How to Keep Vertical Lines in Photographs Vertical: Number Four: Use a Longer Lens

The Rock City "Birdhouse" barn in its original location.

Another good technique for keeping the vertical lines vertical in your photographs is to back off and use a longer lens -- if you have room to do it. These aren't great examples of the technique, but are the best I could find without some deep digging in my files.

Above is the Rock City "birdhouse" barn in it's original location beside Interstate 75 in Dalton, Georgia. It was painted by Clark Byers, the original barn painter, and his son Freddie in 1967. In 2001/02 it was dismantled and put back together in a field at the foot of Lookout Mountain below Rock City. When all the other Rock City barns are gone, as they inevitably will be at some time in the future, people will still be able to see this one.

"Shotgun" houses on Georgia Highway 208 in Harris County.

This second example is from my limited edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait. They are called "shotgun" houses because the rooms are all in a row from front to back. Theoretically, one could fire a gun in the front door and the bullet would go straight through and out the back door with no obstruction. I found these three on an obscure road in west central Georgia while looking for "lost" Rock City barns. 

About the photos: Both were made with a Canon EOS A2 camera, probably with the Canon EF 28-105mm lens. The film, as usual, was Fujichrome 100.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 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 2024 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    Harris County, Georgia    shotgun house     Rock City    barns      film photography     Canon EOS A2 camera     Canon EF 28-105mm lens     Fujichrome film

The Photo-Fossil

 Musicians at the Cultural Village, Lusaka, Zambia.

Olympus OM2n, 100-300mm f4 Tokina lens, Fujichrome 100 film

(Click to enlarge)

Blog Note: As I said in my previous post, sometimes life gets in the way. Unfortunately, it's still in the way, so I'm re-posting a blog from about three years ago. I hope to get back on track soon and continue the series about perspective control.

I've been a photographer for nearly 56 years now. From 1968 to 2003 all my photographs were made on film, but in the summer of '03 I switched to digital photography. Not because I wanted to, but because it was necessary to remain competitive in my photography business. So -- 35 years with film, and 20 so far with digital, although I have exposed a few rolls of film in those years.

Several years ago I began a project to choose my 100 best photographs, with the idea that I would have them printed in a book by one of the online publishers. I haven't spent a lot of time on this, and it may turn out to be one of those projects that never get finished. I should probably pick several hundred and take the whole pile to my longtime friend, client, and ace graphic designer, Michael Largent, and let him pick.

In any case, at this point I'm only up to about 70 photos, and only seven of them were made with a digital camera. Two-thirds of my photographic life was spent working with film and only the last third working with digital. Twenty years worth of work, years when I'm supposedly a mature photographer, and yet the overwhelming majority of photos that I consider to be among my best were made on film.

"Why is that?" you might ask.

I can think of at least two reasons. One is that life brought me more interesting assignments in the days when I was shooting film. All my overseas documentary assignments and the Rock City Barns book were done on film. My limited edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait is a combination of film and digital photography.

The second reason is that digital can be just too easy. And that makes it too easy, for me, at least, to be careless or too easily satisfied when the little screen on the back of my camera tells me I have an okay shot. Maybe not great, but okay. Besides, "I can always fix it in Photoshop!"

In this digital era, cameras can select the proper exposure and focus themselves. All the photographer has to do is frame the shot and choose the instant to press the shutter button. And ways have now been invented to capture the proper instant even if the photographer misses it. The only skill left to the photographer is composition.

By the end of the film era, cameras were pretty good at choosing exposures, but smart photographers learned to fine-tune the settings. Autofocus was also in wide use. But photographers still had to master timing and composition. I believe film helped us be much more careful with focus, exposure, timing, and composition because there was always a little meter in the back of our heads, keeping a running account of costs. In short, I believe shooting film made me a better photographer.

Or maybe I'm just a photo-fossil.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 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 2024 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     film photography     Olympus OM2n camera    Tokina 100-300mm f4 lens Fujichrome 100 film    Zambia

I Like Cameras, But . . .

Shaped logs on the beach at Madras, India

Blog Note: As it says in the fine print at the bottom of every blog post, "I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way." Well, yesterday and today, life did get in the way, so I'm reposting a blog from 2020 that says some important things about my approach to photography.

