Life Gets in the Way

 The Maid of the Mist tour boat at Niagara Falls (Canadian side, 2019.) Fuji X-T20, 16-50mm Fujinon XC lens.

My regular readers (all five of them) will probably have noticed that my posts have been a bit sporadic of late. As I write at the foot of every post: "I post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way." Well, life has been getting in the way.

I began blogging in August, 2011, wrote six posts in a row, and quickly realized I couldn't keep up that pace because of my lack of personal discipline and the realization that it took more time than I was willing to commit to. So I shelved the whole thing for eight years.

In December, 2019 I restarted the blog and made a commitment to post three times a week. I've mostly kept that promise, with more  than 775 original posts over a span of six years.

But now, however, life is indeed getting in the way more intrusively in three ways:

First, I'm not making new photographs. I don't find Knoxville to be a very fertile place to make the kinds of pictures I want to make. And it takes time and miles of driving to get out where the pictures are.

Second, Louise and I are both getting older. Her back is an ongoing problem, so many times when I might have been able to go out rambling with my camera I needed to stay close to help her.

Third, my own lack of mobility. Since I had the bad fall at Potter's Falls in August, 2024, walking is not enjoyable. It's hard to make my kind of photos without doing at least some walking, including up and down hills and on uneven ground.

So in short, I'm not creating new content and that makes it difficult to keep the blog going at the level I've established. 

I don't want to quit blogging, so for now I will commit to at least one post per week. I might post more often if I have something especially interesting to share.

If you like my pictures, visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

 

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

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      blogging   Fuji X-T20 camera     Fuji XC 16-50mm lens   

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