Who was Dave?

Daves. Meriwether County, Georgia

Who was Dave? What kind of place was this? A country store? A bar or restaurant? 

Located on a connecting road between U.S. Highway 27ALT and Georgia Highway 16 south of Greenville (as best I remember), this boarded-up old building asks only questions and provides no answers.

I love photographs with a bit of mystery. Photographs that ask more than they reveal. Perhaps that's why I love to photograph the old and the abandoned, the worn out and the passing away. They speak of people we will never know, of lives lived in obscurity.

There were many abandoned houses in the country neighborhood in southern Indiana where I grew up. I remember being fascinated by them. Quite a few were large, two-story, almost mansions, in fact. They witnessed of a prosperous but long-gone time in the early 20th century when they sat on hills, surrounded by large farms of fertile bottom-land.

Years later I drove around and photographed some of them. To what purpose, I had no idea at the time. I just found them interesting.

All of which makes me kind of an odd duck, I reckon.

I made this photo in December, 2012, when Louise and I went to Pine Mountain to see the Christmas lights at Callaway Gardens. The camera was a digital Olympus E-M5 and the lens was the Panasonic 14-140mm f3.5-5.6. I wish I could give the exact location, but the travel notebook I used from about 2005 to 2016 has been lost.

Signed copies of the new second edition of Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to me at 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography     travel     Georgia     Olympus digital cameras     Olympus E-M5     Panasonic lenses     Callaway Gardens

We Sold Our Baby!

Our lovely Grand Design Reflection 5th-wheel trailer. Our home for two years.

 Sorry I missed posting on Monday. Sometimes life just gets in the way. We had taken a deposit on our trailer a few weeks ago, and yesterday (Tuesday) the new owners, a nice couple from Forsyth, Georgia, came to pick it up. 

We loved that little home on wheels, and were extremely comfortable in it. In fact, the interior was so well laid out that we were as comfortable in it as we are in our 1750-square-foot town home. 

Unfortunately, while we loved living in it, traveling with it was a different story. A rig that's big enough for comfortable living is also big enough for cumbersome traveling. Moreover, just after we bought it, the price of diesel fuel shot up to more that double. 

Our original purpose in getting an RV was travel. And we were not doing that, or at least, not nearly as much as we want to. So the plan now, if the Lord is willing and our health is good, is to buy a small motor home or small trailer and light truck next spring and hit the road west. We haven't seen Glacier National Park, or Yosemite, or the redwoods yet, and so much more.

We have mixed emotions about saying goodbye to our baby, but as always, we're looking forward to whatever the future may hold.

Signed copies of the new second edition of Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to me at 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:     RVs     Grand Design Reflection     5th-wheel trailers

The Underequipped Photographer?

 

c.1950 Nash Ambassador. Old U.S. Highway 27, Chattooga

County, GA. Jpeg from Fuji X-Pro1, 27mm f2.8 lens. I like the

way the X-Pro1  handles this very contrasty scene.

 

(This is an update of a post I wrote three years ago, on October 16, 2020.)

Some photographers might consider me underequipped. That's because my approach to photography is not equipment-centric. 

Owning and using fine, precision equipment can be very pleasurable in itself, and of course there are certain kinds of photography, such as action and sports that are difficult to do well without specialized equipment.  

But in truth, most of us could get by with very little equipment. In the 1930s through the '60s, photographers such as Fritz Henle traveled the world with nothing but a twin-lens reflex. Their pictures can certainly hold their own in comparison to the work being done today. Edward Weston did most of his work with an 8x10 view camera and one lens, although he also used a 4x5 Graphlex single-lens reflex (we would consider it almost unusably primitive) for portraits. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt were Leica photographers who mostly used 50mm lenses, and travel photographer Gerald Brimacombe did great work with a pair of early digital cameras with built-in zoom lenses. The last time we corresponded he told me that he now carries one Nikon D610 and a 24-120mm zoom lens when he travels. Nothing else. Like those named above, he has adapted his vision to fit the equipment he uses.

I will confess that for most of my career I had Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS). However, being frugal (okay a cheapskate), I mostly indulged my addiction by buying, using, and selling second-hand equipment. It was fun, and didn't break the bank. Also, I learned a lot about how to buy good used equipment. In fact, everything I now own was acquired second-hand and serves me well.

All the photographs in my series of posts about our RV tour of the west in 2018 were made with just three cameras and three lenses -- the Fujifilm X-Pro1, X-T1, and X-T20 bodies and the 27mm f2.8, 16-50 f3.5-5.6, and 50-230 f4.8-6.3 Fujicron lenses. All were bought used through on-line fora. The workhorse was the X-T20. 

However, I did run into one problem, because each camera has slightly different menus. I wrote about that here. In a sideways move, I bought a Fuji X-H1. Again, used, through an online forum. The X-H1 is a little larger and heaver, so it balances well with an on-camera flash and my recently acquired 55-200mm zoom. I'll  hang on to the X-T20 as my everyday carry because it's small and light, and the X-Pro1 because the menu is relatively simple and the files have a special character that I love. I still have a too-many-menus problem, but it doesn't seem to be as much of a problem any more. Maybe I'm just getting better.

The X-T1, a lovely camera, is the odd man out, so it's now for sale.  

I've also recently acquired a Fujicron 60mm f2.4 macro lens. It's a good focal length for portraits, and I can also use it to copy and digitize my best photos from 35 years of shooting slides without having to go through the slow process of scanning. With these three bodies and four lenses I have what I need. I don't need anything else. 

So am I underequipped? I don't think so. I love cameras, but when I have the equipment I need to do the work I want to do, I'm more interested in what I can do with it than in the equipment itself. And I no longer have GAS.  

Of course, there are a few things it would be nice to have. . .like maybe the 56mm f1.2 or the 90mm f2. . .?

Signed copies of the new second edition of Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to me at 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags: photography    Fritz Henle     Edward Weston     Henri Cartier-Bresson     Elliott Erwitt     Fujifilm X-H1     Fujifilm X-T20     Fujifilm X-T1     Fujifilm X-Pro1     Fujicron lenses

An Old Chevrolet

Derelict Chevrolet, Keith Road, Catoosa County, Georgia

 

As I think I've written before, I used to take an occasional Sunday afternoon and ramble around back roads to see what I could see. I especially did this between 1975 and 1985, and most of my rambles were in Catoosa County, Georgia because that's where we lived in those days. We were at the north end of the county, so I mostly went south. Going north would have taken me into Chattanooga, where there were many things to photograph, but not the things I was interested in at the time. I was mostly looking for farm scenes and old things.

 

I believe this old car is a 1934 Chevrolet. I remember some friends of my family having one in the late 1940s, and the pictures I can find on the internet seem to confirm that year; although most of the photos on the 'net show versions that have been heavily customized.

 

Now grill-less, motor-less, and headlight-less, someone had parked the old girl on a slight rise just off the road, presumably in hope of selling her.

 

The photo was made with a twin-lens reflex camera, but I can't say which one because I had not yet begun to keep a notebook of my pictures. It was either a Yashica, a Rolleicord, or a Minolta, and the film would have been Kodak Ektachrome, with an ASA (now ISO) speed of 64. For comparison, I keep my Fuji cameras set at ISO 800 most of the time. Digital really makes things almost too easy.

 

Signed copies of the new second edition of Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to me at 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags: photography    travel   Georgia     Catoosa County     1934 Chevrolet     twin-lens reflex     Yashica     Rolleicord     Minolta     Kodak Ektachrome     Fuji cameras