More Black and White Vs. Color

Scarboro Baptist Church in Jenkins County, Georgia in living color.

                        And here it is in a black and white conversion from the color file.

When the editor at Countryman Press asked me to do a second edition of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia, they also asked me to create an additional tour, making a total of 16 in the book. I chose to make this a tour of backroads and small towns roughly along and just north of Interstate 16 in southeast Georgia.

After doing all the travel and photography for the tour, at considerable expense, the powers that be decided it would be too expensive to enlarge the book that much, so I was left with a bunch of unused photos and research material. I should write it up and submit it as an article to Georgia Backroads Magazine and recover at least some of my cost.

Anyway, as I was mapping out the tour I found this beautiful little church in Jenkins County (no relation!) and thought it would make a good example for this post on color versus black and white. Which do you like?

Just to give you something more to look out, here is a color photo of the Gordon-Lee mansion in Chickamauga, Georgia, and a black and white photo converted from the color file.

 

The photo of the Scarboro Baptist Church was made with a Fuji X-H1 camera and the Gordon Lee mansion with a Fuji X-T20, both digital. The lens for both was the Fujinon 16-50mm f3.5-5.6. Just a "kit" lens, but plenty sharp.

For myself, I prefer the color version of both photographs, although I think the Scarboro church photo is almost too picture-perfect. Your mileage may vary.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins. "White Dress" copyright Judy and Tony King Foundation, 2022.)  

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

Black and White or Color?

"White Dress," by B.A."Tony" King

 

To me, this photograph of a ittle girl's white party dress by B.A. King, whom I consider to have been Ameerica's greatest unknown photographer, could not possibly be improved by being in color. (I wrote several posts about King some time ago. To check them out, click here.

On the other hand, my photograph of sunrise in McLemore Cove would be nothing without color, even though it's mostly only variations of a single color..

"Sunrise in the Cove."  McLemore Cove, Northwest Georgia

The issue of whether to photograph in color or black and white was a non-issue for nearly the first hundred years of photography's history because there was no practical way to photograph in color. That ended in the mid-1930s when Kodachrome was invented, but color film and processing were expensive; so for many years most photographs were made in black and white. The studio portraits we had made of our infant son Donny in the late 1960s, for instance, were made on black and white film and hand colored.

So much of the great work of the 20th century was in black and white, and would not have been better if it had been in color. But as digital photography began to surpass film in the early years of this century, the question of color or black and white became a non-issue again, because digital photographs were in color. If you wanted black and white you could convert the files to monochrome. But few did. Including me.

I love and respect black and white and honor the vast body of work done in that medium, but I'm afraid I'm stuck with being a color photographer. As I look at my work I see hardly anything I shot in color that would be better in black and white.

In my heart I’m a globe-trotting, black and white film, Leica-shooting photojournalist in the mold of Elliott Erwitt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Josef Koudelka. But the bitter truth is that I am an autofocus, SLR, zoom lens, color photographer. That’s what I am, and I will just have to live with it.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins. "White Dress" copyright Judy and Tony King Foundation, 2022.)  

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

Where Do My Pictures Come From?

Yugoslav peasant woman in church, 1990.

  

Where do my pictures come from? They come from assignments I am given, from book and magazine projects I am assigned or that I generate, from travel, both professional and personal, for Louise and I have been blessed to be prolific travelers; from occasional days of going out and looking for photographs, and from simply carrying a camera as I go about the daily rounds of my life and photographing whatever interests me. Most of all, I hope it is evident that my photographs come from my heart.

The photograph of an old peasant woman was made in a little church in what I think is now Bosnia in March, 1990, just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Louise and I had been sent by the Church of God on a three-week tour of Eastern Europe to document the role of Christians in bringing about the breakup of the Soviet empire. You can read about it beginning here.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

Louise Sees a Bear

This young bear chose the fork of a massive limb as a place to take a nap. As it happened, that spot was about 25 feet directly above the loop road that goes around Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

(Scroll down for more photos. Click on photo to enlarge.)

 

Louise has had a lifelong desire to see a bear in the wild up close and personal. Well, maybe not that close and that personal, but still. . .

Our 50th anniversary trip to Alaska was great, but with one flaw: we did not see a bear. Well, actually, we did see a couple of bears on the bus trip to Denali, but so far away that to the naked eye they were mere specks. You can read about it here.

