Nolensville Downtown Feed _ Leipers Fork Nashville City Photography - Nashville

1. Nolensville Downtown Feed | Leipers Fork Nashville City Photography - Nashville It was a dark and still mid-summer night. The scene is set in rural Tennessee, half an hour outside of Nashville, but you would never know it was the 21st century by the looks of the nostalgia-lined rows of houses of brick and wood. Barn doors, rustic old granaries littered the countryside in the quaint little town of Nolensville. I was on the hunt. I had a darling customer who'd purchased 3 large canvas prints from me, mostly tailor-made for her exact home setting. She'd asked me months ago to go shoot her small town of Nolensville, Tennessee. Being the busy man I am, I didn't get around to it immediately, but when we reconnected yesterday over the phone I remembered her request to go shoot it, that I'd agreed to. After I got off from work last night in my art gallery, I made my way through the backwoods of Tennessee on my motorcycle. It took a good thirty minutes of winding, but gorgeously scenic, country roads before I found myself in the old Downtown of Nolensville. This old southern town was founded by a Revolutionary War veteran and was named after him, in 1797. The place looked like a scene out of To Kill a Mocking Bird. I stopped in a local coffee shop and grabbed a late-night cup of coffee, it was past 10 pm and I'd had a long day. I got to chatting with a local there and I asked her what was most iconic about Nolensville. She told me about the old mill, and I fell in love with the idea.

2. This was an incredibly technical shoot. There were multiple strong points of lights shining right into the lens, amongst an impossibly dark background. Extreme contrast like that makes lens flares, distortions and generally makes it next to impossible to get a sharp picture with any detail. 30 minutes of measuring light, trying new different angles, different techniques, and ways of shooting this, I came up with what I liked. Being pitch blackout, I of course had to go for a long exposure (where the camera is on a tripod and the photo is taken over 30 seconds or so) to get any detail in the shadows whatsoever. Right at the end of the photo being taken, a screeching firetruck flew by, lighting up the entire countryside and filling my shot with a gorgeous glow of pink and red that was otherwise not present in the rest of the experiments! It felt so great getting this exact shot I wanted despite all the reasons why it was almost impossible.

3. Leiper's Fork Nashville City Deep in the woods in rural Tennessee, alongside an ancient riverbed lies a tiny village settled in the 1700s called Leiper's Fork, with a population of about 650 people. I'd heard about this place for over a year and was asked to photograph it multiple times. A few nights ago, I finally got to escape for a few hours and find this place. There's an old-time grocery store, turned restaurant, and live music venue called Puckett's Grocery. It was hopping on a Sunday night, after dark with a loud band playing on stage for the diners that night. I got to capture this remnant of Old Country charm, nestled in a distant neck of the woods, 40 minutes south of the city of Nashville! It was tough finding the right angle to capture the experience, with so many people in and out of the place, but after enough tries, and being eaten alive by mosquitoes on a warm southern night, I was able to capture this!