Jesse D Poole, Natchitoches, LA (2026)

09/30/2026

It’s officially Christmas time in Natchitoches when Kaffie-Frederick General Mercantile says it’s Christmas time.

I don’t make the rules.

They’ve finished setting up Christmas upstairs, and if you’ve never wandered up there during the holidays, it’s worth the trip. Ornaments, lights, decorations, and nearly enough Christmas packed into one floor of an old general store to make you forget it’s still 80-something degrees outside.

There are certain little signs around town that tell you the season is changing. The days get a little shorter. Window-fronts start changing, and Kaffie’s upstairs turns into Christmas.

So, I guess we’re here.

Christmas in Natchitoches has officially begun.
Well... at least at Kaffie’s... for now.
—

Shot on Canon USA

09/29/2026

I stood here longer than I probably needed to, fighting off biting flies at my ankles and gnats flying in my face.

Watching the Gulf roll in around what was left of a tree.

I don’t know how long it stood there, what finally brought it down, but there was something strangely beautiful about it.

This thing was dead.

Everything around it was moving.

Every wave came in and changed the landscape a little. Sand disappeared. Sand returned. Water filled the spaces around it and then pulled away again. The sun kept dropping. The shadow kept getting longer.

And eventually I stopped photographing it and just watched.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much time we spend pretending permanence is a real thing.

We build lives. Careers. Families. Bodies of work. We collect s**t. Chase things. Worry about things that, given enough time, probably won’t matter nearly as much as we convinced ourselves they did.

Meanwhile, everything is changing underneath us.

People leave.
Kids grow up.
Places disappear.

We become different versions of ourselves without really noticing when the old version left.

And eventually, every one of us becomes something that existed here once.

That sounds depressing as hell when you say it out loud, but standing there, it didn’t feel depressing.

It felt strangely peaceful.

Because the death of this tree wasn’t really the end of its story. The Gulf was still working on it. The salt. The sand. The tide. Eventually it’ll break apart, disappear into something else, and whatever remains will become part of whatever comes next.

Maybe we’re not so different.

Maybe existence was never supposed to be about holding onto anything forever.

Maybe it’s about being here while we’re here.

Making something.
Loving somebody.
Seeing some s**t.
Leaving a few marks in the sand.

And understanding that eventually the tide comes back. I think I’m becoming more okay with that.
—

Shot on Canon USA

09/28/2026

Four Old Ghosts~

Trek far enough down the less-traveled stretches of beach and you start finding scenes like this.

These old trees have been absolutely beaten apart by the Gulf—stripped, broken, weathered, and reduced to these strange remnants standing along the shoreline.

I really dig this composition. Four figures lined up against the water, each one different from the next. There’s something about the spacing and the way they stand that immediately made me think of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road.

Nature’s version, I guess.
No crosswalk. No traffic.

Just four old ghosts walking the beach.
—

Shot on Canon USA

09/28/2026

I haven't posted in a few days...I needed a break.

Not necessarily from photography, maybe just from photographing the same things.

Forests. Rivers. Swamps. Mud. Cypress trees. Louisiana.

I needed to point the camera at something that didn't look remotely familiar.

So I ended up at the Gulf—Florida—but we didn't stop at Destin, Pensacola, or Panama City Beach. We kept going until we ended up on Cape San Blas and the St. Joseph Peninsula—a narrow strip of sand reaching nearly 20 miles out into the Gulf.

And then we kept walking. Miles of it.

Far enough into the wilderness preserve that most everything we associate with a Florida beach disappeared. No condos. No rows of umbrellas. No beach bars. No crowds.

Eventually, it was just white sand, dunes, water, and sky.

The northern end of this peninsula is protected wilderness—miles of undeveloped beach and some of the tallest intact dunes in the Florida Panhandle. It's habitat for nesting sea turtles, threatened shorebirds, and even the endangered St. Andrews beach mouse.

I didn't know most of that when I raised the camera.
I just knew it looked different.
And apparently, I needed different.

I think sometimes we get so comfortable photographing what we know that we forget what it felt like when none of it was familiar. When you didn't already know where the light would fall. Didn't know the composition before you got out of the truck. Didn't already have some version of the photograph in your head.

Out there, I didn't.

There was no swamp. No muddy riverbank. No familiar stand of trees waiting for good light. Just an enormous blue sky, the Gulf, miles of white sand, and a camera in my hand.

Turns out, walking a few miles down a peninsula in Florida is totally worth it.
—

Shot on Canon

09/28/2026

Hey y'all... What's up?

09/23/2026

I was in East Texas the other day for a job, and since I was already out that way, I figured I'd spend a little time wandering around.

Ended up in Center, Texas, standing in front of this old brick courthouse.

Built in 1885.

And as it turns out, the story behind this thing is a hell of a lot more interesting than I expected.

The man responsible for it was an Irish immigrant named John Joseph Emmett Gibson. He'd eventually settled in Center, opened a brick factory, and made a living as an architect and master mason.

When the previous Shelby County Courthouse burned down in 1882, Gibson was awarded the contract to build its replacement.

He designed what would become known as the Irish Castle on the Square, a rather unusual courthouse with these massive cylindrical brick towers, arched windows, and some pretty remarkable masonry.

But here's where the story gets interesting.

During construction, winter rolled around, and Gibson requested that work be suspended because of the freezing temperatures.