So great was her disappointment that when we got home from Alaska we went to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and drove the Loop Road in Cades Cove several times. Did we see a bear? No.

So this past Monday we decided to make a day trip to Cades Cove. Just for fun. We eventually found ourselves at the end of a long line of very slow-moving traffic on the Loop Road. When we finally neared the head of the line we saw people getting out of their cars with cameras and cell phones and looking up into a tree that spread over the road. And in the fork of an enormous limb about 25 feet above us, a young bear, trying to take a nap and wondering what all the commotion was about.

A few minutes later as we finally drove away we saw another young bear running through a field about a hundred yards distant. Louise was happy. She had seen not one, but two bears. Close enough, but not too close.

My telephoto lens is broken, so I made these photos with the 16-50mm lens on my Fuji X-T20 and cropped them severely. That they still look quite good is a testimonial to the Fuji 24-megapixel sensor.

                      Waking up with a yawn. . .                        

     . . .he looks down in amazement. "What the heck. . .?     

  Maybe I should just go down and bite them!"

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

White Trash

Abandoned. U.S, 27, Rhea County,Tennessee.

 

I've mentioned before, many times, actually, that I'm drawn to old and abandoned things -- old houses, old barns, and also old cars and trucks.

I first began old vehicles in the 1970s, as I made frequent Sunday afternoon backroads jaunts around southeast Tennessee and northwest Georgia. Later, as I was traveling and photographing old barns for the Rock City Barns book, I kept finding old and apparently abandoned cars and trucks. So I photographed them too.

By now, I have enough for a book. I even have a title for it: Found on Road Dead: an Anthology of Abandoned Automobiles. Maybe someday I'll get around to publishing it. So many things I want to do, so little time! Meanwhile, the many things I want to do keep me pushing ahead.

Recently, I told my son Rob that I was afraid I would not live long enough to finish all my projects. He gave me some of the wisest advice I've ever heard: "Never die with all your projects finished!"

The photo above is one of my favorites. No doubt some old person had died or been taken to the nursing home, leaving their home and car to rot and rust away. I call the picture "White Trash," although I don't mean that as a reflectiion on the people; just that through whatever circumstances, their possessions had been left to crumble away into trash.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

Cutting Firewood

Cutting up a great big tree with a little bitty chainsaw.

 

In November, 1985, we bought 30 acres of land in North Georgia's McLemore Cove. (Read about how we found it here.)

We put a camper on the property and began spending weekends there. Donny was a teen-ager then, and one Friday evening in the spring of 1986 several of his friends came out to camp overnight. We built a fire in front of the old house, near an enormous maple tree that must have been three feet thick at the base. About eight or ten feet above the ground it divided into two trunks, each at least two feet in diameter.

A little after dark we were all sitting around the campfire when a sudden hard wind came from the west, blowing embers from the fire toward the old house. As we all jumped up to put out the fire, one of those enormous limbs split off the maple tree and fell toward us. We all ran in different directions, and miraculously, no one was hurt.

Except me.

The tree knocked me down and fell all around me. It's hard to believe I wasn't killed, but all I got were some broken ribs.

We were still living in a subdivision near Chattanooga at the time, in a tri-level house. At the lowest level, in the den, we had a wood-burning stove that kept the whole house warm. That fall, I cut up that trunk with a 16-inch Remington chainsaw, split it with a mallet and wedges, hauled it home a load at a time in our compact Ford Courier pickup, and burned that sucker! 

That was the first tree that tried to kill me. Read about the other one here and here. (I got my revenge on that one, too.)

For fans of film photography: you're seeing something unusual, in fact, something you may never have seen before -- a Kodachrome 64 transparency in 120 size. Kodak made it in the 1980s and possibly into the '90s in an effort to stem the tide of photographers switching to Fujichrome. The quality was unparalleled, but it never sold well and ultimately Fuji prevailed. Kodak stopped making the 120 size and eventually stopped making Kodachrome altogether. A sad day, but by that time 'most everyone had switched to digital imaging, so it mattered to only a very few. I shot a few rolls in my Pentax 6x7 and loved the film, but stuck to Fujichrome because I could process it myself.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

Short's Mill in a Frame

My favorite view of Short's Mill

In my previous post I showed a square photograph of the old Short's Mill near Clarkesville, Georgia. While I like the strength and directness of that view, I wrote that it wasn't my favorite. The one above is my favorite.

