Heading home from West Virginia yesterday, I turned off the interstate after the New River bridge and, much to Evan’s dismay, headed down a winding road through Dogpatch territory toward the tiny town of Hinton. Evan was pretty uncomfortable (”Mom, do you know what this place makes me think of? Serial killers!!”) but he tagged along and got into the picture-taking mode down around the semi-restored railroad station. The river looked deadly cold, and a couple of trains were idling on the tracks both above and below the town. I’ve been through here on the Amtrak Cardinal but don’t remember if we stopped. This image reminds me of my feeling when I first moved to Red Hill and realized how much it resembled West Virginia, with its folding, wooded hills, heavily traveled train tracks, and funky industrial sites in the middle of nowhere. Digital pictures are good for documenting, but I’m more interested to see the black-and-white images that I shot with my Holga. It wasn’t until I started using the toy camera that I began to resolve my dissatisfaction with landscape pictures (urban or rural). The view camera never quite did it for me–too literal. These look more like the way I remember the places. The Holga eats light, though, and I’m not sure there was enough down in this river valley yesterday evening to get good images. If not, I’ll drag Evan back down there on our next trip–serial killers be damned–and see what we can get. The instant gratification of digital has somehow freed me up to be more patient with my black-and-white. And Hinton isn’t going anywhere.

Update/edit, 2/18/08: Until I discovered that people were finding this post by googling “serial killer in Hinton WV,” I had no idea that there actually had been such an individual living in Hinton quite a few years ago. Whew–sorry–the coincidence was just that. Maybe Evan’s instincts are better than I thought.