Passing through Gettysburg

 

Dead Confederate sniper at Gettysburg Battlefield. One of the best-known pictures from the Civil War.

Louise's grandparents immigrated from Ireland, settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and raised a large family. When her father was grown he immigrated to Maine, where he met and married Louise's mother. They moved to New York, then, when Louise was six, to Miami, where she grew up. Over the years Mr. Devlin gradually lost touch with his birth family. Around 2018 one of Louise's sisters was able to find and make contact with some Devlin relatives still in the Halifax area. So 2019 we hitched our Starcraft travel trailer to our valiant 2006 Chevy truck and set out for Halifax, Nova Scotia to visit relatives we had never met. 

Coming home, we took our time and worked our way down the Maine coast, camping at various places and revisiting places we had first visited in the 1980s. We then went west to Niagara Falls, and from there south through Pennsylvania to Gettysburg, where we met with one of our nieces who lived in the area and her son. They gave us a tour of the battlefield.

Sniper's Den, Gettysburg National Battlefield Park

 I especially wanted to see if I could find the location of the picture at the top of this post. One of the best-known photographs from the Civil War, it was made by Timothy O'Sullivan and Alexander Gardner after the battle. (They exercised a bit of "creative license" by moving a body 40 yards into position.) Nonetheless, it is a remarkably poignant photograph. The photo immediately above shows the sniper's hideout looking very much as it did in 1863. Rocks don't change much.

 Our mighty Chevy truck and Starcraft camper at Gettysburg.

The next day we toured the old town of Gettysburg and ate in a very old restaurant. Then it was back to the road home.

My photos were made with a Fuji X-T20 camera and the Fujinon XC 16-50mm lens. I have no information about the camera used by O'Sullivan and Gardner, but it was undoubtedly very large and made negatives on glass plates.

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 2026 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      Civil War photography   photographic equipment    Fuji X-T20 camera     Fuji XC 116-50mm lens    Gettysburg   Gettysburg Battlefield National Park     Alexander Gardner, photographer     Timothy O'Sullivan, photographer

Minimum Equipment, Maximum Photography

 

The Bridal Vail

Leica M3, 50mm f2 Summicron

An amazing number of the world’s greatest photographers have been Leica rangefinder shooters. The question is, were they Leica shooters because they were great, or were they great because they were Leica shooters? (And with Leicas, I include similar interchangeable lens rangefinder cameras.)

Neither proposition is entirely correct, yet I suspect it may be closer to the truth to say they were great because they were Leica shooters.

The average well-equipped photographer who sallies forth laden with a pair of DSLRs and a battery of zoom lenses covering a range of 12 to 300mm or more is ready for anything. The problem is that the photographer who is ready for anything is actually ready for nothing. In contemplating any subject, he must decide whether he should use a wide angle to encompass the entire scene or move in close for dramatic impact. Should he back off with a telephoto for flattened perspective and/or shallow depth of field, or should he zoom in to concentrate on a specific detail? The options are overwhelming and invite a terminal case of paralysis by analysis.

I once read an article about the travel photographer Gerald Brimacombe, who at that time was working with a pair of digital cameras that most professionals and advanced amateurs would consider too limited for serious work. Yet, he chose to work within the limitations of those cameras and concentrate on what they could do, rather than what they couldn’t do.And produced pictures that sold over and over.

Although he happened not to be using Leicas, that concentration is nonetheless the essence of the Leica approach to photography. As Picasso said“Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.”

 

Poverty in Rural Tennessee

Leica M3, 35mm f2.8 Summaron

I think it is something like this that made so many Leica shooters great: since using a Leica and one or two or three lenses doesn’t make for a lot of options, they learned to photograph the things that could be photographed with their limited equipment and let the rest of the world go by.

Obviously, you don't have to shoot with Leicas (I don't) to practice the principal of limited means. The standard advice for budding photographers used to be to shoot with only one camera, one lens, and one film for a solid year before adding anything else to the kit.

Of course, all this makes me a voice crying in the wilderness of this gearhead world where some people actually list their photographic arsenals as part of their signatures on internet forums. To them, I would say, "Your cameras are great. Now could I please see your pictures?"

(Reposted from January, 2020)

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 2026 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      Leica photography   photographic equipment    minimum equipment    Pablo Picasso   Gerald Brimacombe

St. Simon's Island: Part II

The interior of Christ Episcopal Church.

The present sanctuary was erected in 1884, built in the shape of a cross, with beautiful stained-glass windows throughout, including one by Tiffany, and another depicting John Wesley preaching to the settlers. The woodwork is also unusually fine.

 

Stained-glass window in Christ Episcopal Church depicting John and Charles Wesley preaching to the settlers on St. Simon's Island.
 

 

 

 

 

  

Best-selling author Eugenia Price, who made Christ Church nationally known through her historical novels, is buried among the live oaks in the church's cemetery.

 

 

 

St. Simon's Island Lighthouse and Museum on Beachview Drive.

Dating from 1872, the St. Simon's light replaced one built in 1810 that was destroyed by the Confederates during the Civil War to make navigation more difficult for Yankee ships.The original light was 75 feet high and made of tabby taken from the ruins of Fort Frederica, in case you were wondering why so little is left of that fort. Some of it probably went into other building projects on the island as well. The use of  tabby was the idea of James Gould, who, after building the lighthouse, became its keeper for 27 years. Eugenia Price wrote about Gould in her historical novel, Lighthouse, the first book in her St. Simon's trilogy.

Congress authorized building a new lighthouse in 1867, but the project was delayed because of unhealthy living conditions. Stagnant ponds near the site bred mosquitoes, and two contractors died of fever before the lighthouse and Victorian-style keeper's residence were completed in 1872.

Now owned and managed by the Coastal Georgia Historical Society, the lighthouse and keeper's residence, currently a museum, are open for tours, including climbing the 129 steps to the top of the 104-foot tower.

 If you're hungry after climbing the lighthouse and would like to do a bit more exploration of a very interesting place, go left  on Beachview for a few blocks to a shopping area with some very good restaurants. My wife and I have eaten seafood several times at The Half Shell SSI, 504 Beachview Drive and always found it excellent. (Adapted from my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.)

Both photos were made with an Olympus E-M5 digital camera with a Panasonic Lumix Vario-G 12-32mm 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 2026 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   travel photography    St. Simon's Island, Georgia    Georgia coast    Panasonic Lumix 12-32mm Vario-G lens   Olympus E-M5 camera    Christ Episcopal Church    Eugenia Price