The Ordinary Photograph

 The scarecrow behind the fire station. Hog Jowl Road, Walker County, Georgia.

No one is going to choose this photograph as a contest winner, nor is it likely to ever hang in an art museum. In fact, I've never even sold a print of it, although I did include it in one of my books. It's just an ordinary photograph of an ordinary country scene. 

But I like it. There's a certain satisfaction in the play of the early morning light across the corn leaves and the scarecrow's just-right costume. The old gate in the background encloses this little rural vignette.

Not all of our photographs have to be blockbusters. There's a place for the ordinary, the commonplace. Sometimes these little glimpses of life can be very satisfying. So when you look at a scene and think there's not much photographic possibility there, shoot it anyway. You may surprise yourself.

The photo: Probably a Canon EOS A2 with the EF 28-105mm lens, Fujichrome 100 film.

See my October 3rd post for information about ordering original 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    film photography     Canon EOS A2 camera    Canon EF 28-105mm lens    Fujichrome 100 film     Georgia     travel photography

The Book that Changed My Life

(Adapted from a post in June, 2020.)

Actually, the book that changed my life was the Bible. But the book that changed my professional life was Rock City Barns: A Passing Era.

In 1982 I began doing advertising and public relations photography for Rock City Gardens, a tourist attraction on Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1988, Bill Chapin, the president of See Rock City, Inc. told me about his long-time dream to create a book about Rock City's barns and asked me to find out what it would cost.

He decided not to proceed at that time, but my interest had been kindled. I obtained a list of the 110 barns they were still repainting, and whenever my travels brought me near one, I made a photograph of it if possible. In 1994, after learning that the number of barns being repainted had dwindled to 85, I made prints of some of my photos and told him I felt that if we were ever to do a book, now was the time.

He didn't say much. Just looked at the pictures for several minutes, asked a few questions, then said the magic words: "Let's do it!"

 

File Cards with Barn Locations

Cards like these were used by many businesses in pre-computer days.

 

 In a few days he sent me a box containing hundreds of old office file cards from the 1960s; Rock City's only record of most barn locations. On each card was the name of the property owner at that time, the highway, and the distance from the nearest town. Many had a small photo attached, apparently taken about 1960; but some had only rough sketches of the barns. Inside the fold-over card was a record of rents paid (usually $3 to $5 per year) and repaint dates.  Rock City had had no contact with most of these barns since the late 60s.  The only way to find out if they were still standing was to go and see.

So I went.

 

Sorting the cards into piles by states (15), and within states by highways, I planned an itinerary and began photographing at Sweetwater, Tennessee on October 24, 1994.  Over the next 18 months, stealing time from my studio whenever I could, the trail of barns led my old Chevy Blazer nearly 35,000 miles to more than 500 sites.

 

When the photography was well along, I hired a designer and began writing the text. The designer found a printing agent and boom! I was in the publishing business! The agent placed our book project with a printing house in Belgium known for fine printing -- their principal business was museum catalogs.

Chapin ordered 20,000 copies for Rock City, which gave me a tidy profit on the enterprise. And this is where I made what I have come to regard as a serious mistake: instead of taking my profit and using it to finance other book projects, I reasoned that I could triple my money if I ordered 10,000 books to sell myself.

Unfortunately, I failed to consider the true costs. I had to hire additional staff to deal with taking orders and shipping; I had to rent additional office space; and I wound up spending a great deal of time over the next ten years promoting and selling the book: time that could have been used to build up my photography business and, as I said, to develop new book projects. Instead, I spent many weekends lugging my books and prints to arts and crafts shows and spent many hours traveling to book signings. 

As the old proverb says, "We grow too soon old and too late smart."

It was an interesting experience and kinda fun sometimes, but I do wish I had instead put the time into building up my business and developing new book projects.   

 

See my October 3rd Post for information about ordering original 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    photographic prints     Rock City Barns:A Passing Era    Rock City Barns pictures    Rock City Barns book     barns

Any Picture in the Book!

Rock City Barns: A Passing Era. More than 29,000 copies sold.

I'm now offering original photographic prints, suitable for framing, of any picture in the Rock City Barns book. All prints are made from the original slides and all prints will be signed by me.

