Some new photos from Fort Wayne

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This house is on Woodheath Avenue, the street where I grew up, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I photographed it on Christmas day while walking around the neighborhood with a camera while visiting my parents for the holiday. I thought that the old metal glider sofa on the porch was interesting. These used to be common around here, but I rarely see them anymore.
 
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These trees were in a cornfield on the north side of Yohne Road in southwest Allen County, Indiana. I photographed them many times over a period of nearly a decade.

The trees were bulldozed several years after I made this photograph. The Republic Services Landfill is located north of the field that the trees stood in, and the dump was expanded onto that land as well.

I made this in 2004 with a newly acquired Nikon D70. It was one of my very first photos with a digital camera.
 
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This is my old cat, Simba, when he was about a year old. He was born at my parents house around the time I graduated from high school. He is climbing on a playhouse that my father built for my sister and I to play on when we were kids. It is built on top of old telephone poles that he got at work. Simba had an amazing ability to climb and hold on to precariously small ledges.

Simba died at age 16 on July 22, 2010.
 
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This pair of abandoned International Harvester pickup trucks were surrounded by old rusty farm equipment and tall grass. The property along State Road 3 in Dekalb County, Indiana, also had a steam tractor and a couple of railroad cars! I photographed them in 2010.
 
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There are a number of dead trees, with their branches cut off, in the yard next to the house at the corner of Dorothy Drive and Haber Drive in rural Allen County, just outside the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The dead trees are covered in boards with hand-painted religious messages encouraging people to follow Christ.

The signs are painted with no spaces between the words, so that the messages run together into a jibberish of letters. The 72 year old man who lives there told me that he painted them that way to force people to stop and read them slowly in order for them to decipher the message!

I photographed them yesterday evening.
 
Hi Chris--I like you orange chair photo a lot. I also like the way you capture the culture of Indiana and the surrounding. I lived in Lafayette while going to Purdue for a year before I had an interest in photography and I feel that you have a great eye for the rural culture of the area.
 
Frankd said:
Hi Chris--I like you orange chair photo a lot. I also like the way you capture the culture of Indiana and the surrounding. I lived in Lafayette while going to Purdue for a year before I had an interest in photography and I feel that you have a great eye for the rural culture of the area.
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Thanks, Frank. The funny thing is, I have never lived in a rural area or small town. All the years I have been in Indiana, most of my life, have been spent in Fort Wayne. Indiana's second largest city, with 250,000 people. At the same time, the culture is not much different, Fort Wayne is the world's biggest small town...a lot like the real thing in culture, but bigger!
 
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I just found this photograph from 2005 in my archives. These trees stood for many years in the middle of a field next to the long drive back to an abandoned farmhouse and barns. in the winter at the beginning of 2010, I photographed these trees again. In 2013, both trees were knocked down by a violent windstorm.

This farm is on Lower Huntington Road, just west of Coverdale Road, in rural southwest Allen County, Indiana.
 
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Back in 2005, my grandpa's longtime neighbors sold their house to a developer who had it demolished to make way for a commercial building. I got to photograph the place right before it was torn down. Here is the garage that sat behind the house.
 
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I photographed this barn outside Fort Wayne way back in 1998. I look back at so many of my photographs...10, 15, 20 years ago. It doesn't seem like it has been so long. I made it while putting together my graduation thesis exhibit from art school. This one didn't make it into my final selection for the show, as I could only include 12 photos, but I still like it.
 
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This is the view from a 3rd floor classroom window on the front of North Side High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The circle drive is next to the old front entrance to the school, which is the second oldest high school in the city. In the background, State Boulevard crosses the Saint Joseph River.

I thought the 'looking down from above' perspective was interesting, and different than how I normally see. I made this photograph last month.
 
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In the last few years, these inflatable snowmen have become very popular Christmas decorations. One of these inflatables in front of a house on Avalon Drive in the Waynedale area of Fort Wayne had been knocked down by high winds earlier in the day. I made the photo a few days after Christmas.

It was windy and the light wasn't terribly bright, so I shot this on Delta 3200 rated at 3200 so I could shoot with a small aperture and still get a fast enough shutter time to prevent motion blur. In 120 size, this film does't look too grainy at all, and the tonality is great!
 
Wednesday morning, we had really heavy fog in northeast Indiana. All of the rural school districts had school delays because of it, but the urban district that I work for didn't. I shot the first one before going in to work around 7am:

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The second one was around 8am. The school had a fire drill, so when I took my students outside, I shot this one:

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We get that heavy fog here in the Carolina's too. Good to see you posting again in this thread Chris. Almost forgot you are a school teacher now. I hope the students recognize how cool it is to have you as a teacher. Have a great school year.
 
gb hill said:
We get that heavy fog here in the Carolina's too. Good to see you posting again in this thread Chris. Almost forgot you are a school teacher now. I hope the students recognize how cool it is to have you as a teacher. Have a great school year.
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I'm a substitute teacher now. I had a stroke in November, and have not felt well enough to work every day since then. I sold my Leicas this summer to pay the bills since I didn't work enough to get a paycheck over the summer. I hadn't shot anything in 35mm in over a year, so it wasn't a huge loss, but still sucked to have to let them go. I'm back to working now that school is back on, but I still work less than full time.

I've been shooting a lot more color this year because I haven't felt up to messing with chemicals to develop film (I have shot color with a Canon 5DmkII for a few years now). I've actually done a lot of photography, despite my health, in 2014.

I've got some other projects I'm working on too. I built a new website for my film developing times and my digital tutorials, and to advertise my private lessons. I've had a good number of people, including a couple of high school art teachers who have been made to teach photography, hire me to teach them. The site is still a work in progress. I'm slowly adding more stuff as time allows, since I'm trying to work as much as I can in the schools. I'm hoping to add some videos to the site soon to show how to do different photo techniques.
 
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