Whataphoto
I live in Texas. As a Texan, it is almost a requirement that I love my Whataburger. And I do. I really do. Too much, actually.
But the weird thing is that it wasn’t always this way. I remember being a kid in San Antonio in the 80’s and nobody really cared about Whataburger. We were McDonald’s kids. And why wouldn’t we be? McD’s had the Play Place, that collection of medieval torture devices we called a playground. Metal playgrounds in Texas were a thing in the 80’s. A sizzling, painful thing. And we loved it. I fondly remember roasting alive in the big metal cheeseburger jail, sweating buckets and getting lightheaded but refusing to come out because I wasn’t ready to go home yet.
It was good times. In high school we had Burger King, with the 99-cent Whopper. And a 99-cent anything is a winner when you’re 16 and only get $20 allowance on the weekend. $5 in gas and a Whopper and you still got about twelve or thirteen bucks for the arcade.
Whataburger was always there, but we never really paid attention to it. It wasn’t the marketing beast it is today. And I remember why I got hooked on this stuff in the first place. And it had nothing to do quality, or price. My mom’s house, where I lived off and on throughout my early adult years, was pretty remote. Driving to get something to eat anywhere meant driving into town. And when you drive into town, you have your pick of pretty much anything. Plus, WB’s weren’t exactly on every corner like they are today.
But then, Whataburger came to town. It was only five miles away. And it was way easier to go to Whataburger than anything else. So congrats, WB, you won by mere convenience. I quickly got hooked on their sweet tea and their ridiculously large cups. That was all it took, really. WB for breakfast, WB for lunch, WB for dinner. On the run? Grab a Whataburger tea. Smash that gigantic styrofoam cup into a cupholder that was never designed for such a magnificent girth.
Anyways, 20 years and an extra 20 pounds later, there I was at five o’clock in the morning, standing in front of a Whataburger two hours away from home. Why? Because like every other business that has stood the test of time, the Whataburger building has undergone a number of changes. At one time, it had an iconic A-frame building, some of which can still be seen today, re-purposed as Mexican bakeries, mostly. But there’s still this one, and even though I realize this isn’t the original style, it is one that is rapidly disappearing.
I didn’t really want to photograph it at 5 a.m., but as with most WB’s, it’s open 24 hours, which means come breakfast time that line starts getting long, fast. And trying to photograph a WB at sunset— also known as “dinner time” is probably not a great idea, either. So I arrived well before sunrise to get some “safe shots” of the place, just in case the crowds really started rolling in toward dawn.
So there I was, standing in an adjacent parking lot, rubbing my eyes, waiting for a sunrise that… didn’t happen.
I probably have the worst luck of any landscape / urban photographer, because I rarely, if ever, get lucky with a sunrise. I was hoping for the clouds to break up as the sun came up, giving me a mix of those pink and blue cotton-candy accents speckled amongst the low, gray clouds. But as my mornings usually go, the cloud cover thickened and the morning glow I was hoping for just didn’t happen.
So the photo you’re looking at is one of the early-morning “safe shots” I took. I actually shot it from both sides, but I found that I really preferred the side with the drive-thru window. It’s just a tad more interesting. It adds that human element to the scene; the early morning commuters swinging by for some breakfast, waiting patiently, saying “Hey I ordered bacon, not sausage.” The soft red glow of the tail lights painting the back fence. The sign for some Mexican Hot Chocolate Coffee. If there’s one cherry I would have liked to put on top, it would have been the employee leaning out of the window handing the customer their order. It was taken pretty early, and I was still in the thick of Blue Hour, hence the contrast and the dark, brooding sky. (The image here is appearing noticeably darker than it did in the editing software. I’ll have to look into that.)
There are no distracting elements in the shot here, with a nice paneled wooden fence along the back of the parking lot and an empty lot on the other side, allowing the diamond shape of the front facade to stand out against the sky. The incandescent lights on the sides of the dining room did clash with the flourescents on the top of the A-frame, and from the lamp post just out of the shot on the right. When there’s a mix of two opposing temperatures of light like this, the best thing to do is manually set the white balancing in-between; White balancing for one is going to make the other look even worse. I set my white balance to 5500K. That keeps the lights looking more-or-less how we’re used to seeing them, even if it’s not the most ideal. I was waiting patiently for the pinkish pre-dawn glow to overpower both of them and give me that sweet, sweet light, but alas it never happened.
Compare my final shot with a test shot (unedited) from the opposite angle.
This shot obviously came a bit later in the morning, and by this time everything was really starting flatten out. But horrible lighting aside, let’s focus on the scene itself. I felt that the drive thru order menu was a bit too far away from the building. It was fully lit, as it would be, but that big glowing box sitting out in the darkness on the far side of the frame was just too distracting. On top of that, the scene from that side was framed by both a curb along the bottom and power lines overhead. Not deal breakers in themselves, and I’ll admit they made for some cool angles to complement the A-Frame. But the final nail in this composition’s coffin was the dark building peeking out from behind the diamond-shaped front of the Whataburger. That dark square messes with the shape of the facade and just kinda kills it. There’s just too much darkness back there. In all, there was just too much clutter from this angle, and I found that I preferred the cleaner scene on the other side.
I think there’s a composition here that works. Sometimes simple is all it needs to be. I’m glad that I had the presence of mind to pursue other vantage points, but I do feel that maybe I got a little bit caught up in my own head that morning. It had been quite a while since I had done some photography of this kind, and with a 2:00 a.m. wake-up time, along with a two hour drive, just to be there, I think I put a bit more pressure on myself to get an image than I should have. I will admit that I didn’t love the final image at first. I was going to use it as a learning tool. But as I’ve been looking this image over in order to critique it for the write-up, I find that it’s actually growing on me. I realized that the one thing that was keeping me from loving the image was the fact that I absolutely did NOT get the sky that I wanted. I wanted that morning glow, some broken clouds allowing just the right mix of deep blue and orangish-pink. I wanted the ambient light to overpower the sickly green from the flourescents. I wanted to be able to increase my shutter speed just enough to keep the incandescents from being blown out. The fact that I didn’t get any of that had me driving home for two and a half hours, lamenting a wasted trip.
But as I was editing, and looking the image over, at all the small details that are captured within, I began to let go of the shot that I wanted and began to embrace the one I got. Would I have loved to have had the sky I pictured in my head? You bet your ass I would’ve. But do I still feel like it was a wasted trip? Absolutely not.