I do like cameras. I like them a lot. But, relatively speaking, I don't write about them all that much. I'm told by photo-blogging friends that if I were to write about cameras more often I would have more readers. Many people want to read and learn about the latest and greatest in the camera world because they have bought into the lie that better cameras would make them better photographers. Unfortunately, that's not the way it works, because photography is not about cameras, but about life. What we do with our cameras if we are truly photographers and not just gadgeteers is record life as we see and experience it.

I may not have as many readers this way, but as I say in the introductory column to your left, I write the blog I would like to read if someone else were to write it.

So I would rather write about photography itself, rather than cameras. (Cameras are certainly necessary to do photography, but cameras themselves are not photography).

Or about life. Or about my life in photography. Cameras are the key that opened the door to this life, but they are not the life itself. Nonetheless, I owe those little tools big time. My cameras have taken me to many places I could never have gone and opened the door to many experiences I would never have had. So I'm grateful.

But when I write, I like to write, not about the cameras, but about the places they have taken me. And about the things they have made it possible for me to see and experience.

Because of my cameras, I was able to see fishermen come down to the city beach at Madras, India early in the morning to lash rough-hewn logs into a makeshift boat, launch it through the surf, and move out to a day's fishing.

With my cameras I have driven many thousands of miles to create books about the barns of Rock City and the backroads of Georgia. Although I lived in Georgia for 45 years, I did not realize just how much I loved the state until a stranger looked at my photographs and told me what he saw in them.

Perdue's Mill near Clarkesville, Georgia

Through my camera, I saw the setting sun throw a beam parallel to the ground and against the wall of a rural mission hospital in Nigeria, creating a scene of beauty and mystery.

Because of my cameras I was able to attend a worship service of the Underground Church in Moscow. Something few westerners have ever seen.

With my camera I watched Dr. Jaime Gomez dispense medicine and the Gospel to the people of a remote village in the mountains of northern Guatemala.

My cameras have given me access to a blessed, privileged life. But the credit does not go to the cameras, nor to me. The credit goes to a loving and supportive wife and to the One named in the line that appears at the bottom of this page and on every blog I post.

And now. . .a word about the cameras! Photos one, two, four, five, and six were made with Olympus OM film cameras and Fujichrome film. Photo number three was made with an Olympus E-M5 digital camera

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 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 2024 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     film photography     Olympus OM film cameras     Olympus E-M5 digital camera     Madras, India     Perdue's Mill     Nigeria     Moscow, Russia     Guatemala    Fujichrome film

How to Keep Vertical Lines Vertical in Photographs: Number Three: Crop

The Queen Anne-style Meriwether County Courthouse in Greenville, GA was built in 1903.

I had to search through my files for a bit to find an example of cropping as a way to keep vertical lines vertical because I don't often need to use this technique.

It's simple, and similar to the one I wrote about in the previous post: back off or zoom out until the subject is positioned in the top of the frame with the camera level and the vertical lines vertical. Make the photo, then, if there's nothing interesting or significant in the foreground, in Photoshop or whatever program you use, crop off as much as you like to achieve the composition you want.

Actually, what I did here was turn the camera to make a photo in vertical format, lined it up so that the lines of the courthouse were vertical in the top part of the frame, then cropped off the bottom half. Below is what the courthouse looked like in the original photo before cropping. (I also cropped off a bit of the top.)

The courthouse before cropping.

This photograph, which was made for my limited edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait, is a good example of the cropping technique. It illustrates the point that the camera must be kept level so that vertical lines in the subject show as vertical lines in your viewfinder. Grid lines in your screen will be very helpful if you have them. Most recent digital cameras can be set to do this. In the days before digital cameras arrived, I installed screens with grid lines in all my film cameras.

I remember the first time I used this technique: it was very early in my professional career and I was given an assignment to photograph a three-story parking garage in downtown Chattanooga. I didn't, in those early days, have a 4x5-inch view camera, which would have been ideal for this kind of assignment; but I did have a medium-format Bronica with a Nikkor 50mm wide-angle lens which made a 2-1/4 X 2-1/4 negative; and that was enough to make a good-sized print. I put the camera on a tripod, leveled it, and made the shot. I cropped the negative in the enlarger, made the print, and the client was happy. At least, I suppose he was -- he paid me.

About the photo: Canon EOS 5D Classic digital camera, Canon EF 24-85mm lens.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 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 2024 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     Perspective Control      Bronica camera     Nikkor lens   Photoshop     Meriwether County, Georgia     Greenville, Georgia     Georgia courthouses     Canon EOS 5D Classic camera     Canon EF 24-85mm lens