Three in a Row

 

Apparently the owner was having a yard sale the second time I photographed this barn. When I first found it, there was a row of smaller sheds built onto the left side of the barn which made the sign a little more difficult to see.

Blog Note: I've been working on a post about my 1992 trip to Asia and got my days mixed up. I still have a half-dozen slides to scan before I can post that story. So I'm repeating a post from November, 2020. The Asia trip will post next week.

When working on the book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era, a box of age-yellowed file cards was my guidebook to finding the old barns with "See Rock City" signs. The very cards that once were used by Clark Byers and his crew of barn painters themselves. 

When I began the project I assumed that all the barn locations were included on the cards and that there were no others. However, as I traveled around the southeast and midwest on my search, I found about 20 barns for which there were no file cards. They had been lost from Rock City's records. I called them "lost barns." 

My usual way of traveling to a barn location was that if there was an interstate that paralleled the old highway where the barn was (presumably) located, I would drive the interstate to save time, get off at the nearest exit, photograph the barn if it was still there, and get back on the interstate. 

After my Rock City Barns  book was published in 1996, I began to receive postcards and letters about other lost barns. I tracked them down and photographed them as I had opportunity. 

One afternoon as I was driving down Interstate 24 on my way home from Nashville, it occurred to me that there were stretches of highway that I might have overlooked because of getting on and off the interstate instead of driving the old roads to see what might be there. I immediately got off I-24 south of Murfreesboro, went over to U.S. Highway 41, which paralleled the interstate, and headed south. I found the first unlisted barn in less than a mile. And not only that -- it was one of the very rare barns with the message "T'would be a Pity to Miss Rock City."  

 

And then I found another one a half-mile or so south of that, both on the left side of 41. 

If I had been watching carefully I would have found a third barn just another half-mile south, but on the right side of the road. As it was, I didn't learn of it until years later, when Brent Moore, who has interesting blogs at http://seemidtn.blogspot.com/ (See Middle Tennessee), and http://see-rock-city.blogspot.com/ (See Rock City), told me about it. I photographed it in 2014 and again in 2019. As you can see, it deteriorated considerably in five years.

 The first two photos were made with a Canon EOS A2 with the 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 EF lens and Fujichrome RDP100 film. For the third one, I used a Canon EOS 6D digital camera, probably with the EF 24-85mm lens; and for the bottom photo, a Fuji X-T20 with the Fujinon XC 16-50mm lens.

Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

Signed copies of my book 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 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Photography and text copyright 1999-2025 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     film photography     Canon EOS A2 camera     Canon EF 28-105mm lens     Fujiichrome RDP 100  film     digital photography    Canon EOS 6D digital camera     Canon EF 24-85mm lens     Fuji X-T20 digital camera     Fujinon XC 16-50mm lens     barns     See Rock City barns     Tennessee

Nostalgic for McLemore Cove

 

Sunset over Lookout Mountain. From our home in McLemore Cove.

Recently, Louise and I have been increasingly missing our home and little farm in northwest Georgia's McLemore Cove.

When we sold our property and moved into a fifth-wheel RV, it seemed like the right thing to do. And, given our ages and the state of Louise's health, it probably was the best decision. After our two years of RVing, we now have a nice home in Knoxville, with family members nearby. But we greatly miss the active, outdoor life we enjoyed for 33 years. If we were there now, I would probably be busy cutting and splitting firewood or doing some of the other, endless things that seemed to need doing on a farm. 

I'm sure Knoxville is a place with lots of interesting things to do, but so far, we haven't found them. Or maybe they're not the kinds of things we're interested in doing. Our life here is easy, but uneventful.

We miss having deer in our backyard on an almost daily basis.

Today (Monday), we're going to drive over to the Smokies and prowl around. We'll probably drive the Cades Cove Loop Road again -- we never seem to tire of that -- and maybe, on a March Monday, there will not be much traffic. Maybe we'll even see a bear! If there's time,we will go up to Clingman's Dome, and after that, there's a restaurant in Pigeon Forge that we like. We've been coming to the Smokies since the early 1970s, and have always enjoyed it, except for the times when the traffic has been unbearably dense.

A young bear in a tree on the Cades Cove Loop Road.

Well, we are where we are, and I do believe it's for the best. I'm 87, and Louise will be 80 this coming Saturday. We are grateful for the life we have had, but we do miss it.

I even miss removing the dead trees that fell across Sourwood Lane.

The photos were made with several different cameras over 30 or more years. The sunset sky was photographed with a Pentax 6x7 medium format camera fitted with a Takumar 105mm lens. The film was Fujichrome 100 in 120 size.

Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

Signed copies of my book 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 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Photography and text copyright 1999-2025 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     McLemore Cove    film photography     Pentax 6x7 camera     Pentax Takumar 105mm lens     Fujiichrome 100  film     Georgia     Great Smoky Mountains     Cades Cove

Photographing Interiors

 

 The Clubhouse at The Manor Apartments, Atlanta.

(Reposting a blog from four years ago.)

As a small-market professional photographer for most of my working life, I had to deal with a wide variety of genres and be reasonably proficient in all, or at least most, of them. Advertising photography, product photos, location photography for annual reports and corporate brochures, business and personal portraits, weddings, architecture and interiors, editorial photography for magazines, photographing and writing audio-visual productions -- one never knew what the next project might be. And I enjoyed it all. Just about everything was an interesting challenge. One of the things I especially enjoyed about commercial photography is that it's an endless sequence of interesting problems to solve, but if I failed to solve them the world would not end.

Of course, if I had failed very often to solve them my career might have come to an untimely end.

But I mostly solved them, and enjoyed the process.

One area in which this is especially true is photography of interiors, which is all about staging and lighting. Usually the interior designer or an art director handled the staging, but the lighting problems were mine and mine alone to solve.

However, in the photo of the clubhouse at The Manor Apartments in Atlanta, I was on my own. No interior designer, no art director. But staging was easy -- I just moved a few chairs and pillows around and turned on some lights. Lighting was fairly simple also. I always carried a compact case with three portable studio strobe lights. I set one at camera position and the other two on the right side, about ten feet apart. They are hidden by the leaves of the tall plant on the right edge of the photograph.

That by the way, is an example of simple problem-solving. If you want to hide something from the camera, use some sort of found object that looks as if it would naturally be where it is -- in this case, the plant, which I moved into that position. It was originally much farther to the right and out of the picture.

I like this photo and have used it in my architecture portfolio, but it has one glaring fault which you would probably not notice if I didn't point it out -- there's no fire in the fireplace! If I had balled up a few sheets of newspaper and lit them in the fireplace it would have made the room come alive in a way that it doesn't now.

That probably wouldn't have happened if a designer had done the staging, but apparently that was something the building contractor didn't budget for.

My camera for this project was the Pentax 6x7, with the wonderful 45mm lens. Film, as always, was Fujichrome 100 in 120 size.

Probably the greatest of all architectural and interior photographers, and one of my heroes, is Julius Shulman, who retired in his mid-80s, got bored after awhile, and went back to work until his death at age 99, going around with a walker and an assistant to carry his camera.

Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

Signed copies of my book 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 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Photography and text copyright 1999-2025 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     photographing interiors    film photography     Pentax 6x7 camera     Pentax Takumar 45mm  f4 lens     Fujiichrome 100  film     photographic lighting

A Little More about Photographing Birds

 Hummingbird on (I think) trumpet flower. Copyright 2020 Philip N. Jenkins.

As I think I made clear in my previous post, I'm not a bird photographer, except incidentally. If I see something interesting, I'll photograph it, but I don't go looking for birds to photograph, as serious bird photographers do.

My brother Phil is one such, and he does exquisite work with birds, as do Dennis Mook and Dave Hileman, both of whom I mentioned in my previous post. 

These guys all photograph birds from the smallest to the largest -- eagles, cranes, herons, etc. Phil has an exceptionally beautiful series of hummingbirds, as well as the eagle I've posted here before. And all three of them have lenses with sufficient range to do the job. It appears that lenses for serious bird photography start at about 600 mm equivalent and go on from there as far as your budget and ability to carry the weight will take you. And even then you may have to do some cropping

A pair of pileated woodpeckers, seen from my kitchen window.

Speaking of cropping, I looked out my kitchen window one morning several years ago and saw a pair of pileated woodpeckers working on a tree about 30 yards away. The longest lens I own is a Fujicron XC 50-250mm, which is a 345mm equivalent when fully extended. That's what you see in the photo above. Interesting, but not close enough.

So what to do? I cropped. 

Pileated woodpeckers. Cropped version.

Even severely cropped, the photo is sharp and would easily make a reasonably good 12x16-inch print.

Barn swallows under our deck.

 Sometimes, though, you can get bird pictures with very little effort. For quite a few years, barn swallows raised broods of fledglings under our rear deck. All I had to do was step out the basement door and snap photos of these disgruntled young fellows.

Both the woodpecker and barn swallow photos were made with a Fuji X-T20.

Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

Signed copies of my book 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 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Photography and text copyright 2025 David B.Jenkins except as noted.

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

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

Tags:   photography    photographic techniques     bird photography     Fuji X-T20 digital camera      Fujicron XC 50-230mm lens     digital photography     birds    woodpeckers