Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Nope, your email isn’t on repeat. I know you have gotten an alert from me every day in February at this point. I would apologize for that, but I’m actually pretty happy that I have been so busy in the middle of a season when most photographers put their gear away and wait impatiently until Spring. Yet, here I am knocking it out of the park with new photos and finding more places to shoot along the way. Obviously, things would seem to be going great right about now, but today was one of those train wrecks where I really wondered if I was going to have anything at all worthwhile to share with you. It certainly didn’t start out that way though.
This trek actually got started on Sunday morning when I was photographing a location in Traphill which I have been trying to secure permission for several years now. As I was talking with the property owner, she advised me of a relative of hers that had a lot of old cars on his property. She told me the road he was on and gave me a brief description of the area. There was no way that I was going to be able to get out there to shoot the property by the time I was done with her’s, so I just filed it away in my mind for another time. As you have seen, that trek has taken me a while to work through with the last of the blogs going out yesterday morning. As it turned out, Toni and I had a guest during the early afternoon which was a really nice break from being down at the computer editing and typing. Maxine had come up just to meet me and talk photography for a bit after following my work for something like eight years. It was quite humbling to meet a “fan” of my work and I was beyond flattered. We talked a lot about going around and finding different locations to shoot as she is a bit of a photographer herself.
I remember telling her about the most recent session in Traphill and how it had morphed into something much more than I had imagined. I also shared how I had been given a hint for another property not too far away. Because we had been talking about the weather conditions that I like to work in, I mentioned that Wednesday was supposed to have some good clouds as well which would make it a great day to go out and start to work the new property. Of course, I had to say how exhausted I was after all the work that I had been doing with my recent shoot, but I was needing the cloudy day to make the most out of the trek, and with Spring right around the corner, I didn’t want to lose the openness of the bare trees and reduced vegetation. It was seeming like I was going to be hoisting the camera bag back on my back once again for another trek in the first full week of February.
Looking at the weather, the clouds were supposed to be pretty thick all day, with them increasing during the afternoon. The clouds would be mid and high level to start with and then the low level clouds would join in during the mid afternoon. It seemed like it was going to be a perfect day. It even looked that way when I woke up a little later than planned, but still very early in the day. The clouds were looking great, and it appeared that there were more rolling in from the West. I got my morning chores done and got ready to roll out. The sky was still looking great and the light was nearly perfect for what I was hoping for.
Within a mile after turning out of the driveway, I could see shadows starting to form. I looked up and saw that the sun had found a thin spot in the clouds. This wasn’t a problem because the clouds were plenty thick enough to cover it back up in a few minutes. It did, and I continued out to Traphill anxious to see what was waiting for me. The sky was starting to change though, and I hadn’t even been driving for five miles yet. The clouds were thinning and the sun was getting kind of bright. I could see that the clouds were still looking good to the Northwest which was where I was headed so I just hoped that they would hold out for a bit longer.
By the time I arrived in Traphill, the sky was a hazy blue and the sun was shining brightly. Looking around, I didn’t see much hope that things would cloud back over any time soon. I was here though, might as well see what I had to work with. If the cars were in open light, I would be able to do something with them at least, but I was pretty sure that they were going to be in the woods, at least partially based on the satellite image I had seen.
When I got to the place that I thought was going to be the property, I saw a lot of newer cars all jumbled together in a field. I didn’t see much of anything that I might have wanted to shoot, so I kept driving down the road. I eventually found a side street with an old barn at the corner surrounded by several shells of old cars. I pulled down on the side road and looked a bit closer. The light was kind of harsh, but I did see some possibilities here. I continued down the road and saw some more cars here and there which looked really good. I found a guy leaving his house and asked if he owned this property I was looking at. He didn’t, but told me where to find the owner Jeff across the street. He even drove out with me to help me find him.
I went down the long driveway and got out to knock on the door. There were dogs inside, but no answer at the door. It really looked like somebody was home so I went around saying “Hello…Hello”, but to no avail. The sun was getting brighter and I was afraid that I would be wasting an ask at this point because I doubted that I would be able to do anything with these cars now. I just got back on the road and started driving through Traphill because I knew that this area has always provided some great subjects for me to shoot.
However, it wasn’t looking like a good photo day at all at this point. The sky was barely hazed over with clouds at this point, and it was mostly blue. The sun was bright enough that I had my sunglasses on which normally means that it is much too bright to work with. I resigned to the fact that this was going to be a scouting mission at this point and I was probably not going to get a single photo. This was kind of heartbreaking for me after thinking I would likely be out all day long capturing new subjects. Now, I was just squinting and trying to find something for another time.
