I've Never Owned a New Car

The 1987 Chevy Blazer at Rock City barn AL-11. U.S. Hwy. 11, DeKalb County, AL.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. We spent the day with our son Don, who lives here in Knoxville. Our daughter-in-law Kim cooked a great Christmas dinner and we enjoyed seeing grandson Devlin and granddaughter Marlee and their significant others.

But to get back to our topic -- I bought my first car in 1956, when I was 19 - a slick 1950  Ford V8 coupe purchased with a $500 loan from my grandmother. Since then, I've owned more cars than I can count -- and all of them were bought used. Owning a good car was important to me, but owning a new car never was.

I drove many of those cars to high mileages and most of them served me well. The only outright lemon was a Dodge Aspen sedan I bought in the late '70s.

At the time our son Rob was born in 1961, we had an NSU Prinz, a tiny German car that we named "Baby Buggy." It was lots of fun, but didn't prove very durable over the long haul.

Barbara, my first wife, passed away in 1963, and in 1965 I married Louise. We embarked on our honeymoon in a 1959 Volkswagen. 

Away on our honeymoon in our '59 Volkswagen.

Then there was the 1963 Plymouth Belvedere that we bought while Louise was in school at Florida State. A great road car. We routinely made the 490 mile trip from Tallahassee to Miami in six hours -- in the bad old days of very restrictive speed limits. You can see it here.

After her graduation, we moved back to Miami, where we later sold the Plymouth and bought a '62 Chevy II Nova wagon from friends. We drove that car when we moved to Chattanooga in 1970 and drove the wheels off of it for the next six years with no problems. In 1972, before the first great hike in gas prices, we drove it to Miami on about $12.50 worth of gas!

Before I forget, I need to mention the photo at the top. That 1987 Chevy S-10 Blazer took me nearly 35,000 miles in 15 states as I searched for Rock City barns for my book. The transmission gave out in northern Indiana when I was nearly finished. A year or two later I sold it to my garageman for $2,000. It had 235,000 miles on the odometer.

That's enough for today, but I'm not finished with this topic.

Click on the link at left for information about ordering original signed prints from the Rock City Barns book.

If you like my pictures, 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    travel photography    used cars     1959 Volkswagen    1963 Plymouth Belvedere    1962 Chevy II Nova    Chevy S-10 Blazer    1950 Ford V8 coupe    1960 NSU Prinz

Was This Always the Plan?

The empty tomb. Jerusalem, Israel 

Who shows a picture of a tomb at Christmas? Well, I do, because in the deepest sense that's what Christmas is about. I expect most people would prefer to think about the baby in a manger. Seems all cozy and comforting, doesn't it?

Unless you grew up poor on a farm, you probably have no idea what a cold and incredibly filthy place that stable was, and how unsuitable as a birthing place for anyone, let alone a king. 

But his birth, necessary and important as it was, was not the goal.

His life, which he lived perfectly and without sin, was not the goal, although that goal was ever before him.

His death, cruel and unjust, was a necessary step. For on that horrible cross he bore in his own body every sin you and I have ever committed or ever will commit. But even the cross was not the goal.

The tomb itself, where his body laid for three days, was not the goal. 

The goal, from all eternity, was the empty tomb. God raised Jesus from the dead; the ultimate proof that Christ's sacrifice had been accepted by the Father and our debt was paid in full. This is the gospel, as stated clearly in I Corinthians 15, verses 1-5: "That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures."

When Jesus went to that cross, he bore in his own body your sins and mine. He paid in full the debt of our sin and now offers you and me eternal life as a free gift.

What does he ask of us? He asks only that you and I accept the fact that we are sinners in need of a savior, and that we receive Jesus by faith as the savior we need.

My prayer is that if you have never received Jesus as your savior, you will do so on this Christmas Day.

Click on the link at left for information about ordering original signed prints from the Rock City Barns book.

If you like my pictures, 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    digital photography   Jesus Christ    Jerusalem   Canon EOS 5D Classic camera    Israel    Canon EF 24-85mmm lens    Bible history   Salvation     Resurrection of Jesus     the empty tomb

In Praise of the Unspectacular Photograph

  Early Snow.  Sourwood Lane, McLemore Cove, Walker County, Georgia.

As a follow-up to my previous post "Please Yourself,"I'm reposting a blog from five years ago -- December, 2020.

In November of that year, friend and fellow photo-blogger Dennis Mook, who blogs as The Wandering Lensman at thewanderinglensman.com was on a roll with some really good posts.

