30 came, I decided to go ahead and head North to see what I could get. It was hot yet again, so I had the air running nearly full blast in the truck, but I knew that the camera was sitting in the bed of the truck getting acclimated to the warm and humid temperatures. This way I didn’t have to worry about fogging optics when I got started which will always put me in a foul mood.
For the entire length of the trip up the mountain the clouds were looking to be staying away for the most part. There were some in the sky, but just enough to soften the light which wasn’t the worst thing. I was still thinking that sunny conditions would be good for these subjects but always am happy to have a diffuser pulled over the sun to soften the light just a tad. That was what it appeared was happening. The last little bit of the trip I spent thinking about how I wanted to photograph the van specifically. I had a semi-detailed memory of what I saw with it and knew that I wanted to capture the front of the van where the emblem had been, but a ghost of it was left in its place. There were also some really interesting broken windows that I felt would make for some interesting shots. The passenger door was no longer mounted and was sitting in the passenger seat which I found kind of interesting and thought that I might be able to take advantage of that aspect.
I had to get a plan together because I wanted to hit the ground running when I got there in case the shop was open. I didn’t want to be in the way of business, and I still needed to get home before the storms hit. When I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a Civic was there which I had not seen before but saw no signs of activity. I went ahead and parked and got my camera out. Based on what I had been thinking, I pulled out the camera with the long lens attached which should make it easier to get the detail shots that I had in mind. I walked over to the building and found the bay door partially open. I peeked underneath and saw two guys in the shop, so I introduced myself and then walked in the main door.
I talked briefly with Mike, the owner and confirmed that it was OK for me to get some photos. He was happy to let me and was interested in seeing what I came up with. As it turned out, the van was in line to be restored for a prop at a wedding venue which would be a great use for this old van. I was glad that I had spotted it when I did because I would hate to have missed out on being able to photograph it in its current state. I’m sure it will look great all freshened up, but for me, this was nearly perfect, and I was very excited to see what I could do with it.
When I got back outside, I started to really look at the van critically and started wondering if I would be able to get more than a few photos from it based on how it was situated in the parking lot. For some reason, I was remembering more trees around it which would have made life a good deal easier for some compositions. I didn’t let it get to me though, and I decided to just take it as it came and photograph whatever views interested me. I don’t see too many of these vans, so it made sense to try and get as many photos as I could of it while I had such a great example right in front of me.
The first view that I went for was the front end of the van with the ghost emblem still showing on the nose. I didn’t want to do an overall front capture though because I thought that might be a little boring. I had noticed a mop head draped over the bumper which gave me another point of interest on the front end. I worked on a composition that included the lights, the ghost emblem, and the mop head. It didn’t take me long to get something figured out that had plenty of visual tension and a pretty strong composition.
At a couple of points while I was out here, the owner had offered to let me move the mop head. He also expressed his regret that he hadn’t brought the emblem with him from home. I assured him that everything was perfect as it was. Looking back at the photos now, I can’t imagine them without the mop head, or with the actual emblem attached. Those two aspects added more visual interest to the front of this van than anything else that I could have done. There are benefits to shooting it as I find it, and this subject was really benefitting from that mantra.
After getting a few shots of the front corner, I moved my attention to the broken glass on the passenger side that I had seen earlier. I really love how this old glass breaks and it always adds so much visual interest. The only issue that I had was coming up with an interesting composition of the broken glass. I needed something beyond straight lines which would just divide up the scene, so I found a good angle for the camera that allowed things to go diagonal. I also decided to use the door handle for a bit of a visual anchor. The white paint framed the part that I really wanted the viewer to see, while the handle was in a field of blue that receded to the background (things I’ve learned in studying color theory). The end result was a pretty interesting photo of a pretty flat surface.
From there, I moved back to the gas lid and the vent for the motor. I worked out what I thought was a pretty strong composition with those two elements. It was rather abstract, and I liked the lines and shapes that were captured. After about two frames I was pretty sure I had that composition worked out and I moved on from there. You are probably looking for that photo, aren’t you? Well, that composition didn’t make the cut when I was culling the images. Don’t worry though, I did return to it later on with a different lens and from the opposite direction. That one turned out pretty good and does appear here in the blog.
The next successful composition came from the same side of the van though. This was the side that didn’t have anything parked next to it. I had much more room to work, and there were several interesting areas to work with on that side of the van. One of the areas I found was the opened door…or more accurately, the missing door. It gave me a very open view of the dash which was pretty simple in design. If you have been following me for any length of time, you will know that I have a hard time with interior shots but have been getting much better over the last couple of years. I felt that this one offered a good opportunity at a composition, so I started to work out something with the camera.
