Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
The Subject
This is Jim Hawkins, the owner of the New Paris Store in the small town of New Paris, Indiana. New Paris is a tiny town in Elkhart County, a few miles south of the city of Goshen.
New Paris Store is a tiny storefront built in 1901 as a drug store, and it still has the original molded tin ceilings. Jim opened the store in 1978. It is basically a convenience store, selling cigarettes, candy, and some grocery items. All the things piled up all over the store are items Jim has bought from customers to sell on eBay. Most of the town's people are unemployed.
Cigarettes are far and away the best selling items at the store; Jim told me that 70% of his sales are cigarettes!
Jim said that times have been tough in recent years. The high unemployment in the town has made it harder and harder for his customers to buy things, and recently a large chain, Dollar General, had opened a store just outside of New Paris on the highway that runs past the town.
The Photograph
I wanted to do a portrait of Jim that would show both him and his store. Since he's the owner, and he runs it by himself with no employees, I wanted him behind the counter. I also wanted to show the unique old building in which the store is located, and I wanted to show the kind of merchandise Jim sells.
The store is a cramped space. To show it well, I needed a wide angle lens. I used the 24-105mm F4L-IS Canon lens at around 24mm. This let me show Jim in the foreground, while the background shows off the store's ceiling, the shelves full of grocery items on the sides of the store, and the piles of stuff he is selling on eBay that fill the center of the store's floorspace. The cigarettes, the store's biggest sellers, dominate the other products in the photo.
I tried several compositions, including one looking toward the counter straight-on. In the end, this one was the one I liked best, as it best fulfilled my goal of showing both the store and its owner.
Exposure was a bit of a challenge, as the store was rather dark inside. Many of the lights, as you can see in the photo, did not work. I had to shoot at ISO-6400, handheld. I couldn't have used a tripod and a lower ISO for two reasons. One, the store is so cluttered that there was simply no place to set up a tripod! Two, I needed a reasonably high shutter speed to ensure that Jim would be sharp. No one can stand rock-still for a long exposure!
I think I successfully depicted the little store and its struggling owner, who perseveres despite the difficulties of running a small business in an economically depressed place.