I eventually turned down a road that I had been on many times before and it reminded me of all the times that I had been out here looking for an old Ford truck sitting in front of a barn. I had found it by accident after a workshop many years ago and stopped to grab a couple of shots before the light failed completely. I was exhausted and still needed to drive about an hour back home in Winston, but I managed to get a couple of frames that I felt were good enough to keep. I’ve actually done one of them as a metal print for a client which tells me that it was a fairly successful photograph. I’m always excited to provide a printed version of my work for clients who find the photos suitable for hanging on their walls.
Anyway, I ended up talking about the location with another client a few years later on and she was wondering where it was located. I couldn’t remember exactly, so I went out there to try and retrace my steps as to how I found it. It was gone, even going by the GPS instructions for the back way to the highway since I had to take a detour thanks to road construction on I-77. I spent an hour driving around out there and couldn’t find it to save my life. Every time I went out that way for a year or more I would look for this barn without success. Then one day I was driving around without my camera and happened upon the barn. I was so excited that I did a screenshot of the location and sent it to my client. I figured I would always remember where it was at after all this, and I felt that I would probably want to come back to it again sometime in the future.
Well, the day came when I thought that I might want to go back out and try my luck with the scene once again. I had my camera and went out to where I thought it was at and wasn’t able to find it once again. How in the world did this happen? Why is this barn like my Kryptonite. Back to the driving around in an attempt to find this barn which apparently moves regularly along with a Ford that I don’t think has moved under its own power in thirty years or more. There was just no finding it at all.
Now that I was driving on a very familiar road, I thought to myself that it would be a hoot to find this barn once again by accident when I had my camera but the lighting was terrible. It would be just my dumb luck to run across the barn when I would be able to get a good shot of it. Wait a minute….what is that in the distance??? I can’t believe it. There is that stupid barn and truck right where I left it. The question was, why had I missed it so many times while driving through the area? I had no idea, but here I was and the barn was looking like it was about to fall over on itself which kind of put me in a bind. If I didn’t shoot it today, there was a great chance that I would lose it again, and by the time I found it, it might be no more. I decided that the sun was at least on the right side of the barn and the shadows weren’t too bad at all. The sky could use a little work, but I figured that I could make due with it.
I drove over to the house that I figured was where the owner lived because if I was going to shoot it, I might as well do everything that I could to get the right shot which might mean getting in closer than I had been able to last time. There were signs posted at the house that stated if I could read this, then I was within range. My thought was that they needed a longer raged weapon because I was 15 feet from the door. I knocked and heard nothing on the inside. I waited for a moment and didn’t hear anyone moving, and I heard not firearms being cocked which was a good thing. Figuring that nobody was home, I got back in the truck and went back over to where the barn was.
This barn is in a fenced field next to an event center of some sort which had its own fence. There was an area between the two fences that I figured I could get between to get a little closer than I had before. i was a bit more timid the last time because it was nearly dark when I was out there, and I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea of what I was doing. Now that it was the middle of the day, I just parked right on the shoulder of the road to keep my truck visible and grabbed the camera with the standard zoom lens attached. I also clipped on the polarizer as I like to do in almost all situations and I went to find the right spot to put the camera.
This was kind of a slow process because I wanted to stay as close to the road as possible, but needed to get closer to the barn, and more to the side of it which would allow me to move the Ford away from the barn in comparison to how I had shot it before. When I finally landed on what I thought would be the right spot, I started to frame up the composition. The sky was very bright so I decided to minimize it which put me in the same situation that I had been in the last time with a close crop on the barn and just a little sky above the trees. It was what I had to work with though. I fired off a few shots like that and started to evaluate what I had. As I was looking at the image review, I could see faint lines of clouds in the sky above. I double checked with my eyes in real time and could see clouds moving over the barn. This might work out well after all. I changed up the composition and moved the camera slightly more to the right to spread things out in the scene.
I fired off a test frame and saw that the sky looked a little bright. I ran back to the truck and grabbed my filter wallet so that I could slide in a 3-stop soft grad to even out the exposure. I did that, and the histogram looked fine, but I wasn’t seeing any definition in the clouds with that filter. It was darkening things too much, so I switched that filter out for a 2-stop version and tried it again. It was better, but there was still no definition in the sky. I was going to have to pull the clouds out in post which I knew I could do easy enough, but I needed to have a brighter point of reference in the clouds to make it work. I pulled the grad filter off and shot the scene as it was knowing that the bright sky would contain the white point that I needed while I could then add enough contrast to pull the blue sky back down to a workable level.
