I Sold My Truck -- Finally!

 The mighty Beast. The 2018 RAM 3500 with dual rear wheels.

My truck is sold. The new owner is picking it up tomorrow. It has been a long haul, if you'll excuse the expression, getting it off to a new home.

We sold the trailer last October, but I kept the truck until the trailer was gone because I was afraid I might need to move the trailer, and of course, couldn't do it without the truck. So I listed the truck on AutoTrader on November 1st and got six inquiries immediately. And then I came down with Covid that same day and had to inform the prospective buyers that I wouldn't  be able to show the truck for a week. They all apparently moved on, and I had few serious inquiries from then on. 

Over the following six months I kept lowering the price, but had no takers until Sunday afternoon, when a man called and came to see the truck. He checked it out thoroughly and made me an offer that was far from what I had in mind. I told him thanks, but no thanks.

After he left, I called my son Don and asked him what he thought. He said "Take it!" 

I prayed about it, and thought about how the truck had become an albatross around our necks. We need another car, but have no place to park a third vehicle and the diesel truck is too expensive to drive on a regular basis. So I called the man back. He raised his offer by a thousand dollars and I said "Deal!"

So, I'm relieved. We can move on.

This post is obviously not about photography. But as it says in the intro on the left of your screen, I write about photography, about life, and about my life in photography.This post is about life. But just to say a bit about photography, both photos were made with a Fuji X-T20 camera and the very fine (but cheap!) Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens.

 

 The Truck and 5th-wheel trailer. Ready to roll on our very first outing.

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  RAM 3500 trucks     Fuji X-T20 camera     Fujicron XC 15-50mm lens

A Final Word about Perspective Control: Put It in a Frame

 

Blog Note: I didn't want to leave the subject of perspective control without mentioning a very important way to do it -- put the subject in a frame. I've written about this in the past, so this is a repost from early 2022.

Above are two photographs of the beautiful, old Starr's Mill, a few miles south of Fayetteville, Georgia. They were taken at different times and with different cameras, however, looking at each file at high magnification, there appears to be no difference in photographic quality.

Which one do you prefer? Can you say why?

Although the second photo is sharp and has beautiful light and color, most people prefer the first one, even though many probably could not say why. The mill looks great in the second one, but there's no feeling of depth and no place for your eye to rest. In the first one, the tree on the right, the rocks on the shore, and the dam all combine to lead the eye to the mill. They form a frame around it,  which gives the picture a a sense of depth and dimensionality.

"Framing" a photo is a very effective compositional technique, and one I use a lot. In this photograph of Short's Mill near Clarkesville, Georgia, the mill is actually only a small part of the picture, yet the stone ledge, flowing water, and autumn leaves form a frame to lead the eye to the old mill. 

There many ways to put the subject of your photograph in a frame. For instance, in this photo of a children's Sunday School class, the way the children's heads are turned direct the viewer's eye to the teacher and the child she is speaking to. 

I don't use this technique of framing for every shot, of course, but I think if you learn to look for opportunities to put a frame in your pictures it will improve your photography.

You can read more about framing here. 

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   Georgia     old mills     perspective control     photographic composition

Should You Shoot RAW or Jpeg?

Les Barnett plays a homemade banjo at the Foxfire Museum. From a jpeg original.

There's a long-running debate about whether it's better to shoot RAW or jpegs in your digital camera. I would guess most knowledgeable photographers would counsel you to shoot RAW. Me? I shoot both. But most of my digital pictures that you see will be out-of-the camera jpegs. The RAW files are backups, and I only use them when a scene has an extremely wide range of tones or presents a difficult color-balancing problem. Most digital cameras allow you to shoot both simultaneously.

Slide film was probably the most difficult photographic medium to work with, yet I used it for the majority of my work for 35 years. It required a very precise metering technique, because if it were more than a stop overexposed it was unusable. It was a little more forgiving of underexposure. But I never relied on the built-in camera meters, because they read the light reflected from the subject and could easily be fooled. I almost always used an incident meter, which read the light falling on the subject, which is far more accurate.

However although the meter built into your digital camera is a reflected-light meter, it is far more sophisticated and accurate than those in my old film cameras. The meters in my Fuji cameras are right on the money most of the time, and at worst, are close enough that a simple Photoshop adjustment in Curves will make them just right. 

When I'm finished editing my photos I usually delete the RAW files to save space on my hard drive.

Here's how I set up my Fuji cameras to shoot jpegs. Your camera may be slightly different.

Image Quality: F (Fine)

Film Simulation: S (resembles Fuji Astia, my favorite film. This is a matter of personal taste. I prefer my photos to have softer, warmer tones.)

Dynamic Range: 100

White Balance: I usually use Auto

Highlight and Shadow Tones: Both 0

Color: +1

Sharpness: +1

ISO: Varies with situation, but I mostly use ISO 800. The sensors in today's digital cameras are so good there's seldom any advantage in using a lower speed. My files will easily enlarge to 24x36 inches and beyond with excellent sharpness.

The photo above is an excellent example of a straight-out-of-the-camera jpeg. There's good color and a wide range of tones with nothing extreme. Click on it for an enlarged version and you will see that there are no burned-out highlights and that there is detail even in the dark hallway behind the banjo player. The photo was made with a Fuji X-H1 camera and the  cheap but vastly underrated Fujicron XC 16-50mm 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    camera setup     Fuji X-H1 camera     Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens     Foxfire Museum     RAW     jpegs

The Backroads Traveler: Milledgeville, Georgia

The old Georgia State Capital in Milledgeville was built in 1807.

 Only two cities in the United States were established for the express purpose of being capitols. One, of course, was Washington, D.C. The other was Milledgeville, founded in 1804 to be the capitol of Georgia.

After the capitol was moved to Atlanta in 1868, Milledgeville went through many years of struggle. The establishment of Georgia Military College in 1879 and Georgia College and State University in 1889 helped the city to survive and perhaps become less provincial than most other small towns in Georgia. The current population is about 17,000.

In the 1980s and '90s, Milledgeville began to revitalize its downtown and historic district. On my visits there I greatly enjoyed browsing through downtown Milledgeville, with its many shops and restaurants and gracious, old-south lifestyle. Milledgeville has a surprisingly cosmopolitan air for a smallish, off-the-beaten-track town, perhaps because of the two colleges located here. I wanted to stay and relax with the crowds at the sidewalk tables in front of many of the restaurants.

The 1822 Orme-Sallee House is one of many historic homes in Milledgeville.

 

The 1807 O'Quinn's Mill on Town Creek is the same age as the old capitol building.

 

 Andalusia Farm, the home of writer Flannery O'Conner during her most productive years.

About the photos: The old State Capitol and the Orme-Sallee House were photographed with an Olympus E-M5 fitted with the Panasonic Lumix G Vario 12-32mm lens. For O'Quinn's Mill and the Andalusia Farm house, I used a Fuji X-H1 camera and the Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens.

This post was adapted from my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia. 

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     Georgia     Milledgeville     Flannery O'Conner     Olympus E-M5 camera     Panasonic     Lumix G Vario 12-32 lens     Fuji X-H1 camera     Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens     Andalusia Farm