7/07/2008

On the Road with Joe


One night in the hospitality room at the UPAA Symposium at Auburn, Joe Ruh was looking for people to go out on a morning road trip to see what we could find out in the back country of Alabama.  Noah and I signed on for the 5 A.M trip. We left and our map was Joe's gut feeling about where we might find something.  We found a train.
Joe is giving a friendly wave to the engineer I am not sure his hand gesture was as friendly because Joe was very close to the train as it came by.
I kept a little more distance from the train by shooting from a pile of railroad track rebuilding supplies and i learned if you use a long enough exposure you can see through solid object like trees through moving objects like train cars. I knew this but i have never witnessed it in a photo that I took.
We traveled down more dirt roads and we found a grove of Pine Trees as the golden light was beginning.


I was shooting with my Nikon 12-24 zoom. I am not very comfortable with that lens and I am trying to use it exclusively to get the hang of shooting wide. I tell people who take my continuing education classes that they have to make friends with their cameras so I am trying that with that lens. Well next we found a cemetery.


As we are following Joe and hs gut about where we are supposed to be going we finally end up in Tuskegee,Alabama. The court house bricks were being cleaned and we stopped to take some photos of that. As I walked around trying different angles I found this guy walking down the street.


Well little did I know that while I was looking for an angle on the court house Joe and Noah were taking bets on whether or not I would be able to get up on the boom lift with the guy cleaning the bricks. Well I did better than that I got us inside the court house and up to see the clock tower and the clock mechanisms.




We drove through the Tuskegee Campus and then we drove by the airport where the
Tuskegee Airmen trained. There was a lot of construction going on and nothing about those famous pilots that was open for three roving photographers out just before 8:30 in the morning. You can read Noah's account of the UPAA Symposium on his blog and he details the Road Trip with Joe as well.
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1 comment:

giantdave said...

sounds like a fun trip. i need to make some photographer friends here at home to do that with. took some the other day around a little town where my cousins aunt ont eh other side has a restaraunt. gonna do a photo project there as soon as a voice recorder i got off ebay comes in. cool shots though!