The first frame that I shot which I felt was going to work well showed me another issue that had to be dealt with. There was a breeze now which was blowing a piece of siding on the barn as well as some aluminum gutter trim. This was blurring in the image when I looked to the image review. This forced me to make some exposure changes and then I started waiting for the breeze to calm. When that happened, I fired off another frame, but realized that the siding was still swinging like a pendulum. I was going to have to wait for not breeze and for the momentum of the siding to stop before the next breeze. Yeah, this was not an easy shot to get. I’m actually embarrassed by the fact that I shot 20 frames of this composition and the one that you see here was number 19.
It might have taken longer than I wanted, but I finally had the first image in the bag. It was a hard won shot, but I felt that it was going to be well worth it when I got it home. Little did I know that I would like this photo so much. It was the first one that I edited and it was the one that took the longest because of the work that had to be done to the sky, but when it was finished, it was quite a bit better than the first attempts, and I thought it fit in very well with my current level of work. The fact that I shot it on a day when the light was less than ideal and it came out so good is amazing. I guess this barn just appears when I can get a decent photograph of it, and it hides the rest of the time.
It felt good to get a photo, and I would have been happy to drive on home at that point, but I really wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out after seeing it on the back of the camera in the bright sun. I really wanted to get one more location shot before calling it a day. The sky was still very bright overhead, but it looked like there were more clouds to the North which was where I decided to go. I ended up going up US 21 into Aleghany County which is a route that I haven’t taken in a very long time. I remembered there being some good subjects out that way and into Virginia if I ended up going that far up. The thing that I was most interested in was the sky, and that was where the clouds looked to be.
When I got into the twisty parts of the road, the clouds seemed to disappear from sight more often than they were in view. There was getting to be only a sliver of a direction where the clouds could be found. Was I chasing them away? I wished I could harness this power when I was out in the Miata which loves to be in the full sunlight. This was crazy though. The entire day was supposed to be socked in with clouds and I was fully expecting some drizzle with the clouds as thick as they were supposed to be in the afternoon, yet here I was around 11am looking through my sunglasses and squinting at the bright light.
When I got into Sparta, I considered turning around and just heading home. I had been gone all morning long and it wasn’t looking like I was going to be able to find the clouds at all that I was expecting to see out here. About the time I figured that I would get turned around, I recognized the area that I was driving though. If I was right, there would be a small barn off on the right side of the road that I had shot before. It might work out this time as well, it was worth a look. Sure enough, I found the barn, but it wasn’t looking good in the light and the sky wasn’t looking good overhead either. I continued on for just a bit longer to get turned around and then I saw some old rusted vehicles on the side of the road. This was another area that I had shot before on my first trip into Sparta maybe in 2016 or possibly 2017. I had ended up with a few keepers from this area and figured it was worth looking at once again.
When I pulled onto the side road, I saw that the house which had been across the street had apparently caught on fire recently and was now vacant. The patch of land between the two roads was still filled with all kinds of rusty vehicles from tractors, to heavy duty trucks, and even a small French car. While the light wasn’t great, and I didn’t much care for the sky, I saw a few vehicles in the collection that caught my eye.
I looked really hard to see if there were any signs saying that I couldn’t be there which I found none. There were no fences, and with this being between two roads that surrounded it like a “V”, there was no way that I would not be seen doing what I was doing. I decided to risk it and parked right there on the shoulder, visible to both roads and got the camera out and built. I started out with the 24-70mm lens because I wanted to try and get an old Sunbeam box truck photographed and figured that a mid focal length would do the job. It was the right lens, but not the right setting because no matter what I did, there was no way to make the background work for the photo. The best I was going to be able to do was to get a snapshot of a cool old truck which was not my intention or goal for being out here.
What I ended up doing was moving in close to the truck to get some isolations. I tried a lot of new things that just didn’t work at all until I finally ended up working the area behind the hood and over the fender which is a pretty common composition for me. I chose to work on the shaded side of the truck for this shot so that the lighting was a little better. I was finally able to get something to work out from that angle and had my first keeper shot from this location that I was reasonably happy with. I then moved around the lot for a while and worked some of the other vehicles but kept running into compositional issues that I just didn’t like at all. Maybe this trek just wasn’t supposed to happen and I should be happy that I managed to get one or two keepers at this point.
