Former AP and UPI photographer Dan Sears says that his “Southern Scenes” is “an on-going personal project to document vistas and sights that are disappearing from the South.” For Sears, photography is preservation. So far he has “logged over 1300 miles” in the course of his project, and he has found some of the most artfully crafted images we’ve ever published (like this picture above, taken near Bunn, North Carolina). Photography aficionados will appreciate that the “Scenes” were shot in Hasselblad medium format on Fujicolor 400 film and then scanned and converted into black and white images. The rest of us can only appreciate the mixture of the magical and the ordinary that these photos capture, the consideration they provoke, and the sense of wonder they leave with us.