I was in Alabama for a few days covering the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and otherwise exploring a few parts of the state. In the interest of indulging my inner-Walker Evans and Fred Herzog, I devoted a good amount of time to black and white and color photography of older buildings, signs, and advertisements.

For this post I want to focus on the black and white photography, which I shot using the Leica M-D I mentioned in a previous point. The M-D, you’ll remember, is a digital rangefinder which doesn’t have an LCD screen and only a few auto settings. Combined with the manual focus M-mount lenses and you have a digital camera that feels exactly like shooting a film Leica M. And that is more or less how I treated my photography on this trip, finding an average exposure and then bracketing on either side in the interest of getting it right “in camera.”

As with actual film, a good exposure is just the starting point for the real work of creating a usable file for printing and display. All the photos you see here were processed in Lightroom, using VSCO as a starting point and adjusted to ensure a full range of tones. The remaining photos in this post were taken in Fairfield, Alabama, which is part of the Birmingham metro area.