What I found was that I wasn’t able to get a framing that I liked. In order to capture what I wanted to from side to side, I ended up including too much on the top and bottom of the frame. There was just no way around it, so I ended up changing the aspect ratio in the camera to 16:9 which offered a more fitting frame for the photo. It was now working quite well and all I had to do was get the steering wheel separated from the speedometer and to get the window frames lined up in a compositionally considered way.
Once I had that all figured out, I made an exposure and immediately found that I was blowing out the highlights in the windows in order to get the shadow detail. I did a four-frame HDR series and knew that would give me all the exposure information that I needed. When I was going through the files looking for any irregularities, I noticed that I had forgot and left the aperture set at f/22 which was nearly stopped all the way down. This wasn’t really a huge problem, but it did allow the background to be captured in pretty good focus which I didn’t really like. I opened up the aperture to something a bit more fitting for what I was wanting and adjusted the shutter speed to match. I made a single exposure and while the lighting hadn’t really changed, the histogram somehow looked much better than it had before. I had detail in the shadows, and nothing was badly clipped in the highlights. I saw no reason to do an HDR series with this one.
For my next trick, I moved to the front of the van and decided to do something straight on to capture the ghost emblem that I loved so much. This was not a difficult composition to come up with because of the two-tone paint on the nose of the van. The blue corners matched up nicely with the windows on the top for a bit of framing to the emblem. The colors all worked together here with the rust playing off of the blue color while the white was left to be rather neutral. The emblem had a bit of cool tone to it as it looked like the blue paint was wearing through the white where the emblem had been. I only shot a couple of frames here because there wasn’t much to change around as far as the composition went. I just had to make sure that I wasn’t clipping anything in the highlights, while pushing the exposure as far to the right as I could.
It was while I was shooting the front of the van that I started to want to try and get an overall establishing shot of it. This was not going to be easy because of the Mitsubishi parked on the driver’s side, and I had parked on the other side of the driveway on the passenger side thinking that I wasn’t going to be shooting anything overall. I was at least far enough away that I could get a shot using the telephoto lens by backing away from the van and using a tighter focal length. This worked well and also kept me from having to include the treetops and the sky which I didn’t’ really want to do with this shot.
The sun was really working well here, and the van was jumping out at me with the trees in the background in shade. I fired off a few frames with slightly different depths of field to see what I was going to like best when I got home. It was a simple composition, and I figured that the way I processed it would have everything to do with whether or not it was a keeper by the end of the day. I would have much rather had another element to bring into the frame to balance out the van, but all I had to deal with were some tree trunks in the shade for a bit of depth establishment. They worked out well enough, but I still would have preferred something a little more engaging in this spot. It was the mop head that once again made the shot though. I’m so glad that it was there!
Feeling that I had spent enough time with the van, I moved my attention to the Beetle that was on the other side of the parking lot. It was a little more difficult to work with than I had recalled. However, I did like the yellow color with the greenery around it. Because the car had such a recognizable shape, I knew that I didn’t really need to include all of the car in order to establish a story with it. In fact, as long as I got the important curves of the car, I could omit a good majority of it, and nobody would even notice as their minds would just fill the rest of the car in.
I started to work on the angles and where to place the camera so as to avoid the clutter in the foreground and the stuff that was piled up on the rear of the car. I was surprised at how well it all came together, and the shape of the car was still very dominant despite the fact that I had cropped out a large percentage of the body. The composition turned into a story of curves rather than of a particular subject. There was one aspect that I really liked about this car and that was the decal that was on the vent window. It is kind of hard to tell on this small version of the image, but the decal is of a pair of eyes, and I really liked how it was situated in the window. I tried to bring them out as well as I could in post, but there was really no way to get them solidly backed by the dash which would have been ideal but would have ruined the rest of the composition if I could even get the angle right to have them against the dash only.
It was around this point that I was having a hard time with the telephoto lens because I was wanting to capture some broader scenes which just weren’t possible with the lens that was on the camera. I knew that I would be switching over to the standard zoom at some point, but I wanted to make sure that I had everything with this lens that I wanted. I moved back over to the van and started to work my way around it one more time. I found the broken driver’s window that seemed to be rather interesting with the way that the breaks were done in a curved manner. I could almost get the composition that I had in mind with the telephoto lens, but I was forced to be about an inch too close because of the car parked next to the van. This close proximity was just outside of my minimum focusing distance with the lens which meant that I wasn’t going to be able to get the shot with that tool.
It was time to swap out the lenses and I went back to the truck to retrieve the standard zoom. I’m finding that I am using this lens more this year than I did last year, but still nothing like what I had used in years previous when it was about the only lens that I ever had on the camera. It is a very flexible lens and one that works in a lot of different cases, but what I was needing this time was the close focusing distance that it offered. I was able to get right up on the window and frame up the shot as I had visualized it with the long lens. This time, focus was not an issue, and I was able to lock the focus anywhere that I wanted it to be within the scene.
