Behind the image: The King Carving
(2024 - Hoover, AL)
The year is 1993. It is a Friday in mid-March. The forecast in Alabama had called for a winter storm and that afternoon when people were met with a mix of light snow and rain, most wondered if this was yet again another case of an incorrect meteorologist.
As the sun set, the rain began to turn into snow. Reports of howling wind, thunder, lightning, and above all, lots and lots of snow.
As people all around the state woke up the morning of 13th, what greeted them was a sight rarely seen in the Yellowhammer State: 15 inches of snow lay on the ground in some places. Icicles were hanging from roofs. Cars were half buried where they had been parked the night before. And for almost a week, thousands were without power.
Most people living in Alabama at that time can tell you their story of this event, how they remember it, and how they spent their time waiting for the snow to melt. I wasn’t alive at this point so I can’t tell you my story of this event. I can tell you, in a roundabout way, about this photo, though.
Because of the ice and snow in 1993, there were sections of cedar trees in Orr Park that died and a local artist, Tim Tingle, decided to begin carving faces into the cedar trees. As time went on, he began carving more and more faces into the trees in the park.
Today, there are more than 50 trees within the area that locals now call “Tinglewood.”
Miles away from Orr Park, which is in Montevallo, there is a botanical garden called Aldridge Gardens in Hoover. On the backside of the lake at the middle of the property is a carving that bears a remarkable similarity to the carvings in Orr Park. I can’t tell you definitively that Tingle carved the one in my photo but it’s been attributed to him before and it looks like his work.
This photo, unlike a lot of my other photos on this site, was shot on film. I have a small medium format twin lens reflex camera called a Yashica-A that I got in Huntsville at an antique shop. To my surprise, it shoots a very clear image and has made me quite interested in shooting on film ever since I got it.
When operating the camera, you set your f-stop, your shutter, and then look down through an eye piece on top to set your focus. As I am still in my infant stages when it comes to using this camera, my biggest metrics for a successful film photo are when the subject is in focus and when the exposure isn’t blown out.
For this image, the side-eyed king is sharp and the background is blurry and you can still see the light hitting the forest floor behind him without the leaves and shadow being too dark. I’ll call that a success ten times out of ten. This is how I took this image.
