My Most Significant Accomplishment

 

Rock City Barns: A Passing Era. The book that changed my life.

My career as a photographer began in 1969 in a very modest way, photographing sports and activities at the private school where I was a teacher and selling prints to the students and their families.

I soon left teaching and began trying to get established in professional photography. For several years I worked in advertising and for a studio that made training films, finally opening my own business on January 1, 1978.

In 1982 I began doing advertising and public relations photography for Rock City Gardens, a tourist attraction on Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Their principal, and very successful, advertising thrust was painting "See Rock City" on barns all over the southeast.

 In 1988, Bill Chapin, then president of See Rock City, Inc., told me about his dream to create a book about Rock City's barns and asked me to find out what it would cost. That was the beginning of a process that ended in the publication of a coffee-table book that sold more than 29,000 copies and altered the course of my life.

I've been blessed with a long and interesting (to me, anyway) career, but this was the peak -- my most significant accomplishment. The Rock City Barns book went on to win many honors and awards, including the 1997 Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal Award in the highly competitive Arts category, which includes books about art, music, and photography.  Sponsored by the Independent Book Publishers Association, the award was presented at a banquet in Chicago during the American Booksellers Association national convention.  The book also won a Silver Medal in the Travel/Essay category.

Here are some of the comments from reviewers:

"In 'exquisite' photographs and 'warm and gentle' text, Mr. Jenkins captures not only the spirit of the barns, but also the spirit of an era.  'Rock City Barns is a remarkable contribution to the folk culture of this country.' Anyone who remembers the days of two-lane highway travel will find it hard to put down. Nostalgia may not be what it used to be, but these photographs show us that sometimes the past can be even better than we remembered."

In the next two posts, I will retell the story of how the book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era came into being.

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 $4.95 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 2020-2025 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    travel photography     Rock City Gardens    See Rock City      coffee-table books    creating books    Rock City barns

Breakfast at Susie's

 

 Breakfast at Susie's Sunset Cafe, LaFayette, Georgia.

Blog Note: This is one of my favorite pictures and one of my favorite blog texts. Reposted from December, 2020.

The name of Susie’s Café on the square in beautiful downtown LaFayette, Georgia was officially Susie’s Sunset Café. But I always thought it should have been named Susie’s Sunrise Café, because the early morning sun streamed in through the plate-glass front windows and illuminated everything all the way to the back wall.

Susie’s had booths down each side for those who preferred a feeling of relative privacy, but it also had a couple of long tables down the center where lawyers, businessmen, farmers, factory workers, and gas station attendants ate their breakfasts together and chewed the fat (no reflection on the bacon or sausage) in amiable equality. 

Susie's has been gone for several years now, replaced by a Japanese restaurant, and LaFayette is the poorer for its loss. Places like Susie's are the heart and soul of country towns. 

On a technical note, the photograph was made with an Olympus SPn rangefinder camera with a non-interchangeable 40mm lens on Fuji color negative film. 

I had noticed the potential for this picture sometime previously, but it took more than one attempt to get myself seated in the best position with the most interesting combination of people in place. No one noticed me as I made a few exposures with my small camera from a booth to one side.

(Photograph and text adapted from my limited-edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait

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 $4.95 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 2020-2025 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     LaFayette, Georgia    restaurants      Olympus SPn camera    Fuji color negative film     rangefinder cameras

After More than 100 Years George Eastman's Dream Comes True

 My backyard tree ornaments. Photographed with a 12-megapixel iPhone 6s.

I received a comment recently from a long-time friend who was bemoaning the complexity of digital cameras. I told him that one of the reasons for the popularity of cell phone cameras is that all you have to know is which way to point them and when to push the button. 

The camera in a cell phone is the fulfillment of George Eastman's dream. In 1880, he founded the Eastman Kodak Company, and in 1888, brought to market a revolutionary camera -- just a box with a lens, a shutter, and a winding crank, loaded with enough film for 100 pictures. When the user reached the end of the roll, he simply sent the camera to Kodak's processing laboratory and in due time received his pictures -- and his camera; loaded with a fresh roll of film for another 100 photos. From this came Kodak's slogan: You push the button. We do the rest.

One hundred and eleven years after Eastman launched his camera, the first cell phone with a camera appeared on the market: the 0.3 megapixel Kyocera VP-210, the first phone with a built-in camera. It wasn't very good, but the technology has advanced rapidly, and now, in the mid-2020s we have compact marvels with multiple lenses in different focal lengths and 48 megapixel sensors that are capable of very fine, even professional-level work. And some professionals are using them for much, even all of their work.

Three grandmas and a baby. Walmart, 2020. iPhone 6S.

I have a semi-professional photographer friend who does excellent work with a late-model iPhone with three, built-in lenses. Although he has a conventional camera with long lenses for bird and wildlife photography, he prefers to use his iPhone for most other work.

Is this the future of photography? For the vast majority of people, I think it probably is. But there will always be people like me, who enjoy using a traditional camera and the extra capability that goes with it. But, like my picture of the grandmas with a baby in Walmart, a cell-phone-with-camera is a handy thing to have along when you don't have your real 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 $4.95 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.

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

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

Tags:   photography   cell phone photography     cell phones    George Eastman     Kodak     Kyocera VP-210 

Back on My Soapbox

 Louise in our '66 Corvair Corsa, somewhere in the northeast Georgia mountains.

People who read this blog are familiar with my ongoing rant about backing up the files of your cell phone photographs.

Reader Marcus Peddle, who lives and teaches in South Korea, wrote in a comment: "I once asked a student if her parents had taken many pictures of her when she was young. 'Yes," she said, 'but my father broke his phone and all the pictures were lost.' What a disaster." 

Marcus blogs at  https://imperfect-composition.blogspot.com/

Because I prefer to use a camera that feels like a camera and has the features of something created expressly for photography, I don't take many pictures with my cell phone. But when I make a photo with my cell phone that's important to me, I back it up on my computer and back-up hard drives. 

I also back up the photos from my cameras, of course, and I do not reuse my SD cards. They are so cheap now that when I fill one up, I replace it with a new one and store the old card.

When Louise and I went on a memorable weekend trip to the northeast Georgia mountains back in 1971, cell phones were almost beyond imagination -- like something from a Dick Tracy comic strip.

But I did have a camera with me (as always) and took a few pictures. I wish I had taken more. This is the only survivor I've found, and it's important to me. The photo was originally square, so I probably made it with a Rolleicord Vb twin-lens reflex and cropped the image down to a rectangle because that's easier to post on Facebook. The picture doesn't have anything to do with today's topic, but since this is a photography blog, I feel an obligation to show you a photo. :o)

(The Corsa, by the way, was a really fun-to-drive car on mountain roads. A true poor man's Porsche)

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 $4.95 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.

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     cell phone photography    Corvair automoblile   northeast Georgia mountains    Nikon F camera     cell phones     Corvair Corsa