The Artful Engineer

The barn above was just around the corner from where we stayed last month in Traverse City, Michigan, so it was an easy target for a brief photo outing before I started work for the day. This was one of those situations where you had to choose between color in the sky early and light on the barn late. A little earlier, the sky still had some color but, while nice, it was nothing special, certainly not special enough to carry the image alone. With the barn in darkness, one strategy would have been to silhouette it against the sky, but the barn and silo barely extend above the treeline behind them, so that wasn’t very promising. In the end, this image, with the face of the barn lit by warm morning light, worked nicely even without much happening in the sky. There are some secondary things that help this image: the light hitting the tops of the silo and far roof; and the light raking along the right hand side of the barn, giving it texture. The single vertical board that is catching the light on the right hand side helps tie that wall to the face of the barn because of the color alone. The deeply shadowed foreground and sides wrap the barn in a strong vignette, while the overgrown concrete area in front of the barn breaks up the dark lawn, keeping it from overwhelming the image.

In this next image, the water tanks are the main event and are placed centrally. The result is sort of an environmental portrait of some water tanks. In addition to their central placement, there are a lots of rooflines that point at them from both sides. The converging parallels of the barn’s siding on the left also point at them, too. So, those other buildings don’t overwhelm the water tanks or confuse what the image is about, despite the fact that they also have a lot of interesting details worth looking at.

I will mention that had a dramatic sky been available, the water tanks, perched on their open-trussed platforms, would have made for an interesting silhouette in a way that the previous barn and silo couldn’t.

This next image is quite graphic with the bold triangular roof against the sky. It’s shape is emphasized by the dark strokes of the shadows under the eaves. The oxidized red complements the blue sky well, and the windows are nicely distributed around the image. Being the same size and shape, they all tie together nicely, but each has its own personality. There is a lot to like about how they are arranged: the two that are boarded over are on a line parallel to the right hand side roofline; the three others make a triangle that mirrors the shape of the roof itself, albeit flipped upside down; the missing panes in the right window make a dark accent point while the unpainted plywood inside the left window make a light accent point; etc. It’s also nice that there is a little cloud in the upper left to help keep that blue wedge from being too dominant—there isn’t any way to crop more of it away without losing other important things in the image.

This next image is a different view of the same building above, but taken on a shaded side. While I immediately liked the image, the shade renders what is obviously the same paint color very differently and I worried that it would clash with the others. Sometimes I will take a misfit image and use it as an Image of the Week on the home page where it can stand alone. But in this case, I realized that the reflection in the window did match the other images. I did need to carefully brighten those reflections a bit, and did add a little bit of warmth to them, too, but those were really just tweaks to what was already there. It was tricky to do because the windows are partially painted over and generally filthy: the whitish streaks on the window are very blue because they are in shadow like everything else, and what you see on the window is a blend of that and the reflection itself. It took a some manual brush-work in Lightroom, but I think the result was worth it. I also touched up the center and right-hand windows, too, because they were picking up the warmly-lit reflections of some trees, so enhancing the left-hand reflections would have looked odd without enhancing the others. I’ll also point out that the reason that my reflection in the windows wasn’t an issue is because that one window in the center was boarded up, which saved me having to try to remove my reflection.

The final result is an image with some interesting contrasts but still ties, color-wise, to the earlier ones in this set. The vines are a strong complementary green, too, and the vines reaching up the wall all happen to point at the all-important window on the left. The vines also make a nice base for the image and the sliver of roof caps it on the top. The repeating ends of the rafters make an interesting pattern, too.

Since red is easily the most common color for barns, a green one was guaranteed to get my attention. This straight-on view works well with the bold white elements: the window frame and the fascia board. The sliding door, being green like the wall, is subtler, but still sets up a big square–little square pairing. The light-colored foundation with the dark-stained lower portion of the wall also echoes the white trim and shadow under the eaves. Compositionally, most of the features run horizontally, but the siding makes a contrasting vertical pattern. When you add in the color palette, variety of textures, peeling paint, and bit of reflection in the window as an accent, the image has a lot going for it.

This cute little building—too small for me to call it a barn and too big for me to call it a shed—was really beautifully lit. I didn’t want to tramp through someone’s yard in the early morning so I settled for this shot through a gap between bushes. The only problem was that there was a big nasty electrical box on the lawn in front of it. Fortunately, it was easy to excise with Lightroom’s generative remove, something I knew I would do when I clicked the shutter.

I hope that you enjoyed these images from Michigan. It is definitely a barn-rich state where driving random roads is rewarded. We will stick with Michigan for another week or two before moving on to other adventures. I hope you will come back to see them!