Well, I decided to try one last thing. I haven’t been using my telephoto lens much this year and I was starting to wonder if I was going to move back to using that standard zoom as my primary lens. This is definitely one of those times when I would have used the telephoto in the recent past because it was experiences like this which prompted me to start using it a couple of years ago which quickly made it one of my favorite lenses for quite some time. I went back to the truck and swapped the lens out for the long one and started to look at the bread truck once again. Nothing was jumping out at me, but there was an old Dodge truck that was parked in the middle of everything that caught my eye. It was a plain truck and I am not sure why I was drawn to it, but I went over and started to look around it to see if there were any areas that jumped out as good photographs.
As an old standby for me, I stopped at the driver’s side fender and looked at the emblem that was attached. It identified the truck and told part of the story. There wasn’t really any patina here, but there was some lichen attached to the body above the emblem which I kind of liked. Figuring out the composition wasn’t all that simple, but once I decided that I wanted to include the door for the cool tones of the paint, things got a lot easier. The teal blue worked great with the red in the emblem which allowed me to captured some very nice color balance while the lichen and limited patina rounded out the textures within the photo.
The next view I seemed to be drawn to was the area around the driver’s door and the fuel filler. I liked the chrome bits and the fact that the door was a different color from the cab corner. I could see that the window was covered in the film of age which caused the steering wheel to kind of fade away inside of the cab. I started to work out a composition with those elements and quickly landed on one that I liked pretty well. After playing with the depth of field in order to get the right emphasis on the elements that I wanted, I was able to throw another one into the bag. I felt like it was good enough to look at further when I got home even though it was a pretty simple composition.
The last composition came as a bit of a surprise for me as it was just of the paint and rust on the hood. There were no real lines that were visible around the interesting colors and textures, so I just framed up a few shots around those elements. I wasn’t sure if the photos would turn out, but I felt that the color combination between the rust and the teal paint made for a very compelling argument to capture a few photos here. I tried both vertical and horizontal approaches and experimented with depth of field as well. It was one of the earlier ones that I ended up processing when I got home. It was the simple diagonals that worked so well with the composition. The subsequent ones were just a little to spastic when I looked at them on the computer screen.
I was happy to have the one as a keeper because I do like doing photos like this without any true structure as far as lines go. It was just a photo of random rust which makes for a nice abstract which I am always excited to add to my collection. It was the color combination that made this shot though. I just really loved how it all worked together and I think that is why I spent so much time with the Dodge and got so many photos from it. That teal blue just really set things off and I was digging the color for sure.
The subject that I had spent the most time with was the bread truck, and up to this point, I had a lot of attempts, but nothing that really stood out from the crowd. In fact, the only keeper that I had from this subject thus far was my standard cowl composition which just didn’t ring through as special to me since I have shot that same composition so many times over the years now. I did want to come back to the old truck and try some more things with it, which I did after I got done with the Dodge.
One area that I seemed to be drawn to was the handle on the passenger side at the accordion door. There was a lot of really texture rich rust and flaking paint in this area and with the bright sun on this side, there was a nice and deep shadow that I wanted to play with. There were a lot of compositions that I shot here that included the whole handle with portions of the windows, and the frame for the windshield. However, I didn’t really like those all that much and they seemed to be missing the point. Eventually, I started to reduce the composition down to just some key elements and that seemed to work out much better. I was only capturing a portion of the handle now, and used the body lines to frame that portion of the handle. This seemed to be more direct and a better translation of what I was seeing. There was still the shadow in the frame which was important, but it was the mounting hardware that I found to be most interesting along with the texture that was amplified thanks to the bright sunlight overhead.
The one thing that I wasn’t sure of was the very red overtone to the whole thing thanks to the rust. It could go either way, but I figured that I wasn’t going to like all that red in the final image. This turned out to be an accurate assumption when I got the photos home and started the processing on this one. I immediately decided that the red had to go and I wanted to do a high contrast black and white with it. This would give the shot an abstract feel and now you can’t tell if it is peeling paint on metal, or wood that is starting to splinter with age. You can recognize the handle, but the body lines around it add to confusion because they just don’t look like something from a regular car. When done in black and white, this photo began to sing on its own and it became one of my favorites from the day.
There is every chance that the photo never would have happened because it was the last attempt out of about a half dozen frames where I was trying to convey my thoughts and reactions about this element through the photo. It was a hard one to figure out and I ended doing several things that I would normally not do. I guess these breaks from the norm help to elevate this one a bit further in my mind. It was a hard fought win of an image, but I’m so glad that I stuck it out like I did.
