DiAnna Paulk is a certified professional photographer in central Alabama with a Master Photographers Degree from PPA, specializing in portraits and commercial photography.
Practice any art — music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage — no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut in a letter to students attending Xavier High School in New York, November 5, 2006
That’s what I took the opportunity to do yesterday. I stepped away from the list of things to do and met a friend at Old Cahawba in Orville, AL. We spent a pleasant afternoon on a beautiful winter day photographing what we wanted with no one to please but ourselves. And it was so good for my soul!
Cahawba was once Alabama’s state capital (1819-1826) but became a ghost town shortly after the Civil War. Today it is an archaeological park.
I took a new lens — the Lensbaby Edge 50 Optic on a Composer Pro — and kept it on my Canon 5D Mark IV for the day. It was my first time using it and the best way to learn a new lens is to put it on your camera and leave it there for a while. I bought it specifically for locations like this and was very pleased with the results! If you’re not familiar with Lensbaby lenses, they are creative lenses which give me the freedom to capture in-camera how I feel about a scene. The Edge 50 Optic creates a slice of tack-sharp focus in any direction, surrounded by a sweet blur. I absolutely love it!! More so than the Sweet Optics I’ve purchased in the past.
Here are some of my favorite captures of the day.
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church built during the 1850a at Cahaba. The church was dismantled and moved to the village of Martin’s Station where it was reassembled and served as an Episcopal church for several decades. It was later used by an African-American Baptist congregation for over 60 years before being acquired by the Alabama Historical Commission. In 2008, architecture students from Auburn University dismantled the church and brought it back to Cahawba. The students numbered and mapped every piece of the church so it could be accurately reconstructed.
Two-story brick slave quarters built in 1861 behind the much-larger main house. The main mansion burned in 1935. We noticed that the slave quarters had electricity available at one point. A sign on the property notes that after the main mansion burned one of the grandsons added columns and a back wing to the old slave quarters and moved in with his new bride.
Previous visitors had rubbed their hands against the white bricks and placed handprints on the black boards covering the windows. It added so much to the mood of the building.
The remains of the one-room schoolhouse. The bottom image was taken with the iPhone 12 Max Pro.
The ruins of the Methodist Episcopal Church South built in 1849. It was the first single denomination church in Cahawba. When the white congregation vacated the church after emancipation, the black congregation was able to use it and it became known as St. Paul’s A.M.E. Church. In 1954, sparks from a fire in the nearby woods ignited the wooden steeple. The brick walls toppled before the fire squad could respond.
The only relic of the Castle Morgan prison used during the Civil War to house captured Union soldiers.
The New Cemetery, which served Cahawba from 1848-1900. Sadly, the cemetery was plagued with destruction from frequent vandals in the 1950s. In 1960 almost every monument was found smashed with a sledge hammer. To help protect the site from further destruction, a gate was installed and a caretaker hired. The Alabama Historical Commission repaired many of the monuments in 2019.
There were several areas of Old Cahawba I didn’t get to photograph on this trip as I was running out of daylight. I’m hoping I can go back in early spring and complete the tour.
