School and Home

school&farm-snowsceneThis telephoto shot compressed the distance between the one room school-house in the middle and two Amish farms in the background. I find it humorous how modern schools have closed several times due to low temperatures,yet Amish kids still walk to school and attend on the days public schools are closed. I spoke to an Amish friend and he told me ”we love our children just as much,we just don’t think they need to be sheltered from every adversity”. Some people wonder how the Amish can live without all the modern gadgets,yet they have things many can only dream of,like contentment, humility and the list goes on and on. Imagine sitting in the outhouse at that school in minus 10 degree weather,and you can bet you would take care of business in a timely fashion.

.

Schools Out

one-room-thunderheads

This is a typical one room school in Lancaster County ,with the one exception that it still has a nice white fence around it. Many schools have been encircled with chain link fence or something similar after the tragedy at nickel mines a few years ago. As a photographer trying to capture the uniqueness of the landscape,it is much harder to get a shot like this anymore. Storm clouds in the background are what I had been following  and when I spotted this foreground,I had to stop. A lovely farm is located a short distance away.

Simplicity

This is a location I have driven by numerous times and never really gave it much consideration. This evening I turned onto the road and saw the late evening sun hitting the one room school and hilltop farm, and decided to set up and see what develops. Once again I sat for close to an hour as countless buggies went zipping by on the road behind me, each time raising my anticipation and then never turning onto my road. Several times I set a time to leave, and several times extended it because I knew as soon as I moved a convoy would start coming by. My patience paid off as these two buggies came by. I like this scene because it has the one room school, a farm and the locals all in one shot.I utilized my rooftop setup and laptop to operate the camera. The scary thing is several times in recent weeks, I have found the images I am capturing are somehow not downloading to the laptop and are gone forever. I hear my camera firing and then no download, so when you wait an hour for one chance, you pray everything functions as expected and this time it did.