Now that I had the focus figured out, I needed to work out the depth of field. I wanted there to be some blurring in the distance to show the depth of the scene because the composition was a bit abstract to begin with. The blur would add some interest and give an indication of the angles that were at play. It looks like this was shot wide open, but that is more a product of the distance to the subject because the aperture was set to f/5.6 which is two stops closed down from wide open. That gave me the right amount of blur and helped to minimize the overlap of the glass which was a feature of the two-piece window here.
The final step was to determine whether this was going to be color or black and white. Since the main focus of the image was the cracks and how they went off into the distance, I wanted to remove the focus off of the color in the image which would leave the focus on the contrasts. That meant that this was a perfect time for doing a black and white presentation which is how I visualized the shot in the first place and how I processed it from the start.
The next image was not planned as being done in black and white though. There was no doubt in my mind that this one was going to need to be in color. It was a play on the first composition that I had shot at the beginning of the day where I focused on the front corner of the van with the ghost emblem. The main difference was that I wanted to include the side of the van as well showing the depth in the scene. The composition all came together rather well and there were only two slight variations on the concept before I moved on from it.
When I started the processing of the image, I did do it in color but wasn’t able to come to a good conclusion with the amount of the blue in the scene thanks to the side being included. The grass right next to it, and the broad stroke of white was creating a bit of discord in the colors, and I wasn’t able to massage the hues into something that was complimentary. It wasn’t a bad photograph, but the balance was off when it came to the colors. That threw the whole image off in my mind. I still felt that the composition was solid, and I liked how the elements were all laid out, so I decided to stick with the edit a bit longer.
I went through several different color profiles trying to find one that would suit the scene a bit better than what I had selected to start with. After a bit, I moved into the black and white profiles and eventually landed on one that I felt solved the issue with balance. The color was now no longer a concern and the tonal relationships in the frame all made more sense. The key elements were still there and worked just as well as they had done in color. It wasn’t how I had envisioned the photo looking at first, but I think that it still captures the essence of what I was trying to accomplish with the shot.
Now that I had the standard zoom attached, I moved back to the Beetle once again because I wanted to try and get an overall composition of it. I had decided that the pallets behind the car were not really a problem with a composition, and neither was the corner of the building. What had kind of bothered me to begin with were the barrel and the sprayer that were on the ground by the car. I really felt that they were just too complicating for the composition and felt that by getting in closer to the car with a wider angle lens I could just overshoot them. That was what I tried, but nothing was lining up and the angle felt way too extreme.
I ended up backing up and framing up a composition with the barrel and sprayer included in the lower left as a foreground element. Between those elements and the stuff on the back of the car with a tarp that was a faded green, there were just too many things that were a distraction from the car. There was also too much yellow and green in the image when added in with the natural wood tones and the rusty look on the barrel. The car started to blend in with the grass at this point and that wasn’t working.
I was able to figure this out in the field by switching to black and white. By doing this, the analogous color palette that worked in the close-up version but was a negative for the broader scope image turned into a non-issue. I was now faced with contrasts of light and dark with the Beetle being among the brighter objects in the scene. It no longer blended into the grass that was all around it, but it stood out proudly in the frame as I wanted it to. In fact, the pallets now complimented the car quite nicely in terms of tonality and the sprayer also fit the scene better. In the color version, it was white and the brightest thing in the frame, so it took a lot of the attention. It was still brightest, but only by a little, and shared a tonality with the car which worked much better. This was definitely one of those times that being able to imagine a scene in black and white really came in handy. Fortunately, I had spent a good portion of last year doing a lot more black and white photography to get better at it for just this reason.
Now that I was over on the far side of the parking lot, I started to look at the van once again, only this time from the passenger’s side perspective. There was just enough room between the van and the car that I felt that I might be able to get a good shot of the van with the open door. I didn’t want to do it the same way that I had done from the driver’s side with a long focal length though. I needed something a bit more dramatic to make the image work in a different way. That meant getting in a bit closer and dropping the camera down to the ground so that I could get the sky above. There were now clouds coming in which gave the sky a slight bit of texture and darkened it a bit more. The sun was still shining on the van which helped it to pop out of the frame. It was probably the lighting that really prompted me to work on this composition.
The problem that I was dealing with was a parts delivery from a supplier that was taking place at the time. The truck was parked in the middle of the parking lot which wasn’t a bad thing, but it did limit where I could be with the camera. The more I looked at the angles, the more I realized that I would possibly be able to get in right beside the truck and get the right angle on the van. That was what I tried to do, but it was just too straight on, and I wanted to push the angle as much as I could to the left to get the side of the van in the frame. Fortunately, the driver was coming back out to the truck, so I picked up the camera to get out of the way and let him move on. As he moved from his spot, I plopped the camera down in the approximate place that I thought I could get away with it and started to frame up the shot.