Both photos were made on October 11, 2010. A lifelong friend had asked me to photograph his son's wedding at a venue in Dahlonega. After the ceremony and reception, he put me up in a hotel there and I got the best night's sleep I had had in a long time. I wish I knew what kind of mattress it was!

Anyway, after sleeping until about 10 a.m. and eating what is known as a hearty breakfast, I went exploring. Short's Mill is located on Old Georgia Highway 197, about four miles south of Clarkesville. I photographed it on film with my Minolta Autocord twin-lens reflex, and also with my digital Canon 5D first version, often called the Classic. This picture was made with the Canon.

What I like about this view is the way the leaves and the top of the waterfall form a frame, drawing your eye to the mill. I wrote more extensively about framing here and here if you would like to read more about it.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My most recent book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is a 304-page soft-cover with more than 200 color photographs. Published by Countryman Press, it is priced at $22.95. Signed and inscribed copies are available directly from me at (423) 240-2324 or djphoto@vol.com.

Another View of Short's Mill

                                                  Short's Mill near Clarkesville, Georgia

I don't imagine anyone could read my blog for very long without catching on that I'm a lover of old things in general, and old barns and old mills in particular. In fact, I define myself as a photographer as a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life.

Short's Mill, a few miles south of Clarkesville, was probably built around 1880, however some sources say it could have been built as early as the mid-1800s. Although the mill ceased operation in 1970, it appears to be mostly intact more than 50 years later. The sluiceway which carried water to the top of the overshot wheel is long gone, but the wheel itself is still in place and looks as if it could once again begin turning the millstones with a few moments notice.

This photo of the mill is not the one I usually show, but I like it very much. Made with my Minolta Autocord twin-lens reflex, the square composition seems to me to be very strong. The film was Fuji's 100-speed Astia transparency film, and I think its soft colors suit this scene very well.

The film was scanned on my old Epson Perfection 4990 scanner, which still does a very good job.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My most recent book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is a 304-page soft-cover with more than 200 color photographs. Published by Countryman Press, it is priced at $22.95. Signed and inscribed copies are available directly from me at (423) 240-2324 or djphoto@vol.com.

 

 

Hiding in the Shadows

Can you spot the horse? Click on the photo to enlarge.

There's a horse hidden in this picture. Can you find him?

The photograph was made on U.S. Highway 27 just south of Winfield, Tennessee, near the Kentucky line, on October 25, 1994. I was on my first trip to find and photograph Rock City barns.

My camera was the ahead-of-its-time Canon EOS 10-S, and the lens was the Canon EF 70-210mm f4; an okay lens, but not the sharpest in Canon's arsenal. When I had the opportunity I upgraded to the Canon 80-200 f2.8L, a lens so legendary for sharpness that it was nicknamed "the Magic Drainpipe.

As usual, the film was Fuji's RDP100 Professional slide film, my all-time favorite, although Kodachrome 64 would have been a close second. I slightly preferred the colors of the Fuji, but it's big advantage was that I could (and did) process it myself, while the Kodachrome had to be sent to a Kodak lab for processing.

This is by no means the sharpest picture I've ever made, but it was sharp enough to make a 20x30-inch print that hung over our fireplace for many years.

Well, enough tech-talk. Have you found the horse? Here he is.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My most recent book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is a 304-page soft-cover with more than 200 color photographs. Published by Countryman Press, it is priced at $22.95. Signed and inscribed copies are available directly from me at (423) 240-2324 or djphoto@vol.com.

 

Another Rock City Barn in Morning Light

Morning light on a farm scene near Kingston, Tennessee.

As I wrote in the previous post, I visited more than 500 sites in 15 states looking for Rock City barns. About 250 sites still had barns, or the remains thereof in some sort of recognizable condition.

Although most of Rock City’s barn painting program had been shut down in the mid-1960s, they were still keeping the signs painted on about 80 barns in the 1990s. This barn, located just south of Kingston, Tennessee, on Highway 58 had been repainted fairly recently.

