The James Roberts Farm in Madison County, North Carolina comes as close in my mind, as I can recall, to an ideal example of a working mountain farmstead. Its collection of barns, sheds, cribs, and houses could easily qualify it for the National Register of Historic Places. One of the two flue-cured tobacco barns has a shed addition which houses this wonderful old wagon. When I went to begin work there I got so caught up in this one structure that I stayed for nearly four hours. The barn, itself, dates to the late-1800’s, and there’s no telling about the wagon. I asked Bob, the mule, but he just looked at me and swished his tail. I wanted to take in nearly as much of the barn’s inner structure, along with the wagon, as I could, so I used a focal length of 18mm. By adjusting my distance from the closest wagon wheel, I could control how large it appeared as an element and choose what else in the interior I wished to include in my frame. An aperture of f/16 gave me depth of field and a shutter speed of 6.0 seconds gave me an overall medium exposure at ISO 100. Once I had processed in color I went to Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 for the B&W conversion.
LOVE IT! I can see how you could spend 4 hours there! You must have been in heaven with all those lines. Wish I could have been there… So many stories, so many abstracts and probably faces in the wood. I am glad you made it black and white. Color is not part of this story. I like the diagonal lines of the wagon, it’s position and size. Just big enough to be the star but leaving plenty of room to show the barn. It looks like the barn may still be standing just to protect the wagon. Thanks for sharing.
Perspective control and distortion are very difficult to handle with wide angle lenses. You have done it very well. The old wagon is wonderful. Sometimes I feel about as outdated and useless as the wagon and not nearly as photogenic! lol. Keep sharing your work with us.
Great example of placing me on that spot there in the barm.
Hi Don,
I’m conflicted looking at this image. My eye immediately goes to the big wheel in front, which is the brightest thing in the image – then I want to explore the wagon, but then the overhead beams on the left pointing back and the spaces between the boards in back keep drawing my eye away from the wagon. I’d probably crop out the left third of the image, which then makes the whole wagon the subject to focus on.
Bob
A beautiful scene. Would that I had four hours to shoot such a place from a hundred different angles. Is it just my computer (Mac with high-res Retina display), or were the lines of the wagon really that sharp? In my mind’s eye, I just imagine something that old as having softer edges.
Hello Everyone. Thank you all for joining me for this Image. I don’t share much of my black and white imagery so I’m glad this one resonated with you. Nancy T., you know me too well. Indeed I am a wide-angle, line guy; and you are right: when I saw those lines I knew I would be there for a while. And you are also perceptive again: there were faces in abundance, and I do so wish you could be here to share them with us. Dorsey, you know I always appreciate your kind and thoughtful remarks, and I know how you feel about being compared to that wagon, but think how handsome and photogenic it is and how much pleasure it brings to those who spend time with it. You are right about the distortion effects of wide-angle lenses and one of the joys of getting to know these pieces of glass is learning to work with, and within limits, control the those effects. Duke, there is no better compliment than to say that a photographer made you feel as if you were in the scene; thank you. Don N., I can’t promise you four hours in this barn in September; but I can guarantee a couple anyway, and I know you’re going to enjoy them as much as I did. To be as old as it surely is, this wagon is in incredible condition, and its lines are, indeed, fine. We’ll have to ask James Roberts if he knows the age; somehow I suspect that he does. Bob, I truly appreciate your comments, and I’ve thought at length about how to respond to them. As I stood in front of it, my eyes saw a number of possibilities for expressing this wonderful location. One of them was pretty much along the lines you have suggested: focusing almost exclusively on the wagon. In fact, somewhere in my time with that wagon, I have some images that are nearly exactly that. That’s perfectly to be expected; usually we can see a subject in more than one way, and it is a reflection of that uniqueness that makes our art peculiar to us. As a teacher I encourage two things about this truth: first is to learn how you tend to see the world artistically, because I believe that we all gravitate toward seeing the visual world in one, or perhaps two, of a limited number of ways. Second is to be familiar with the other ways in which the world can be seen photographically and to practice all of them alongside your own specific tendencies, so as to become holistic and well-rounded as an artist. Based on comments I have read from you here and previously, I’m going to go way out on a limb and suggest that you tend to see artistically as an intimate landscape, a telephoto image, or, less probably, as a macro image. As you may have gleaned from past Images, I tend to see the visual world as a wide-angle landscape, and those are the images toward which I seem to naturally incline. It’s just who we are and how we are unique as artists and photographers. I applaud that you would take the image you have described; it simply would be a different image from the wide-angle work I have done here. Thanks, again, everyone for all of your astute and thoughtful observations and ideas. This is what I have always envisioned as the type of conversation I hoped to create from this blog.
Thank you Don for your response. You’ve guessed right about my work. Robert Floyd, who runs a photo gallery and education center here in Western MA, has made me aware that even though I photograph many different types of subjects, the unifying characteristic is a focused intimate perspective, regardless of whether it’s a wide angle landscape, a creature, a still life or a person. That said, I’m often amazed by how different photographers approach the same subject and frequently I say “why didn’t I think of that” – seeing other peoples work and approach is a rich educational experience for me. I value being able to see your work and reading yours and others comments and I hope that my comments are indeed viewed as positively adding to the conversation.
Bob, it is my turn to be grateful, and I do, indeed, value your observations and perspectives. Please keep them coming. When I teach composition I emphasize the elements of graphic design, but I also stress learning “how you see the world,” and while I make no claim to having discerned all of them, I do believe I have distilled at least the primary ones. And, perhaps like Robert, I stress the journey of discovering how you particularly see the visual world and working to maximize that talent to the utmost; but I also highlight the importance, as I mentioned earlier, of working equally hard to practice the other ways of seeing, so as to become as well-rounded as possible. After all, it seems somewhat incomplete if we only work at what we already know well. Again, let me say that I value your contributions and hope that these conversations are helpful in your own journey.