After a few more attempts at some different compositions with the truck, I decided to move over to a backhoe tractor that was parked next to the bread truck. There wasn’t anything all that special about the tractor except it was nicely rusted. It was a Massey Ferguson which is a brand that I have photographed a decent amount in the past. I was here, and it was here, so I figured that I would give it a try. The first concept for a composition was a simple shot of the front wheel. I didn’t really like it, but it was something to get me started with the tractor. As I moved around and looked closer, I saw a chain sitting behind the seat under a loose panel. The yellow panel and the rusted chain caught my eye and I decided to do another abstract/texture shot with these two items. I made two different exposures here and moved on not sure if either of them would work or not. The last composition that I shot was of the fender and the headlight. This was one of those times when the bright sun really helped me out. It helped to brighten the yellow and give it a lot more punch, but it also put the darker areas into shadow which I really appreciated because it simplified the image. For this one, the only really creative choice that I needed to make happened to be the depth of field that I used.
I went with a very shallow depth of field so that the eyes would fixate on the light more than anything else. I wanted the rest of the frame to be in soft focus, and or in deep shadow. This worked out well, and my first thought was to flip the image horizontally so that the light would be on the right side. However, when I looked at the image for anything that would give that away, I could see the scripting on the bezel for the light. I hadn’t noticed that at the time of capture, but there was writing on that ring which would show that the image was flipped if I did that. Because of that writing, I decided to leave the shot as it was done with the light on the left. It is not a fatal flaw and the more I live with it, the more I like the visual tension with the light pointing out of frame to the left while the eyes are wanting to go to the right. It worked out quite well in this orientation, but I am very glad that I caught what would have been a glaring mistake on my part had I flipped it as I was originally intending.
When I was done with the tractor, I had a total of 55 frames shot on the camera during this trek. There had been 20 frames of the barn earlier, which means that 35 of them had been at this location. Seven of the eight keepers resulted from those last 35 frames which puts my hit count well over my average. This actually surprised me quite a bit since I had been having so many difficulties working out compositions here and the sun had been very unforgiving. At the end of the day though, I performed and got the shots which always makes me feel good. It is a simple thing to go out and make photos when everything is in your favor. It is a far different thing when you can create in conditions that you are not comfortable working in which is what I had been doing all day long at this point.
Now that I had my handful of photos, I figured it was time to return home to see what I had captured. The culling went pretty quickly as did the edits with the exception of the barn which took about 35 minutes to process. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for a photo like this, and it certainly wasn’t a matter of fixing it in post as I had done everything right in the field to be able to capture the best possible photograph in camera. The time was really spent polishing everything and making sure the light was sculpted just right and that the sky came out looking natural. I knew that this was going to be a portfolio piece for sure, and hopefully will make it onto somebody’s wall in the very near future.
Should you want to be the proud owner of the barn photo, or any of the photos seen here today, I would love to talk with you about getting a print done to your specifications. There really is no better way of viewing a photograph than in a print form. Unless you are looking at these photos through a calibrated monitor or device, there is no guarantee that you are seeing the colors that I have intended in the photo, and even the contrast and brightness could be different. When you get a print, you can rest assured that the print looks exactly as intended when I have processed the image since my monitor is constantly calibrated and proven to match print output with hundreds of prints having been made over the years. Isn’t it time to for you to have your very own print hanging on your wall?
I think that I might just take a short break from treks and blog entries now that I have been active every day this month so far. I’m ready for a weekend. I’m still wanting a nice cloudy day to go out and work the collection of cars in Traphill and I hope to make that happen sooner than later. Should that day not present itself the next time I get creative, there is a studio session that I am thinking about doing which is a new interpretation of an old photo that I did long before Toni and I got married. For those that enjoy a good game of chess, I think that you will like this photo. There are just a few things I need to work out with lighting so that I can start building out the photo and get it shot. I’m closing in on making that happen. I just need the time and energy to go through all the different steps to getting a still life photo completed.
Don’t forget there are two workshops coming up in the Spring that you don’t want to miss out on. One of them will be a photo walk through North Wilkesboro which is a very relaxing Sunday stroll where we identify and capture meaningful photos while looking at some very run of the mill scenes. The other is a constant crowd pleaser in East Bend where we spend a full day surrounded by decay subjects and learn all the different ways in which you can photograph them. There are still slots left for both workshops and time to get on the list for attending. It would be better to sign up early as there are several emails that I will send out leading up to the workshops with information that you will possibly need during the day. The sooner you get signed up, the more organized your experience will be. I hope to see you there!
Until next time….