On November 19th, he wrote about wabi-sabi, a Japanese term that means the appreciation of "beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete in nature." But when he looks at today's landscape photography, he no longer sees a representation of nature or nature's imperfections: he sees photographs that are dramatic, over-edited, and over-saturated; hyper-real and hyper-perfect.

On November 27th, he posted a photograph that was so quietly beautiful that I was compelled to write in his comments section "This photograph is quietly, modestly, perfectly beautiful. I would hang it on my wall anytime. It is a perfect counterpoint to the "spectacular," overprocessed photographs you wrote about on Nov. 17. . . it will have far more "staying power" on your wall than a so-called "spectacular" landscape. It will give the eye delight and rest every time you walk into the room."

From my very earliest days in photography my aim has been to capture a moment of stillness in each photograph. My name for my portfolio of "art" photographs is "Images of Tranquility." My photographs are mostly quiet, and I hope, quietly beautiful. I don't do spectacular. I just see what I see and try to show it.

Ricky's Trees. Daugherty Gap Road, McLemore Cove, Walker County, Georgia.

My post-processing is pretty simple: I have an old version of Photoshop -- CS2 -- that does most of what I want to do. Just an exposure adjustment in Curves, if needed, and light burning and dodging with the Brush tool, plus a simple adjustment in Unsharp Masking that enhances mid-tone contrast without affecting highlights or shadows, and I'm done. I want my photographs to look like the scenes as I saw them, not hyped-up renditions that never existed in reality.

Rooted in the Past. S. Dicks Creek Road, Armuchee Valley, Walker County, Georgia.

I realize this will not make me popular with some photographers, and maybe not with the art-photo buying public. So be it. I am thankfully, too old to care.

The Photos: Early Snow was photographed with a Canon EOS 20D and the Canon EF 24-85mm lens. For Ricky's Trees, I used a Canon EOS 5D Classic with the Canon EF 70-200mm f4L lens, and for Rooted in the Past, I used an Olympus E-M5 and the Panasonic 14-140mm Vario G lens.

Click on the link at left for information about ordering original signed prints from the Rock City Barns book.

If you like my pictures, 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    digital photography   art photography    Walker County, Georgia   Canon EOS 5D Classic camera    McLemore Cove    Canon EF 24-85mmm lens    Canon EOS 20D camera    Canon EF 70-200mm f4L lens    Olympus E-M5 camera    Panasonic 14-140mm Vario G lens

Please Yourself

 Blue on Blue. Florida beach scene, 2007.

Do you like this picture? 

I do, but it's okay if you don't. Not everybody has to like everything. I like it so much that I had a 20 by 30-inch print made that hangs in our guest bedroom. As is frequently said on the internet, YMMV--Your Mileage May Vary.

Most photographers are pleasers. We want people to like our pictures, and  by extension, like us. And of course, if we're photographing for pay, we had better make darn sure the client is pleased. And if we're making family/friends snaps, we want our subjects to be pleased as well.

But if we're photographing for ourselves and want to create significant work, we need to get past that. The world does not need any more cliches. Instead, we need to find our own subjects and our own way of seeing them. Or, they may be subjects everyone else has photographed. We must find a new way of photographing them to make our photographs our own.

What subjects?  I can't answer that question for you.  Edward Weston found his universe in peppers, shells, and rocks. Steiglitz found his in clouds, Ansel Adams in the forces of nature.  Dorothea Lange found hers in the faces of the poor and dispossessed, and Cartier-Bresson found his in the patterns of everyday life.  I have found mine in the play of light across a human face, and across the face of the land.  Ultimately, your answer will come out of your world view.

I believe that this world was created by a loving and sovereign God, and is filled with both beauty and mystery.  I believe he created man in his own image, and although man has fallen and that image has been broken and marred, it still exists.  Man is thus both noble and savage, and the world is a place of both darkness and light, of chaos and order.  I want my photographs to show a world of beauty and mystery, of light and darkness, of nobility in the midst of savagery.  There is chaos, but underlying it, there is order.

Your way of looking at the world may be different from mine.  If it is, your photographs should show that difference.  Your photographs must be yours.  They must come from your heart, your way of seeing life and the world.

So what subject?  The whole world is before you. Please yourself.

The photo was made in Florida in August, 2007 with a Canon EOS digital Rebel (amateur camera) and a Canon EF 24-85mm lens. 

Click on the link at left for information about ordering original signed prints from the Rock City Barns book.

If you like my pictures, 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    digital photography   art of photography    Florida   Canon EOD Rebel camera    beach scenes    Canon EF 24-85mmm lens