Return to Limestone Mary

Last October on an early morning walk in Libertyville, Illinois, I came across some monuments. Most were standard headstones, but one was a statue of Mary made of limestone or concrete, I'm not sure which. I prefer to think she's carved in limestone. This occurred before I began this blog, so here are some of the photos I took that day. I used either my Nikon F3 with my Tokina 28-200 SZ-X lens and Walgreen-brand 200 ISO film or my Pentax K-7 with my Sigma 35-80mm lens. The first ,second, and fourth were taken with the Nikon and Walgreens film. Pretty great what film can do, right? The images are a bit softer than the digital, with less sever acutance and more blending across the subject. There's also a flaw in the film that caused the last one to have a weird redness, but let's not focus on that. A key need for all new cameras is to shoot a test roll. This determines if the camera works properly and detects and leaks in the light seals. So the Pentax 6X7 I bought came with two rolls of film -- Ilford 125 Plus-X and Ilford PNAF 50. Both expired in early 1998, so I had little hope they would provide good images. However, they would be good test rolls. I shot the 125 first, exclusively on Limestone Mary, at 100 ISO to compensate for the aging. Here are some shots. As you can see, the camera works. But more than the shots, these images work well because the monument is so well made. I admit I'm not Catholic, so images of Mary don't emotionally affect me like they may other people, but this statue gets me because of its quality. It has such detail that, as you can see in the last image, it looks as though it could be a real person walking in a field, reaching out to touch flowers as she walks past. It's an amazing statue.