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.

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.