Sometimes you don’t get the ideal light when you show up at a place. In this case, the timing was everything, and given the agenda for our trip, we ended up at the truck lot at high noon on a very bright sunny day. Not a cloud in the sky. When that happens, you have a choice to make, and you can put the camera in the bag, head over to the store for a cold drink, and call it a day. Or, you can work with what you have. In my case, I am luckier than some as I like the impact of harsh light on some subjects. So seeing those old trucks baking in that hot sun, I knew that, for me at least, there would be lots of work to be done.
The light was so hard that there wasn’t much to romanticize about the history of these old trucks, but the reflections in the chrome and textures of peeling paint all tell an amazing story—a story of surviving in that hot sun day after day, year after year. So wondering among the trucks, I tried to focus on interesting shapes, reflections, and textures. After an hour or so, we did drift off to the corner market to get a cold drink, but I was glad we stopped and spent the time looking. You never know what you might find even in the harshest of light.
