Before we conducted our Spring Smoky Mountain Workshop my good friends Tom Franks and Norm Walker and I decided to take a short detour to South Carolina to photograph some of the fascinating architecture to be found in Charleston. As a commercial / architectural photographer I always enjoy an opportunity to explore a city with such wonderful design and beautiful landscape.
Once we arrived we split up each going our own way to find and make our own images. There are advantages to working both on an individual basis and working together in a small group. If you work by yourself your images will have your stamp of composition on them. Your visualization and placement of subject matter as interpreted by only you. You cannot afford to be lazy. Your mind and your eyes must be engaged. First looking, then seeing and finally visualizing your image. Just as working in the darkroom, your style of printing is yours and is rarely influenced by others since darkroom work is most often a solitary experience.
If you are making photographs as a group often times the vision of one person will influence others. But there are other times when a particularly beautiful subject is spied by two or three people at the same time and from almost the same perspective, multiple cameras will be set up and the subject matter composed and images made. I see this occurrence often, especially on our workshops. Even with cameras set up close to each other, it’s rare that you see the same image from two people. There are so many variables to consider, from lens selection, placement of the subjects, vertical or horizontal, filters, exposure and finally how a negative is interpreted for printing. Later after the contact prints are made it is great fun to see and compare how others saw and composed the same image. It can be a shared learning experience. For Charleston we decided to split up.
I found myself very involved with Charleston. The longer I worked the more images I saw to be made. I had to be careful since I had 12 loaded backs and it would have been easy to expose all 24 sheets of film that day. It was already noon and my film check indicated that I had 5 backs or 10 images left. I began a process of being a bit more discriminating with my image selection. I knew the light later in the day would create interesting shadows and interesting compositions, which it did. By 7pm all of the film was exposed. There was only one thing left to do. Find Tom and Norm and then find some dinner. In our rush to get out and begin making our photographs that morning we forgot to set meeting time and place. Somehow, we all managed to meet in the park at the same time. They say great minds think alike. I wonder why we could not agree on the restaurant for dinner.
After dinner it was time to head back to the hotel and load new film in the film holders. Changing film is best done in the hotel bathroom in the evening with all room lights out. We carry a dark plastic sheet to cover the door to prevent extraneous light from fogging the film.
We were up early the next morning and driving to the Smoky Mountains. When I travel in such a beautiful part of the country I prefer to take the back roads. It is a slower trip but we had plenty of extra time and you will often find interesting subject matter to photograph along the way. It didn’t take long and we found ourselves exploring an old but well maintained plantation. I was glad I took the time to load more film the previous night because there were going to be a number of photographs I was going to make here. Later in the afternoon Tom and I were walking down a narrow path that lead to an old broken down home. It was a very small home that may have been vacant for the last 50 years. But it was not this structure that held my interest. It was this very beautiful and very old Live Oak tree that was growing in the front yard for the past 500 years. This old tree was the first thing Tom and I saw and it was obvious we were both going to make