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I love taking road trips with other like minded photographers, my wife, or by myself if I can’t find anyone to come with me. Generally when I take any kind of trip that’s more than hour away I like to research the areas that I travel through and the surrounding areas for possible places to shoot. But as of mid June of 2015 I haven’t had the time or the budget to take any long distance road trips.
Over the last couple of years I have been researching and planning 24 hour, 48 hour, and 72 hour road trips to cover all the areas of West Texas and the southern parts of the Panhandle to continue where I left off on my previous visit to the area and revisit a few sites. Then in early September I was able to make it back to west Texas. Today I want to share with you my September 2017 West Texas Road Trip.
This article is a summary version of the 750 mile round trip that started in my small town of Blue Ridge, Texas to where I met up with a friend in Decatur, Texas and then traveled to Floydada, Texas.
That trip was crazy long but I had a lot of fun and I got to hang out with a fellow rural photographer. Our trip took about 16 hours to complete with many stops along the way. We started at 6 am (I left 4 am where we met in Decatur, Texas) and I got home around 2 am I think. I really can’t remember that night much. I had only about 2 hours of the sleep before we left for the trip.
Why Only A Day Trip?
My photographer friend and I have different schedules and neither one of us could line up our days off in a row for a two or three day trip. So as much as we wanted to spend a couple of days on the road, we decided for a quick explore of the area. Our goal was to only stop at a few leads that I had, stop at places of interest, or locations of opportunity, and spend no more than 30 minutes to an hour at each spot. During our travels we also marked spots on Google Maps for a return explore.
Our Stops
Or original plan was to travel down HWY 380 and travel at least as far as Post, Texas and then loop around and head south east towards Anson, Texas and explore the surrounding areas. But once we met up, we decided to head north west and get as far as Paducah, Texas and head south until we hit 380 and head home.
We made a lot of stops along the way. We stopped to photograph and document the schools, churches, towns, and abandoned homesteads along the way. To see the complete articles and more pictures, make sure to check the article over at VanishingTexas.com
About the Images
The images were shot by hand or by tripod at different times of the day. Most shots were done without the aid of a flash. I used a Sony A6000 with a Sony E 55-210mm F4.5-6.3 Lens or a Sony SEL16F28 16mm f/2.8 Wide-Angle Lens. The images were then edited using Adobe Lightroom to crop, straighten and clean up the images. I used Google NIK Collection (and sometimes Topaz Labs Clarity to help give some of the images that bit of extra details) to add detail, add contrast, and sharpen/remove noise. As always my images are for sale with or without the watermark in digital and prints. Please contact me via the contact page for more information.
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