While driving sections of Route 66 through New Mexico, I remembered that Rick Sammon had once posted a photo of the historic Blue Swallow Motel on his photography blog. So, I made plans to spend a night at the motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico. That way, it would be convenient to capture a picture of the motel and vintage sign when the light was best.

Blue Swallow MotelBlue Swallow Motel at 815 E. Tucumcari Boulevard (Route 66) in Tucumcari, New Mexico on August 8, 2014

The reviews were very positive regarding this motel. And, in my judgment those reviews are accurate. The motel is very clean and reasonably priced.

I arrived in the middle of the afternoon. While checking in, I had two questions for the owner. Was he going to turn on the sign? Would he leave the vintage automobile parked under the sign? He replied that he turns on the sign every night. Also, he always parks a car in front of the office so that higher vehicles won't pull under and potentially damage the sign.

After shooting for a while in downtown Tucumcari, I made sure to get situated in time to capture a twilight image of the motel. If I were to wait much longer, the sky would go completely black and the scene would lose a significant amount of color and detail. So, I began shooting just after sunset.

Getting into position to shoot this motel at twilight in the small town of Tucumcari took a lot of planning, so I was disappointed by what happened next. Just as I was about to start shooting, a vehicle (SUV) pulled up behind the vintage car. For the longest time, he left his headlights on and they were positioned to shine directly into my lens. Then, he left the car parked there and entered the lobby--where he stayed talking to the owner for at least 45 minutes (until well after I packed up and left).

I also had to deal with another challenge. A white car pulled up next to the blue motel door just behind the vintage car. It was a modern white vehicle and ruined the scene in my opinion. What made it worse is that the motel guest kept walking up behind the vintage car and looking into my camera. He seemed curious as to what I was doing and it took for what seemed forever for him to leave the frame.

Now, I had very little flexibility with my composition. I kept moving the tripod up and down, left and right, to minimize the distraction of these two vehicles that didn't really belong in the scene. Notice how I've mostly blocked the SUV by positioning it behind the vintage car. At the same time, I kept moving left to use the sign to block the white car parked just left of the motel. My positioning was within an inch or two of where it needed to be to take care of both vehicles at the same time.

A final challenge was dealing with a blinking neon sign. I made sure to open the shutter while the sign was fully lit. For this five frame HDR photograph, the sign was fully lit for each of the five exposures. Fortunately, I was aware of this issue during the photo shoot.

I shouldn't complain too much. I was fortunate to get some nice weather and lighting in Tucumcari for this photograph. And, I was very pleased with how the picture turned out as well as with my stay at the historic Blue Swallow Motel.