I moved a few inches here and there to get the angle just right and to give the appropriate breathing room to the right of the van which meant putting the bumper of the neighboring car just out of the frame to the right. To tell you how close I cut it, there was a sliver of the bumper that I had to clone out which I wasn’t able to see in the camera and could barely see it on the computer monitor. I used the driveway to the left to frame the van and have the composition make more sense. Normally, I would have wanted more room on the right of the van as that was the direction of implied motion. I wasn’t able to do that without creating a very claustrophobic composition. By giving room to breathe on the left side, I created some visual tension with the van facing to the right. The driveway helped to provide a bit of visual interest that framed the van and gave the viewer something to look at so the space wouldn’t be empty. The negative space that was included on the left wasn’t empty space, and that was all that I wanted.
I now had the composition all figured out, but the parts truck was still sitting at the edge of the driveway firmly in the view on that left side of the frame. It didn’t really help tell the story, so I was just waiting for the truck to move out of the way. It had been nearly five minutes though and I was getting impatient. It was at this point that I did something that I rarely, if ever do and approached the driver. I asked if he was going to be there much longer. he said that he was just finishing up and would be moving in a minute. That was all I needed to hear, so I went back to the camera and waited for that minute.
The minute passed and he started to drive out into the road. I quickly checked the exposure on the camera and saw that it was now underexposed, so I added a little exposure. I realized at this point that there were clouds over the sun and the light that I had been interested in was now over. Looking up into the sky I saw that there was a large cloud over the sun, and it didn’t look like it would be clearing any time soon. I could have sat there and waited, but I didn’t think it would be worth it. I fired off a couple of shots with the diffused light and picked the camera up to start working on another idea that I had with the gas lid and motor vent that I had shot earlier. I wanted to get something down low with that showing off the tall grass and the flattened tire.
While I was getting that set up and deciding that it wasn’t as strong a composition as I had thought, I could sense that the light was getting brighter again. Sure enough, the sun was coming out again and I saw an opportunity to get the shot that I had been trying for before. I went back to the spot where I had been sitting and waiting and put together the same composition as I had before. I fired off a few different exposures as I wanted to make sure to control the highlights and the sky. The lighting was definitely better this time, and I was glad that I had come back to get the shot. It was much better than the composition that I had just been working on with the gas door, so I had no problem abandoning that idea in favor of this one.
Once I had the shot in the can, I did go back to the gas door once more. This time, I raised the tripod to a similar height from the earlier attempt at a photo. This time, I was working from the front of the gas door and was shooting in a vertical orientation. The whole composition was different and actually more simplistic than what I had worked on earlier. It was full of diagonals though, and the visual anchor was the slightly covered keyhole which I liked. I wasn’t sure which composition I was going to like better when I got home but having choices is always a good thing.
When I got the 48 frames home that I had shot in a total of an hour and a half, I found that the gas door photos were both good enough to have an example of each make it through two rounds of culling. On that last round, I put them both together and really looked at them. In the end, simplicity won out and I went with the vertical shot. There was just more to like about it and there were no elements that could lead to distraction like including the white upper color in addition to the main elements that I had wanted in the shot.
That was the end of the day. It was getting hot, and I was getting thirsty. The clouds were coming in fast at this point and I didn’t want to be caught out in the storms that were coming. It was now 2:30 and the last I had seen the rain was going to start any minute. I packed things up and headed down the mountain hoping to be able to get the edits done and the blog finished before it was time to head to bed. It appears as though I have accomplished just that. At the time I am typing this the time is 9:21 and I’m getting sleepy. I’ve got about another hour or so worth of work to do before I am done down here, so I timed it all out pretty well.
Thank you for joining me on today’s adventure. It was a bit more normal with more than just a couple of images to share. It was nice to be able to spend so much time with these two subjects, especially since I don’t get the opportunity that often to shoot Volkswagens, especially the vans. I know that many of those who follow my work really love these classic VW’s, and I hope that some of these photos find their way onto walls as prints. of course, I have those aspirations for every photo that I shoot. I pride myself on being able to make high quality prints from my images, so when you see them online, just know that they are reduced in size and compressed for easy uploading to this website and to social media. The master files that I have will make huge prints with so much detail it will amaze you. Making prints is truly one of my most favorite things to do with my photography, and I love the opportunity to see my work in its intended form, and I’m always thrilled to be able to share that work with you. Just let me know if you would like a print and we will get the process started.
Until next time….
