My wife Kay and I love traveling back roads around Oklahoma. A few years ago I discovered the book “Ghost Towns of Oklahoma” put out by OU Press. It is a well documented look into late 19th and early 20’th century Oklahoma, with old photos, stories, and history of towns that have for the most part disappeared from the landscape. I have about 250 of these old ghost towns loaded into my GPS as waypoints, and often carry the book around when traveling so we can try and find remnants of the town and read a bit of history.
This time we were in northern Oklahoma, north of Enid around Pond Creek. The town of Jefferson is easy to find and still shown on most maps, and about a dozen houses are still active in town. We ran across this old United Methodist Church that was built in 1895 and is still in use today, 120 years later. That may not sound like a long time to someone from New York or England, but Oklahoma was Indian Territory up until 1907 so for us Sooners, that is a LONG time ago.
Once again I was shooting with my Toyo VX-125 and I wanted to practice with my red filter. I grabbed a light meter reading from my Sekonic L508 and then increased exposure by one stop to compensate for the loss of light from the red filter. My negative came out very “thin” without a lot of contrast. It seemed underexposed to me. I probably should have pushed the development a stop or maybe two to get more contrast in the photo. I still have some photos from that trip I have not yet developed so I may try that to compensate for the underexposure.
Click this link to visit my Ride Oklahoma page on this old church to see a color picture and a bit of history about Jefferson, plus you can easily download the GPS waypoints and load them into your GPS.
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