I was working with one of the early Canon EOS film cameras and Fujichrome 100, a film with a naturally warm quality. However, my goal, always, is to show not only what a scene looked like, but even more, what it felt like. To accomplish that I often used filters, which are colored pieces of glass that mount on the front of the lens. Depending on the effect I wanted, I could use a cooling filter to add more blue to the scene, or a warming filter, to add more yellow/orange. I almost always used a warming filter in varying strengths according to what I felt the scene required. To be sure I got the effect I wanted I often photographed the same scene several times with different degrees of filtration.

This worked very well for me as long as I was photographing with film. In digital photography the filter effects can be added after the fact, but I've never been able to make it work to my satisfaction and I feel my photography is the poorer for the loss. Maybe I should work on it more.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My most recent book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is a 304-page soft-cover with more than 200 color photographs. Published by Countryman Press, it is priced at $22.95. Signed and inscribed copies are available directly from me at (423) 240-2324 or djphoto@vol.com.

 

Early Morning at Bean Station, Tennessee

Faded Rock City barn on U.S. 11W near Bean Station, Tennessee. Nov. 2, 1994

 

It's been a while since I've shown one of my Rock City barns, and this is one I've always especially liked.

When Bill Chapin, the president of See Rock City, Inc. asked me to create a book about Rock City barns, he sent me a box containing hundreds of old file cards from the 1960s. They were 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 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.

The photo above was made early on the morning of November 2nd, 1994 on my second trip. The location was U.S. Highway 11W near Bean Station in northeast Tennessee. The camera was one of the early Canon EOS models, and film, as usual, was Fujichrome 100 slide film.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My most recent book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is a 304-page soft-cover with more than 200 color photographs. Published by Countryman Press, it is priced at $22.95. Signed and inscribed copies are available directly from me at (423) 240-2324 or djphoto@vol.com.

 

 

Riding Shotgun

Donny never let anything deter him from his mission to keep us safe from alligators.

We were always an active young family. We began camping -- in a borrowed tent -- when Don, or Donny Joe, as we called him then and are forbidden to call him now, was just a baby.

We soon graduated to a used Ted Williams pop-up camper, which we loved, and made many trips in it.

We were living in Miami at the time, and decided one weekend to go camping in the Everglades. Donny was about a year old at the time, and thanks to his vigilance, even under extreme circumstances, we made it through the weekend without being eaten by alligators.

I made the photograph with a Yashica 124 twin-lens reflex camera that actually belonged to the private school where I was teaching and was yearbook advisor. I don't remember what kind of black & white film I used.

Don is now a very successful businessman who will be 54 this weekend. Life moves on.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My most recent book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is a 304-page soft-cover with more than 200 color photographs. Published by Countryman Press, it is priced at $22.95. Signed and inscribed copies are available directly from me at (423) 240-2324 or djphoto@vol.com.

Abandoned Church, South Carolina

Seen in a small town in South Carolina. I fought the urge

to procrastinate, stopped the car, and made the picture.

 

I seem to be on somewhat of a roll lately on this theme of abandonment. I have no idea why, but this interest in photographing abandoned structures showed up in the early 1970's when, on a visit to my parents in southern Indiana, I spent a day or two driving and photographing around the countryside where I grew up. Many of the homes of people I had known were abandoned; some were falling down. I told Louise at the time that I did not understand why I was drawn to photographing old structures, because "it was certain that I would never make a dime doing it."

But more than 20 years later, I did indeed "make a dime" photographing old buildings, as my pictures of barns bearing "See Rock City" signs, many of them abandoned, were published in a very successful coffee-table book. Rock City Barns: A Passing Era won many awards and sold nearly 30,000 copies. I no longer have any to sell, but used copies are still readily available at Amazon, and perhaps other places. I notice that occasionally new copies turn up, but I don't know where they come from. Maybe some of my distributors from back in the day find boxes of copies tucked away somewhere in their warehouses.

The abandoned church above was photographed as we were going through a small town in South Carolina on a pleasure trip to Charleston in the 1980s. I made the photo with a Minolta Autocord twin-lens reflex camera and Fujichrome 100 transparency film.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My most recent book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is a 304-page soft-cover with more than 200 color photographs. Published by Countryman Press, it is priced at $22.95. Signed and inscribed copies are available directly from me at (423) 240-2324 or djphoto@vol.com.