Yancey Railroad, September, 1976

In the fall of 1976 my parents traveled to Yancey County from Charleston, SC. They were on their honeymoon, and the South Toe river had just flooded in a little town called Micaville. Construction workers were replacing a bridge on the Yancey Railroad, and my dad, ever the railroad enthusiast, stopped to take pictures.

I had no idea these slides existed until after I graduated from college and began working on the Kona project, documenting the remains of the Yancey Railroad. My dad had a way of revealing such information just when you were starting to feel proud of yourself. "Oh, the Yancey Railroad? Yeah, I photographed that thirty years ago. You know, when it was still operating. But don't worry, yours will probably be better."

I remember standing in his office with these slides held up, blinking into a lamp. The railroad was amazing, of course, but what made my jaw drop was the shot of the church at Kona. If not for the mold on the AgfaColor slides, it could have been taken that afternoon. In fact, I had just photographed it that summer.

I was born five years after these photos were taken, and ten years after that, we moved to Yancey County. By then the railroad was gone. The big flood came in 1977, wiping out the work these men in the pictures had done a year earlier. During that flood my wife was born. The tracks are still there outside her mother's house. We were married on a rock, by the South Toe, less than a mile from the place where these photos were shot.

My dad performed the ceremony.

Bill Moree once told me that the only reason we do what we do as photographers is that we like to look at our pictures hanging on the wall. Well, today I shot about five hundred frames of the governor drinking beer at a press conference. A hundred photos for every one of these YRR slides. I doubt I'll ever hang any of them on the wall.

Bill was wrong; there is another reason we do it. I'm not sure what it is. But as I was driving back from the press conference I caught myself composing an email to my dad: "Drank beer with the governor today, here are the shots." Just one sentence. Because, whatever that other reason is, my dad understood it.


All photos by Rev. C D Cooper, III:

Get your Ektar while you can . . .

HuffPo: Kodak preparing for bankruptcy.

happy new year

At the start of each year I like to clear out my folder of web-ready images waiting to be posted. And though I sort of feel like year-in-review posts are redundant for this type of blog, especially with the chronological sidebar over there on the right, I have added a few images to represent the best/worst moments.

I was going to caption them all, and then I actually looked at them and decided that they can be summed up very simply: Here's to 2011--May we never see the likes of you again.

I've always been sad to see a year go. Not this time. So, for 2012, my usual refrain: Keep your head down, keep your eyes on the horizon, and keep your hands in the soil, clutching the roots.

A Dark Christmas

One year ago tonight I shot this photo:



It started snowing Christmas morning, when we still had two families to visit. By nightfall it was clear we were not getting back to the city. We slid into my brother-in-law's farm just as it became full dark.

Around midnight, I went out to shoot this photo. My nine-year-old niece accompanied me, and I offered to pose with her in the shot. ("Why do you want to take a picture of the horse trailer?" "It's not the trailer, it's the culvert.")

So I have these two frames, one with us, one without. I've been trying to post them for a year, but I never could find the right context. It's a difficult Christmas. Isn't it always?

But, in context, placed next to each other, the photos say this: You can't always be warm, or understood, or appreciated. Sometimes, it is enough not to be alone.

Merry Christmas.

(i hid the whiskey bottles in the back.)

My recyclables are on the cover of the Mountain Xpress this week. This makes three covers in a row!

my lens is bigger than yours.

Just sayin.

So I was walking by a reflective shop window the other day, when suddenly I stopped and said, “Gosh, who's that ruggedly handsome man with that giant lens?” Then, after he left, I thought, “I better get a lens like that if I ever want to impress the ladies.”

We all know the type. He's an older professional, maybe a doctor or a lawyer, and he's getting back into photography after a long and stressful career. So the first thing he does is go out and buy an f2.8 super-zoom because he can afford it.

Well, I can't.

Furthermore, I never really wanted one. Lest we forget (and these days I sometimes feel like there's a real danger I will forget) the tenet of DarkTopo philosophy that was phrased so well by Robert Capa: If your photos aren't good enough, you're not close enough.

Of course, Capa died from stepping on a landmine. And he probably never had to shoot a poorly-lit Asheville city council meeting, either. So I decided it was time I joined the ranks of all the pros and retired rich guys out there and buy some giant over-compensating zoom. I got on the B&H website and sorted my search results by “most phallic” and weepin' creepin' wombats, do you know how much these things cost?

As an “emerging artist,” I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me. Also, I buy their old lenses. They're usually a lot happier about that than they are about those footprints on their shoulders.

In any event, I'm now the proud owner of the old-school Nikkor 80-200 f2.8 D zoom. I picked it up from KEH for a little over $400. It may not have the sex appeal of the new AF-S lenses, but at least I'm the only kid on my block who has a lens made from a decommissioned artillery shell.



Now, it has come to my attention that this lens is the subject of some controversy. The internet is abuzz with allegations of back-focusing. For those of you who are painters, back-focusing means the actual point of focus is behind the targeted point of focus.

The internet photo commandos have all chimed in on this subject. There are two camps. Some say that it is simply impossible for a Nikkor lens to perform poorly. Others say the lens ALWAYS backfocused, and it's only now in the pixel-peeping digital era that we actually notice it. Then they go on and on about studio tests vs. real world results and call each other's mother a whore.

The moral of this story is: Photographers are jerks. Take me for instance. This blog is pretty much all about how I take pictures of those around me to increase my own renown and fortune, and then complain when it doesn't work. But some of us are REAL jerks. Like the people that point out my faults in the comments section.

Anyway, I downloaded a focus test chart from the incredibly unjerkified Tim Jackson. Out of the kindness of his heart, Jackson came up with a focus test way back when the D70 was current and the internet commandos were yakking about whether or not it displayed backfocus errors. For his generosity, Jackson was of course vilified on the photo fora. See a pattern here?

I printed out the chart and ran the test. Because I know I will get comments about the illegitimacy of my procedures, here is a picture of my tripod (set to 45 degrees), my cable release, the flatness of the chart, and the viewfinder image.

I tested the lens at 200mm, f2.8 at the closest possible focusing distance (around 60 inches).







Here are some 100% crops, taken from the edge of the frame. I use the edge because there's pretty much nothing in the center. Before you leave a snarky comment about how my test isn't valid because I didn't show the center crops, you can get the uncropped, full resolution photos here.

Autofocus:



Manual focus:



The Results

Yes, this lens backfocuses like a mofo. Twenty millimeters is about 3/4 of an inch, which is greater than the depth of field this lens has at those settings.

Of course, the standard response by Nikon folk is that this test has no bearing on real world performance. Apparently, they assume I executed this test in Mordor from the back of a unicorn. Make no mistake: Relying on autofocus with this lens will give your subjects soft eyes and sharp ears.

But, for the detractors of this lens, I feel it my duty to point out the obvious: For the rare shot when you need to zoom all the way to 200mm at the minimum focal distance with a wide open aperture, why don't you just focus manually like a real man?

"Real world" examples:


















Conclusion

While we're talking philosophy, there's another tenet of DarkTopoism that should be mentioned here: Cameras and lens are tools to be used, not artifacts to be adored. This idea has drawn fire before, specifically when I posted a picture of my shrapnel-wounded hand after a night in the holler and raised the question of how I would have felt if that hand had been holding a Leica M9.

This lens is fast, it's built like a tank, and it's one-sixth the price of the new AF-S 2.8 zoom. For a savings of $2000 USD, I think I can handle the inconvenience of manual focus at close ranges. After all, some of the finest cameras in the world are manual focus.

Plus, let's not forget what this is all about: Impressing ladies. That $2k I saved will buy some really awesome rims for the DarkTopomobile.

Stay tuned for more photos . . .

Humbug.

Another Xpress cover this week, plus a fairly in-depth story about Asheville's (tenuous?) grasp on the local business movement. The cover was part of a really fun shoot with the Montford Park Players.

Christmas minus 18 days. Batten down the hatches, folks.