The county commissioners apparently weren't having it. They ordered the work to continue against his advice.

Then a severe cold front hit.
An entire wall cracked.

Gibson needed to rebuild it, but the county refused to approve the money for repairs.

So he paid for it himself.
$2,700.
In the 1880s.

According to the historical marker out front, Gibson spent years petitioning the county to reimburse him. He even had the support of local citizens.

He never got the money back.

The courthouse was formally accepted in February 1886, and here we are, 140 years later, still looking at the thing.

I spent a little time walking around it, looking at the brickwork, the towers, and all the little architectural details that someone took the time to put there long before any of us were around.

And I probably would've driven right past it if I hadn't decided to wander around for a bit.

That's one of my favorite things about getting out on the road with a camera. You go somewhere for one reason and end up finding something else entirely.

Sometimes it's a photograph.
Sometimes it's a story.
This time, I got both.
Shelby County Courthouse. Center, Texas.
—

Shot on Canon USA

09/17/2026

I couldn't tell you how many times I've photographed the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception on Church and Second Street in downtown Natchitoches.

Probably more than I care to admit.

But there's something about photographing the place you live. Spend enough time walking the same streets, circling the same blocks, and you start learning the place in a way that's difficult to explain.

You learn the angles that work. The lines. The geometry of the buildings and how they fit together. You figure out where to stand, what to leave out of the frame, and which direction to walk when the light starts getting interesting.

After a while, it becomes almost innate.

And when you live in a downtown small enough to walk several times during golden hour, you get plenty of opportunities to figure that s**t out.

I suppose that's one of the things I appreciate about small-town life. You can spend years looking at the same buildings and still find something worth stopping for on an otherwise ordinary weekday afternoon.

Same church. Same street. Same photographer.
Different light.
—

Canon USA

09/16/2026

Golden hour is one of those things you just have to ride out.

Sometimes the sunset is spectacular. Sometimes it isn’t.

But I’ve learned not to pack the camera up just because the sky doesn’t immediately look like it’s going to do something dramatic.

Hang around.
Watch where the light goes.

Because sometimes the best part of sunset isn’t the sun at all. It’s what that last bit of light touches on its way out.

Tonight in downtown Natchitoches, it caught the trees along Cane River and lit them up for a few minutes while everything else was already beginning to fall into shadow.

That’s the thing about golden hour. It doesn’t last long, and it sure as hell doesn’t wait on you.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is stay put, keep the camera out, and ride the light until there’s nothing left to photograph.

It’s almost always worth the effort.
—

Shot on Canon

09/16/2026

I’ve been looking for inspiration in all the wrong places lately. Thinking I need to drive farther. Find something new. See something I haven’t seen before.

Turns out, sometimes you just need to change the way you’re looking.

I put a macro lens on the camera and spent some time with a spider lily covered in morning dew.

That was it.

Same flower I probably would’ve walked right past any other day.

But get close enough and the familiar stops looking familiar. Petals become landscapes. Water droplets become light. A flower becomes shapes, color, texture and these strange little details you’d never notice standing five feet away.

There’s probably a lesson buried somewhere in that.

Maybe inspiration isn’t always hiding somewhere down a road you haven’t driven yet. Sometimes it’s sitting right in front of you.

You just need a different lens.

P. S. If you’re a photographer and read that as an indication to go buy a new lens—you’re welcome.

—
Shot on Canon

09/14/2026

I've been pretty terrible at keeping any kind of posting schedule lately.

Part of it is life.

Part of it is that I haven't been particularly proud of a lot of what I've photographed lately. At least not proud enough to throw it onto the internet just because the calendar says I'm supposed to post something.

Then I got a roll of film back.

Earlier this summer I met up with an old photographer friend in Lake Charles. He's actually the father of someone I went to high school with, and he's one of those people I've spent a fair amount of time around over the years without really knowing.

Photography changed that.
Funny how a camera can do that.

He had an old lens for me—a Canon 35–105mm Macro—for my AE-1. Both products of another era, from a time when nobody was talking about megapixels, eye autofocus, algorithms, content schedules, or whether a photograph was going to perform well online.

You loaded the camera.
You walked around.
You looked at s**t...and occasionally you pressed the shutter.

So that's what I did.

I loaded some Kodak T-Max 100, put the lens on the Canon, and walked around Lake Charles for a while.

No masterpiece in mind.
No content strategy.

Just an old camera, an old lens, black-and-white film, and whatever happened to catch my eye.

And you know what?

That lens is pretty damn sharp for a piece of glass that's been around for roughly four decades, but I think what I like more is that these photographs don't really need to do anything.

They're just photographs from a day I was there.

A clock.
Some palm trees.
A boat tied to a dock.
Water.
Buildings.
Louisiana in the summer.

Nothing monumental happened.
Maybe that's exactly why I'm glad I photographed it.

Because I'm starting to think I've spent too much time lately trying to make photographs that matter—and not enough time simply photographing the things that made me look.
—

Canon AE-1 Program
Canon FD 35–105mm f/3.5
Kodak T-Max 100
Lake Charles, Louisiana

Jesse D Poole

09/30/2026

09/29/2026

09/28/2026

09/28/2026

09/28/2026

09/23/2026

09/17/2026

09/16/2026

09/16/2026

09/14/2026

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