This includes the pictures in the back of the book. They were printed in black and white for publishing economy, but were originally photographed in color and will be printed in color for this sale. (Unless you want a black and white print.)

Sizes and prices are:   11x14........$59.95

                                       16x20.......$99.95

                                       20x30.....$199.95

These prices include shipping. 

These are the original prices I set in 1996, when the book was published. If I were to adjust for inflation the prices would be much higher, but I want to make the pictures available to as many people as possible.

To order, tell me the page number(s) of the picture(s) you want. If there is more than one picture on a page, give me the position of the picture and the identifying caption beneath it.

You can send a check to me at 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922, or you can use PayPal. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com. Please add 3% for PayPal orders.

If you don't have Rock City Barns: A Passing Era, used copies are available at Amazon.com at reasonable prices. (They even have new ones now and then, but I don't know where they get them. Probably from one of my former distributors.)

Some Rock City Barn prints are available at my pixels site at lower cost, but the selection is currently very small and they will not be signed.

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    photographic prints     Rock City Barns:A Passing Era    Rock City Barns pictures    Rock City Barns book     barns

It's October!

 

  Blue and Gold

Chickamauga Creek* near its source in McLemore Cove,Walker County, Georgia.

 

October is the best of all months.

Some may prefer April or May, and I like them too, but I love October. The summer heat has broken so the nights are cool, but the days are mostly warm and since it doesn’t usually rain much the skies are clear almost every day.

October light is the most beautiful because the air is so clear that the long, slanting rays of the southward-moving sun illuminate everything in their paths with a special brilliance while casting everything else in deep shadow. Fall color usually peaks right around the last week of October in the North Georgia mountains. Leaf colors are softer than they are farther north, but no less beautiful.

October is the month for the first frost, for arts and crafts fairs, for a briskness in the air that makes you glad to be alive, and for taking someone you love for a long walk to look at the leaves.

(Text and photograph are from my limited edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait. This little essay is one of my favorite bits of writing, which is why I republish it.)

*Chickamauga Creek flows from south to north, through the village of Chickamauga and Chickamauga Battlefield, to both of which it lends its name. The creek, in turn, takes its name from the Chickamaugas, a sub-tribe of the Cherokee.

The photo was made with my old reliable Pentax 6x7 with the 105mm f2.4 Takumar lens and Fujichrome 100 film.

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    film photography     Pentax 6x7 camera     Takumar 105mm f2.4 lens      Chickamauga Creek     Chickamauga, Georgia    Chickamauga Battlefield    McLemore Cove    Walker County, GA     October     Seasons

I Love to Photograph Old Cars

19554-55 Pontiac. Georgia Highway 192, Stillmore, Emanuel County.

 

I first began photographing old/abandoned cars on my Sunday afternoon rambles around northwest Georgia in the late 1970s.  I think that fixation goes hand-in-hand with my interest in photographing old and abandoned buildings, which began a few years earlier. It definitely fits with a statement I wrote some years ago about my aspirations as a photographer:

I am a visual historian of mid-twentieth-century America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life. I'm drawn to the old, the historic, the quirky and offbeat, the strange and unusual, and the beautiful. Old houses, old cars. old churches, old courthouses, old mills, covered bridges and historic sites. 

It's something the Japanese call Wabi-Sabi -- the art of finding beauty in imperfection. That's what I do. I seek beauty in the imperfections with which life surrounds us. Because, imperfect or not, life is beautiful. As Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote in his A Child's Garden of Verses, "Life is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

1959 Edsel. U.S. Highway 89, southwestern Utah.

 

 An interesting side note: Louise's mother had an Edsel like this when we were dating and first married. Hers was blue and cream.

 

About the photos: Both of these pictures were made with my favorite combination for photographing old cars: the Fuji X-Pro-1 with the Fujinon XF 27mm f2.8 lens. The picture of the old Pontiac was made on September 29, 2021 and the Edsel was photographed on September 25, 2018.

