An iconic vintage gas station along Route 66, the Mother Road. I came across this in Oklahoma a few years ago and fell in love. This shot will be included in my upcoming "Photographing Route 66" book, scheduled to be published by Schiffer Publishing in 2024.
Your photo will be custom printed on luster archival paper with a one inch border. I will sign and number the print on the border for you. If you would like a metal print, feel free to contact me directly for prices and availability. Metal prints are ready to hang but far more expensive to create and ship.
My work is not about creating art. It is not even about making photographs. It is more about hunting and gathering. The area I hunt is the United States of America. In my heart I call it “The Territories” or simply “America”. Photographing my country is an act of patriotism for me. My way of serving.
Think of me as a big retailer kid. All I want to do is play outside. For me, playing is driving and taking pictures. My current “Bob”, is a destination-bumper-sticker-laden travel truck. This one (Bob 4) is a 2-year-old Ford 150 with 70,000 miles on it. There is no place I'd rather be than driving cross-country on what I call the gray roads; those hidden highways, those roads less taken. I always want to see around the next curve in the road to photograph the treasure that might be there and The Territories never let me down.
I take pictures because I am a hoarder, a collector. I gather them up like toys in a toy store. I choose my angle, lens, f/stop, shutter speed and ISO carefully because I am a discriminating collector. Panoramas offer me even greater control by allowing me to choose the size and shape of my image. I can define the perimeter specifically in each case. I love the precision that photographic equipment affords me.
When I see something great I want to share it. I shoot for my wife, my friends, my students, for whoever wants to look. When I show a photo, I'm thinking “Look what I found!! Isn't it cool?”
This is a panoramic photograph. As a photographer, I was trained in the art of seeing things through the confined dimensions of a 35mm piece of film, approximately 3:2, slightly wider than tall. As all photographers have done, I have worked within these boundaries using wide angle lenses to capture more of the scene than would otherwise be possible, but the resulting distortion of distance and perspective never felt quite right. I found myself secretly jealous of painters, who could select any size canvas on which to create art. When I found panoramic photography a few years ago, I realized I had discovered my unrestrained canvas. Panorama photographs are carefully crafted from multiple photographs that are combined together to form one large image. With panoramas I can photograph without traditional framing limitations. This is immensely satisfying for me, as I feel panoramas are best able to convey what you would have seen had you been standing there beside me when I took the picture. Because of this huge file size, my photos can be printed as huge canvases. I am offering them here as large as 6 feet wide. Of course the little ones look great too.
Product code: Tiny Conoco, Route 66, Commerce, retailer Oklahoma