Small Town Subjects, 5/31/12

NOBLE FINANCE, Chickasha, Oklahoma

My "off topic" shooting on the six-week expedition consisted mainly of looking at Small Town America in parts of the country I've never been before, along with color landscape work. Kansas yielded a lot of this, partly because the landscape and light interested me (even if the wind drove me nuts), and because by the luck of the draw, I drove through or spent the night at several interesting small towns.

SPECIAL SALE, Chickasha, Oklahoma

Oklahoma was less productive, and I've been trying to analyze why, for future reference. If anything, I thought the landscape was more interesting, but the locations of the theaters put me on Interstate highways a lot of the time, while I'd been mostly on secondary highways—where you get to see whether a town is interesting enough to stop and look around—in Kansas. I wound up at, and sometimes had to stay overnight at, larger cities in Oklahoma. Bigger cities don't interest me as much as small towns, but more important, on a trip like this there is no time to find the interesting part of a city. If the two-lane highway goes through a medium sized town you can park, walk around for twenty minutes, and have a productive shoot if things go well. From the Interstate, passing a larger city, even if you spot something that looks like it might be an interesting district, it could take half an hour just to get off the road and find a place to park.

Chickasha, home of The Chief drive-in theater, was kind of perfect. It's small but interesting enough that while finding my way to the hotel I saw several different spots I wanted to come right back to for pictures. I did photo walkabouts both evening and morning, then over the next couple days posted several pictures from the road. In my current edit of the off-topic material I turned up another couple pictures that seem to fit right in with the ongoing "Working Pictures" thematic material, with the twist that I think it's pretty clear these weren't made near my home base in Connecticut.