Musical Cameras

Play Rug

An advertising assignment in my studio.

Two young "real people" models.

Mamiya RB67, Sekor 127mm f4.5 lens, Fujichrome 100

 One of the photography blogs I read regularly and highly recommend is Kirk Tuck’s Visual Science Lab. Yesterday he wrote a post about his enjoyment in owning and using a wide variety of cameras. In fact, in the ten years I’ve been reading his blog he has bought, used, and sold complete camera systems numerous times. Olympus 4/3s, Olympus and Panasonic micro 4/3s, Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji, and now Panasonic full-frame and an oddball Sigma, plus an array of m4/3s and Canon point-and-shoot cameras that he pulls out and takes for a walk when it strikes his fancy.

 Kirk can afford to play musical cameras if he wishes. A highly accomplished and successful commercial photographer, he could, if he wished, spend his money on cigarettes, whiskey, fast cars and wild women. However, I doubt if he smokes, since he is a dedicated athlete (makes me tired to read about his swimming and long walks), drives a run-of- the-mill Subaru, and has been married for many, many years to a lovely lady. The booze? Probably just a little now and then. You can’t hold a camera steady while experiencing delirium tremens.

But he loves to play musical chairs with his cameras.

Me, not so much. My first “good” camera was the original Nikon F, which I acquired second-hand in 1969. (I could have purchased a Leica M3 with a 50mm Summicron in perfect condition for the same money, but went with the Nikon because I could get it and a pair of Tamron lenses for that amount. I have often wondered how my photographic life would have been different if I had started out with a rangefinder system.)

I started my own business in 1978 and stuck with Nikons until '79, when I was seduced by the photographic love of my life, the small, light, precise and lovely Olympus OM system.

I was faithful to Olympus for 13 years, but life intervened, as it so often does. Aging eyes demanded a switch to autofocus. Olympus didn’t have it, and didn’t appear to be planning to have it anytime in the near future, so I began a brief fling with my old love, Nikon. Alas! Nikon’s autofocus system was about as functional as a hound dog with a bad cold in its nose.

Meantime, I had been reading good things about Canon’s autofocus system, so I bought a body and lens to try it for myself. Hot dog! That thing locked on focus like a pit bull! I wound up with a pair of Canon EOS A2s that served me very well until the big switch to digital in 2003. Along the way I tinkered with various Leica, Canon, and Olympus rangefinder cameras, but Olympus OM and Canon were always my money systems in 35mm.

With medium format, it was a different story. In my studio I used 8x10, 4x5, and medium format cameras, as client needs required. But while I was long-term faithful to my 35mm cameras, I changed medium format systems almost as often as I changed my socks. Mamiya C-series twin-lens reflexes, Bronica S2a and EC SLRs, Hasselblad, Mamiya RB67, Hasselblads again, and finally, the monster Fuji GX680, which I sold to finance my first digital camera, the Canon EOS 10D. But parallel with these was the Pentax 6x7, which was the last medium format camera to go, and which I believe gave me the highest percentage of keepers of any camera I've ever owned.

So, I've mostly been writing about film cameras. What can I say? I shot with film for 35 years, twice as long as digital. Digital is probably better in most ways, but with film, there wasn't much pressure to upgrade our cameras ever year or two. Want a different sensor? Just change to a different kind of film.

(Photograph copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

Backroads Treasures: Old Cars

 

Old Ford Pickup, Catoosa County, Georgia

Nikkormat, 28mm Vivitar f2.5 lens, Kodachrome 64

My domain is the old, the odd, and the ordinary; the beautiful, the abandoned, and the about to vanish away. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life.

As I wrote in my previous post, not long after moving to the Chattanooga area in 1970 I began occasional Sunday afternoon rambles with my camera along the backroads of neighboring North Georgia, especially in Catoosa County. There were plenty of backroads to explore, and quite a few interesting things to see, including old cars and trucks. Some were set up beside the road, apparently in an effort to sell them, while others appeared to have been abandoned to rust away in someone’s side yard.

 

Old Chevy, Catoosa County, Georgia

(Probably 1934) Rolleicord Vb, Ektachrome

When we moved to a remote, rural area in North Georgia’s Walker County in the late ‘80s, I found several more interesting old vehicles that had literally been put “out to pasture.”

Many more old cars and trucks were found in the mid ‘90s as I traveled 35,000 miles of backroads in the South and Midwest while tracking down Rock City barns for my book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era and were tucked away in a folder that I labeled “Found On Road Dead.” Since then, I’ve been picking up more pictures wherever my travels around the United States have taken me, including Hawaii and Alaska.

 

White Trash

Rhea County, Tennessee

Canon EOS A2, 28-105 f3.5-4.5 EF lens, T-Max 40

I have enough photos for a book now, to be titled, of course, Found On Road Dead, but I still have to write the text and get help identifying the make and year of the old vehicles, some of which I’ve never seen before or since. And that book will have to take its place behind my current project, Lost Barns of Rock City, a book of photos of Rock City barns I’ve found that were not in the old records Rock City Gardens gave me when I started the original book project. I have other projects in the pipeline as well. I hope I live long enough to complete and publish at least some of them.

But, as my oldest son Rob, a very fine and accomplished writer told me, "Never die with all your projects finished."

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

Backroads Treasures

Gray's Mill, Graysville, Georgia

Sadly, destroyed by a fire set by vandals.

Rolleicord Vb, Ektachrome

One of the things I most like to do is wander backroads, just looking for whatever I can find to photograph. This interest began early on, shortly after we moved from Miami to a suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1970. Our home was just a mile or so from the Tennessee-Georgia line, so I spent many Sunday afternoons wandering the north Georgia backroads, of which there were many, with my camera.

My interest was kicked into high gear in 1994, when Rock City Gardens, a tourist attraction on the cliffs of Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga, commissioned me to find and photograph every still-existing barn which had carried their advertising slogan “See Rock City.”

The painted barns had been Rock City’s principal advertising device from the late 1930s well into the ‘60s. No one knows for sure, but it’s estimated that “See Rock City” was painted on more than 800 barns in at least 17 states in the South and Midwest. Most of these were on routes that were major highways at the time, but with the coming of the Interstate system, were now backroads.

Rock City Barn

U.S. Hwy. 41 near Pembroke, Kentucky

Olympus OM2n, 24mm f2.8 Zuiko lens, Kodachrome 64

 

Rock City gave me what they had of the old records used by the barn painters. I sorted them by states and highways, and in October, 1994, hit the road in my old Chevy Blazer. Over the next year and a half, whenever I could steal a few days away from my studio, I traveled 35,000 miles, visited more than 500 sites, and found and photographed 250 still-standing barns (although some of them were just barely standing). They were published in 1996 in a coffee-table book titled Rock City Barns:A Passing Era, which sold more than 29,000 copies.

I continued my backroads wanderings as I had time, mostly in Georgia, which is a fascinating state, and in 2011 completed Georgia: A Backroads Portrait. It currently exists as a self-published book on Blurb.com, but I’m still looking for a publisher to take it on. Realistically, it’s a large-format book and will not be cheap to publish. But one can hope.

Old Mount Zion Baptist Church

U.S. Hwy. 41, Dooly County, Georgia

Canon EOS 5D, 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 Canon EF lens, Fujichrome 100

However, the editor at Countryman Press saw it, and in 2015 asked me to do a smaller format book which was published in 2017 as Backroads and Byways of Georgia.

I’m not working on a book right now, as we are busy getting our home and property ready to sell so we can downsize to something more appropriate to our ages. But I have an offer on the table from Countryman Press to do Backroads and Byways of Tennessee, so who knows what the future holds. Meanwhile, whenever I can steal a little time now and then, I keep looking for those backroads treasures.

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

So, Why Not Just Shoot with Your Cell Phone?

Dogwoods in Bloom

This photo could have been made

with a cell phone camera. (But wasn't.)

Olympus E-PL1, 14-42mm Zuiko lens.

What's the point of carrying a camera around, anyway?

Since I’ve made a pretty good case for cell phones as an easy way to to make and share spontaneous pictures in the spirit of George Eastman’s “You push the button and we do the rest,” you might ask “So why not just shoot with a cell phone?”

Well, most people would be perfectly happy to do just that. But there are some of us — a definite minority — for whom that’s just not enough. We want something more. Why would anyone choose to fool with cameras and lenses and all that related photo paraphernalia when cell phone cameras are so convenient and capable?

For me, at least, there are a number of good reasons.

First, Better Pictures. When I’m out and about with a camera, I’m usually attuned, even if only on a subconscious level, to looking for things that will make good pictures. With a cell phone, not so much, although something may slap me upside the head, like the three ladies and the baby in the previous post. I almost didn’t go back and take that picture.

Second, Control. Cell phone cameras don’t offer much in the way of control, although they are improving in that regard. Exposure and focus are automatic, and the vast, vast majority of happy-snappers wouldn’t have it any other way. But if I want to decide what my exposure should be, whether I want much or little depth-of-field, whether I want to use a fast or slow shutter speed, or exactly where I want to focus, I need a real camera. Or perhaps I should call them camera-cameras.

Dall Sheep in Denali National Park, Alaska

This photo could not have been taken with a

cell phone camera. Olympus OM-D E-M5,

Panasonic 14-140mm lens at 260mm equivalent.

Third, Capability. Most cell phone cameras come with a somewhat wide-angle lens. If I want a lens with a wider angle of view, or a normal or telephoto field of view, I need a real camera.

Fourth, Quality. Cell phone cameras have very small sensors. And while some of them are surprisingly good, everything else being equal, the larger sensors in real cameras will always be sharper and clearer, especially in larger prints.

Fifth, The Intangibles. A good camera gives me pleasure that a cell phone simply cannot provide. There’s the pleasure of owning and using an object of high quality workmanship. There’s the pleasure of mastering and using the skills necessary to operate such a complex tool. And finally, as I said in my previous post, I simply like cameras. I like holding them (don't call it fondling, please) I like reading about them, and I especially like using them.

Different strokes for different folks.

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone