Fields Far Away

My sons Landon and Jordon scamper up the steep incline on the Appalachian trail  in North Carolina. This was taken when Melanie and I went to North Carolina.

Bob and I got the old man who rode this tractor many a year in his fields in the valley of North Georgia to pose. Somewhere I have his name, but have long since forgotten where.

This was the type photograph Bob and I were after. With our Nikon and Kodachrome atop tripods, we took many photographs together in the eighties.

This is Robert photographing the fall colors along a back road up in the Pisgah National Forest. Bob was the ultimate slow photographer, taking great pains to get the proper exposure and composition. The photograph below is one of my favorites of Bob, and tells much of me, that I was already back at the old van waiting for him to finish up.

In the eighties, my friend Robert "Bob" Jones and I would travel annually each fall to North Georgia and North Carolina to photograph the fall scenery. We would travel up in his VW van, camping along the way in campgrounds if found, but mostly in out of way places.
It was the height of the film era and we shot Kodachrome 25 from our Nikon cameras. Bob had a vintage Nikon F from his WWII days as a Navy photographer and I had the newer Nikon F3,FM2 and FE2.
Our styles were quite the contrast. Bob would slowly survey a scene, meter with his Weston, compose, recompose, focus, click the cable release. I was not as patient, and would go about snapping away, taking perhaps ten photographs to his one. I was always completed and waiting for him to finish up. Looking back, I too needed to slow down and take my time.
Robert is now in his upper eighties, me in the upper fifties and often think back with fondness on those days roving the back roads of the Smoky Mountains. The last photograph in this series, End of Wayah, is atop Wayah Gap on the Appalachian Trail. Bob is walking out of the mist toward the van, where I have competed and have been waiting for him.