 

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     Fuji X-Pro-1 camera     Fujinon XF 27mm f2.8 lens      digital photography     old cars    Pontiac    Edsel    Wabi-Sabi

The Backroads Traveler: Two Historic Churches near Helen, Georgia

The Crescent Hill Baptist Church.

 The little mountain village of Helen, Georgia owes its life to tourism. In early 1969, some Helen businessmen were searching for a way to bolster the village's sagging lumber economy, possibly by finding a way to entice tourists to drop a few bucks in the town as they passed through on their way to the mountains. They consulted with an artist named John Kollock, who had some ideas. By fall of that same year, Helen had reinvented itself as an Alpine village, straight out of Bavaria. And the rest, as they say, is history. 

The town is bracketed by two historic churches. On the southeast is Crescent Hill Baptist Church, built in 1872. It was originally known as Nacoochee Presbyterian Church, but has been used by Baptists since 1921. The church currently has about 150 members, and services are held each Sunday at 11 a.m. The pulpit, pews, and stained glass are all original.  This is one of the prettiest country churches I've found in my travels.

 

 

On the northwest edge of the town is the Chattahoochee Methodist Church. . Founded in 1860, the present building was built 1888–90 and looks the same as it did when it was the setting for the 1951 film I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, starring Susan Hayward, William Lundigan, and Rory Calhoun.

Like the Crescent Hill church, it is still in business. A wedding was in progress on the day I made this photograph.

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

About the photographs: The Crescent Hill Church was photographed on September 26, 2006 with a Canon EOS 5D (Classic) and a Canon EF 24-85mm lens. For the Chattahoochee Methodist Church, which I photographed ten years later, on October 29, 2016, I used a Canon EOS 6D and a Canon EF 28-105mm lens.

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     Canon EOS 5D (Classic) camera     Canon EF 24-85mm lens      digital photography     Canon EOS 6D camera    Helen, Georgia    Canon EF 28-105mm lens     Historic churches    

Street Photography Revisited

 

 Four Women of Vernazza. Cinque Terra, Italy.

Blog Note: Although I didn't identify it as such, the photo of the pedicab and driver in my previous post was pure street photography. That started me thinking about the subject and wanting to write more, but I realized that I couldn't improve upon a post I wrote a few years ago. So here it is.

Street photography is an ever popular genre of photography. In the broadest sense, street photography is just documenting the world around you. 

In some cities, much of life is lived out in public, on the street. This is more the case in other countries, of course, but it's also still true in some cities in the U.S., especially the larger ones. This makes the streets an open-air studio for photographers sufficiently skilled to make something of the opportunity.

Browsing through photography web sites and blogs, I see a lot of what is called "street photography." And it is indeed street photography, if by that you mean someone out on the street photographing people and things in passing. However, most of the work I see has no point to it. Most so-called street photographs look as if someone had just gone into a public place and started firing his camera around at random. There's no apparent point. No apparent message. Not even anything unusual or unique to capture the eye or the imagination. Most of those voluminous photographs are simply meaningless junk. One well-known blogger posts volumes of sharp, perfectly exposed street scenes. If they have a point, maybe I'm too stupid to discern it.

I believe street photography must reveal some aspect of life, of the human condition. If it fails in this, it fails. Period.

Elliott Erwitt died nearly two years ago. I consider him to have been the greatest street photographer of all time. He created thousands of poignant, incisive photographs simply by carrying a camera with him at all times and keeping his eyes open and his mind engaged. He had a gift for this that most of us can only marvel at. He excelled at making photographs that show some aspect of human, or sometimes, as he so ably demonstrates, animal behavior. But the operative words here are "carrying a camera at all times." "Open eyes." And "an engaged mind."  

 

 Sometimes Erwitt's wit is very subtle, and sometimes it's like a slap in the face. Photograph above copyright the Estate of Elliott Erwitt.

As he said, "It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy."

Check out his web site here.

(Top photograph: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EF 24-85mm f3.5-4.5 lens.) 

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.

I also offer signed prints of any photograph in the Rock City Barns book. Contact me for details.

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     Canon EOS 20D camera     Canon EF 24-85mm lens      digital photography     Vernazza, Italy    Cinque Terra    Elliott Erwitt     street photography