Shadows

This week I visited one of my favourite photo locations, Old Car City in White, Georgia. It's always a harsh day out, with high temperatures and mean biting insects, but I was really looking forward to adding to my portfolio of fabulous paint and chrome textures on abandoned vintage cars.

I spent most of the morning focusing on one particular car, a 1940s Buick Special sitting in perfect leaf-dappled light, hoping for a nice set or even a panel of images.

In fact, it's always a challenge to shoot in this light - very bright in the sun, quite dark everywhere else. I was working with a tripod and a shutter release, using live view to save bending over to peer through the viewfinder for every single shot. It took a while to make this combination work, but after a while I thought I had it sorted.

We went for a well deserved lunch break in the diner across the road, and I checked my images more carefully. They were all slightly out of focus. I had totally not handled things in live view.

I was really frustrated to have spent so much time and effort on some well framed shots which were completely useless.

The afternoon light wasn't working on my Special. But I did, sort of, get my tripod/shutter release/live view/focus combination to work. It was a useful reminder of how much I don't know, to try to be positive.

I wasn't loving my tripod much, though, by this point, so I switched to hand-held and concentrated instead on some darker shots, with shadows and suggestions, a little bit Gothic. A slight salvage of a painful day.