Old Rock Church

The Old Rock Church near Cranfill's Gap is one of my favorite places to photograph in north Texas.  It sits alone outside town on a small rise.  There are no powerlines.  It is a neat old church.

It makes a great photograph.

It is a place my friends and I will visit several times a year to photograph.

Here is one of our warm weather trips we made.  

Our usual plan is to get there at dawn and photograph it at sunrise.  However, when you have good clouds, then mid morning becomes great for working in B+W with large format film.

This was one of those mornings.  Nice clouds moving by with some bright blue sky showing through.

Set up the camera to frame the church and the sky.  Because it is out alone, it is usually quiet here unless they are setting it up for a wedding (which people do here sometimes).

This old church is a perfect spot to bring the big camera, take your time and explore.

It is just as neat on the inside, although I always get my best shots outside with some sky in them.

In Holiday Spirit

Spent a fantastic holiday weekend photographing. Hurricane Alex chased several days of rain our way and along with it some great clouds. Spent two of the three day weekend out with the big camera.

Here is another image of the wonderful Rock Church with flag flying proudly for the holiday.

What a great day drive and a perfect day to do it.

When I have clouds like this, I sure wish I had a 47XL. As it was, the 75mm was about the only lens I used this weekend.

Big camera, big sky, big wide lens.

Rock Church and Live Oak

The classic view of the Old Rock Church.

Live oak for framing. Puffy clouds. Empty field. Yep, all the basics.

I was working in B+W with Efke 25 and had it processed in dr5 as a positive.

The came out fantastic. Did duplicate shots and had one set done in dr5 and the other done as a negative.

The negatives are nice but the positives are WOW!

I'll be doing a lot more dr5 with black and white.

The Rock Church

Another church in the countryside, the Old Rock Church.

One of my favorite places to photograph. In the archives of this blog you can probably find four or five other images of it. As you can see, I never really tire of photographing this building.

Can you blame me?

I was working in b+w and with Efke 25 film. To learn the film I was making two of every image and getting half processed as a traditional negative and half done as a positive with the dr5 process.

The negatives turned out great! Still waiting on the positives to come back from mail order. Not sure if my longer term goal in b+w will be to go all positives or negatives. Either way it has given me renewed interest in film since my color work was limited to the edge of the day and b+w allows me to do film more throughout the day.

Old Church

An old church southwest of Fort Worth.

Texas has a great many old churches to photograph and this is one we happened upon one day on a drive.

It's small and not famous, but it was one I liked and return to revisit. I made the image in B+W and I am still waiting for processing-ok I am sending them off this week.

Inside the Rock Church

One from inside the Rock Church. Great church on the outside. Great church on the inside.

I visit here 2-3 times a year and always find new things to photograph. Here I am working the edge of the pews after the good light is gone from outside.

A bonus on this day drive is stopping for some great BBQ in Glen Rose on the way home!

Rock Church

The front of the Old Rock church.

I liked the blue of the sky and the white of the church but the more I look at this image, the more I think I need to try it in monochrome.

The 10mm really is put to good use to get everything in the image. I wish I had the 47XL lens as it would allow me to have done the same thing with the 4x5, as is I sufficed with the 75mm.

Note- the Historic Marker at the front of the church.

The Rock Church in the Morning

Another image from my recent trip down to the Rock Church.

The reverse of the prior image. This time from the back side of the church looking out toward the tree.

There are plans being made to renovate the church back to it's original look. I look forward to seeing it then and what they will do.

Old Rock Church

The Old Rock Church in Bosque County.

I photograph this old church a couple of times a year. It is one I have featured in the blog before too. Alone on a hill with a live oak tree it is certainly an appealing subject.

So, here it is again.

I was set up using my 75mm lens to include all of the tree and the church framed under the branches.

Opposites

Looking all around is a pretty important concept for a photographer. Often the best image is not the first one, sometimes you have to look.

After photographing the tree big in the frame and the church a small distant element, I started walking around. I photographed the church from different angles and kept looking for that next image. Not just a picture, but an image.

I found it on the back side of the church. It was a view of the church in a frame filling pose with a now tiny live oak tree in the distance. It was a complete role reversal of my earlier image.

It took a little maneuvering to get everything lined up right. Then I let the view camera do it's thing. By raising the front standard straight up I am able to keep the building "square" and still get all of it in the image. There upside down on the ground glass the image pops. the church is now the large object that fills the frame top to bottom while over on the side there is a small tree in the distance.

I found the companion image for the first one. It was almost the same yet the opposite.

The Old Rock Church

Some photographer friends first told me about the old rock church near Cranfills Gap. I visited it a few years ago and found it not only to be one neat destination but also a location I made one of my favorite photographs. I have returned occasionally and still find it a location worth repeat trips to.

The church is several miles outside of town and not in the city limits at all. It sits isolated and alone on a small hill. There are no other buildings around it and it’s only neighbor is it's graveyard. There are not even power lines running to it. It truly is alone. You can stand there, look at the church and just see it in a setting of the surrounding countryside much as it would have been a century ago.

That aloneness on the hill makes it unique, photogenic, and well worth a trip to visit.
My plan was to be there for first light hoping that dramatic sky and light would make it a wow image. On my very first visit I got that lucky. I have been back several times, but I have yet to beat that first visit for making a great image.

On a cold, potentially rainy December morning last week, I decided to make the drive to Cranfills Gap and visit the old church. After a two hour drive in the dark night it was a cold, heavily overcast and quite dreary morning that was breaking. I was hoping for clouds , but this was so gray and so blank I knew I would have to work to make the most of it. I looked for different ways to take the sky factor out of the image.

A composition that I thought might work was out by a big live oak tree that grows a few hundred yards from the church. By getting very low I could frame the church under the branches of the live oak so that the tree filled the image above the church and not the dreary gray of the sky.

After I made a few images, I just sat down in the field and made a few of the camera in the grass that really captured that moment of getting low to get the image.