Roy's, an abandoned motel on Route 66 in Amboy, Calif. (Noel Kerns)

Dallas-based photographer Noel Kernstraveled across America photographing several abandoned gas stations, motels and ghost towns in the eerie dead of night.

In order to capture his subjects at nighttime, Kerns uses long exposures that range between one to three minutes in length with some supplemental light.

And since Kerns works with very limited light, weather conditions are very vital to his work.

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“Weather has a major impact on my photography … probably even more so than for daylight photographers,” Kerns told Weather.com. If there is cloud cover in the daylight, the sun is bright enough to still provide enough light to get a photo of the subject, but the moonlight is not nearly as bright, he explained.

“Cloud cover can ruin an evening of shooting,” he said. On the other hand, cloud cover can also enhance photos if positioning is just right. “Clouds moving through a minutes-long exposure can create a beautiful and surreal effect.”

Kerns’ perfect conditions are reflected in his photo of an abandoned gas station in New Mexico titled “Retro Rocket Fuel.”

“Ideally, depending of course on the desired result, I like a full-moon night, with some light, wispy clouds moving across the sky,” he explained.

While Kerns thoroughly enjoys shooting in abandoned spaces, he has had some creepy experiences. When he was shooting alone in an abandoned house in Poetry, Texas, which has since been burned down, he got a little frightened when he started hearing noise above him.

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“It was so loud and so frantic, that I was convinced there was either a startled person or large animal of some kind up there, freaking out about someone sneaking up the stairs, and I imagined that if it was an animal, it would most likely bolt for the exit -- the very stairs where I was standing.”

After he ran down the stairs and nothing followed he decided to go upstairs and see what the noise was coming from and saw that there was nothing there.

“I still have no idea for sure what was up there,” Kerns said. “It sounded huge, generating in my estimation, far too much noise for it to have been a bird of prey of some sort, but there was an open window up there, and no animal to be found!”

Kerns has been “compelled by abandoned places” since he started taking photos when he was a young boy. “There’s something about these places and the stories you can glean from exploring them that reaches inside you and links you to the past in a very personal way.

To see more of Kerns’ work visit his and check out his book “Nightwatch – Painting With Light” available .