5 Frames with 5 lenses and a Nikon F in Tennessee’s Oldest Town

I recently moved to Jonesborough, Tennessee, to be close to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Great Smoky Mountains. Jonesborough is the county seat for Washington County, the first county in the Colonies that was west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and was first settled with English colonists starting in 1769.

Jonesborough has a vibrant place in US history, starting with the Revolutionary War. When British General Cornwallis invaded North Carolina, he sent Major Ferguson to deal with Patriot irregulars in the region. Ferguson warned the irregulars to lay down their weapons, or he would march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and “lay waste to the country with fire and sword.” In response, over 600 Patriots from this region, the “Overmountain Men,” mustered at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River and marched over 300 miles to meet and defeat Major Ferguson at the Battle of King’s Mountain in North Carolina in 1780.

A famous pioneer Congressman, David “Davy” Crockett, was born just a few miles away on the banks of the Nolichucky River in 1788. He fought in the War of 1812 and served in Congress. After getting voted out of office for opposing President Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act which, along with many other Indian tribes, would remove the Cherokee from their historical lands in Tennessee, Crockett moved to Texas where he fought and died in the Battle of the Alamo in 1836.

Jonesborough is known for hosting the first U.S. periodical dedicated exclusively to the cause of abolitionism, The Emancipator, published and funded by the Quaker Elihu Embree. Currently, Jonesborough is widely known for hosting the International Storytelling Festival which kicks off in the first full weekend of October.

I used my 1962 Nippon Kogaku Nikon F, along with an assortment of non-AI Nikkor lenses from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s to capture some of the beautiful architecture on Main Street in the Historic District of Jonesborough. I found it challenging to compose pictures to my liking – the narrow streets and many mature trees limited the options for composition, as well as limiting my ability to use my feet to get the desired distance for a given lens.

I also quickly saw that I was getting severe distortion using my 20mm and 28mm lenses to capture tall buildings from a relatively close distance. I changed my strategy, taking the pictures in vertical mode, keeping the plane of the film parallel to the buildings, and composing the picture in the upper half or upper two-thirds of the vertical viewfinder for most of the pictures. That dealt with the worst of the distortion, the part caused by tilting the camera up to capture tall buildings.

I also discovered that, besides the distortion issues, modest changes in focal length had a significant impact on the composition of the picture. While that isn’t news to anyone who is a serious photographer, my own photography focus for the past 20 years has been wildlife photography, where lens selection is simply using the best and longest focal length I can afford and am willing to carry on hikes. Not having done any portrait or street photography before, I didn’t appreciate how relatively small changes in focal length impact composition and perspective.

So, not fully satisfied with the pictures I was getting with just 20, 28 and 50mm lenses, I ended up picking up 24mm and 35mm lenses from KEH to round out my Nikon non-AI wide angle lens selection and tried multiple lenses for all of the compositions. I also experimented with using a red filter, which I had read some like to use for brick buildings. I also was dealing with a bright sun which made it difficult to get good contrast between the bright sky and the white towers of churches and the courthouse. While the red filter did help with darkening the sky, I found that I preferred the greater contrast between brick and white paint when I didn’t use the red filter. I ended up taking these pictures with no filter and on an overcast day to help with the contrast between the church steeples and the sky.

The final adjustment I made along the way of this photo project was switching from Ilford HP5+ to FP4+ (except for the photo of my camera and lenses outfit, where I used my Nikon F2SB and Ilford HP5+) because most of my photos were heavily cropped and I didn’t want to overly accentuate the grain. For example, the above picture of the Blair-Moore House, which is situated on rising ground, required me to compose a 4:5 ratio horizontal format picture in the upper half of the vertically oriented frame. That way, I could take the picture and keep the film plane perfectly perpendicular to level, with no upward tilt. With that picture being a half-frame, the FP4+ still produced a nice picture without excessive grain, in my judgment. Also, the Type P focusing screen I have in the Nikon F, with its vertical and horizontal crosshairs, was very useful in helping me level the camera, as I could adjust the tilt of the camera to keep the lines of the buildings parallel to the vertical guideline in the focusing screen. All in all, I took eight rolls of film wandering our Historic District before I felt like I was starting to do justice to the beautiful buildings; these pictures are from that last roll.

I developed my film using a Patterson tank and reel and Ilfosol 3 at 1:14 dilution and standard developing times for both the HP5+ and FP4+. I also prefer the look of sepia toned prints in general, so I changed the monotone to simulate sepia after I inverted and applied the curves to the negative scans in Photoshop.

After this effort, I can see the value of a field camera, and I just might give that a shot in the future.

Share this post: