Category: Great Smoky Mountains Book

Make the Holiday’s Happy!

December 12, 2014
BooksGalleryGreat Smoky Mountains Booknature photographyQuiet Light PublishingRichard MackRichard Mack PhotographySmoky Mountains BookThe Lewis & Clark Trail American LandscapesThe Lewis and Clark Trail American Landscapestravel

Need to get some late shopping done? Well how about ordering a signed copy of one of my books – great gifts! You can choose from my first book The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes which chronicles the journey of the Corps of Discovery like you were with them. The images were done at the same time of year the expedition past by these places and words for the journals of Merriweather Lewis and William Clark alongside many of the images describing what you are seeing. There is also a Limited Edition version of the book which includes three fine art prints!

 

http://shop.quietlightpublishing.com/the-lewis-clark-american-landscapes/

L&C Book Shadow

You can also purchase my second book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes which looks at parts of our most visited National Park from a perspective those in the park have said is the best they have seen. http://shop.quietlightpublishing.com/great-smoky-mountains-national-park-thirty-years-of-american-landscapes-by-richard-mack/

GSMNP Book Shadow

You can get autographed copies using the link to Quiet Light Publishing’s online shop. You can also purchase both books together at a specially priced savings. Prints, Note Cards and Folio’s of small fine art prints are also available!

GSMNP_Folio_color

Quiet Light Publishing online shop: http://shop.quietlightpublishing.com/

Happy Holiday’s!

Richard

A Busy Start to the Year

February 1, 2013
Great Lakes ProjectGreat Smoky Mountains BookJill BucknerLake SuperiorNew WorkPhotography ToursPhotography WorkshopsQuiet Light WorkshopsRichard MackRichard Mack PhotographyTWO PHOTOGRAPHERS | ONE VISION

SPEX Art+Vision Show, GSMNP Book Reprinted, Updated Websites, Workshop Dates

It has been a busy year so far in 2013 with the opening of the SPEX Arts+Vision show with Jill Buckner as part of the TWO PHOTOGRAPHERS | ONE VISON project (www.twophotographers-onevision.com) encompassing our images from Italy and Morocco. When you have roughly 30 images framed for a gallery show it takes a lot of work to edit and print each one before framing and hanging the show. The show will be at the SPEX on Central Street in Evanston through February. If you are in the area you should stop by and check it out.

Great Smoky Mountains book

In addition, my book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes is now being reprinted as we will soon be out of stock if we don’t! Part of this process is deciding if there should be any changes before you roll the presses. In this case we had to update the signature page with the updated info, change a Photoshop error on one of the images, and update the current Quiet Light Publishing book list to the final page in the book. We also added four of the best book awards, out of the dozen the book won, to the back of the dust jacket. The book went on press yesterday.

We also released the Quiet Light Workshop schedule for 2013 and updated some of those trips. More on all of that later. Check our websites for the updates. And speaking of websites both the Quiet Light Publishing ( www.quietlightpublishing.com ) and Richard Mack Photography (www.mackphoto.com) websites have been updated with new images and projects!

So the year starts off with a bang and next month will be the same as I get back to working on my next book Twenty/Ninety-Five part of the Great Lakes Project (www.quietlightpublishing.com/GLP.php) with a trip to Lake Superior to capture images of the ice and snow. This is a shortened trip from the one I was supposed to make the first three weeks of March. Will feel great to get back to this project! Stay tuned for updates!

Peace,

Richard

 

Another Award for my book on Smoky Mountain National Park

Great Smoky Mountains book
March 13, 2011
awardsBooksGreat Smoky Mountains BookQuiet Light PublishingRichard MackSmoky Mountain National Park

Great Smoky Mountains bookLast week the Association of Partners for Public Lands, which includes each National Park, National Forest Service, Fish & Game and many Historic Societies, announced the winners of the 2011 Media and Partnership Awards in Dallas. The awards highlight the new ways these organizations incorporate multi-media technology, partnerships, sustainability and education to expand the outreach to public lands visitors and enthusiasts. As stated in the release for the awards, “This year’s products and programs reflect the diversity of these special places, as well as the variety of visitors who come to know and love them. These efforts to engage the public help enable visitors to understand appreciate and care for America’s public lands.”

My book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes won in the category of Non-Partner Published works. This covers books from every national park released over the last two years. Here is what the judges had to say about the book, “What a great value for the price, a beautifully crafted book. This is a testament of dedication by those who saw the visions and made it happen.” 

In a recent article in the Chicago Suntimes, Steve Kemp, who wrote the Foreword and chapter introductions said of my work, “Richard has sensitivity for light that’s pretty rare. He can coax a richness out of landscapes and low light conditions that you don’t see other photographers experiment with. His photographs have an emotional depth that is superior to a lot of other work. It’s the best large format photography book we’ve ever been able to offer our visitors.”  

I also want to congratulate Steve, who is the Interpretive Products and Services Director Great Smoky Mountains Association, on the other five awards he and the Great Smoky Mountains Association won for their work! What an accomplishment. 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes, ISBN# 9780975395424, can be purchased at your favorite book store, Great Smoky Mountains Association website or in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park stores, and of course directly at Quiet Light Publishing where all books are signed by me. 

Congratulations to all the winners at GSMA! 

You can preview the book on the Quiet Light Publishing website. www.quietlightpublishing.com

It is humbling to have been so recognized by such a large association which works for the benefit of our public lands! It is what any landscape photographer who works to bring the message about our need to protect the environment to the forefront for future generations strives for. 

Peace,
Richard

Chicago Suntimes article about me & Quiet Light Publishing

December 18, 2010
Great Smoky Mountains Booknews articlesQuiet Light PublishingRichard MackSmoky Mountain National ParkSmoky Mountains BookThe Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes

Dave Hoekstra from the Chicago Suntimes has written a great article about me and how Quiet Light Publishing came to be. He writes about how I did my first book on the Lewis & Clark Trail and my second book on Great Smoky Mountains National Park before expanding to publishing Steve Azzato’s book Their Love of Music. Here is what Dave wrote – it appears online with this link or in tomorrow’s Sunday Chicago Suntimes – December 19, 2010. First the link to the article online http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/2831128-421/book-mack-clark-lewis-trail.html and now his article here…

Evanston photographer feels call of nature in new book
BY Dave Hoekstra dhoekstra@suntimes.com Dec 17, 2010 09:45PM

Richard Mack’s ember photograph of the Missouri River at twilight gently moves off the page into your soul. I’ve never been absorbed by a photograph in a coffee table travel book as much as this spiritual picture in The Lewis & Clark Trail: American Landscapes. Taken from the crest of the Double Ditch Indian Site, about 30 miles north of Bismarck, N.D., it was the last shot of the Evanston resident’s first book project. “I knew at the moment it could be the cover,” he said during a conversation at a Ukraninan Village coffee shop. “It was the end of a two-and-a-half year project. I was standing on a cliff. It was where the Mandan Indians had camped. As Lewis and Clark came by it was fall [Oct. 21, 1804]. You have to frame and wait for the right light, but in the landscape world, most of it is given to you by what’s going on in front of you. That was during the days of film, so if it came out I knew it would be stunning.”

The Lewis & Clark Trail is a 2007 companion piece to Mack’s 2009 Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. In October, USA Book News named the Smoky Mountains effort as “Best Book, Nature Photography 2010.”

The landscape books launched Mack’s Quiet Light publishing company to a space where he could do a third coffee table photography book. Released last month, Their Love of Music features 117 color photographs from Libertyille-based NBC cameraman Steve Azzato. It is the first non-Mack book for the Evanston-based imprint. (All books are $65, quietlightpublishing.com.)

“Book publishing is harder than you think,” said Mack, 55. “You have to become a publisher and everything that entails. But this is the only way you make money — even though it’s not a lot. It’s like the musicians [Dave Alvin, Aaron Neville, Dave Specter and others] in the book. They do it for the love of the music, you do it for the love of the book.”

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is Mack’s best seller and the No. 1 selling large format book at the park.Steve Kemp is Interpretive Products and Services Director with the Great Smoky Mountains Association. He contributed the foreword and chapter introductions.

“Richard has a sensitivity for light that’s pretty rare,” Kemp said from his office in Gatlinburg, Tenn. “He can coax a richness out of landscapes and low light conditions that you don’t see other photographers experiment with. His photographs have an emotional depth that is superior to a lot of other work. It’s the best large format photography book we’ve ever been able to offer our visitors.”

Mack explained, “I’ve been going to the Smokies almost every year since I was 18. It was the closest national park to Chicago. You could get there in a day. I spent two years (2006-08) going there every season just to shoot for the book.”

Between 2002-2004 he ventured out from Evanston for trips that ranged from a week to 10 days for the Lewis & Clark book. He did one three-week trip to Idaho. For the first year he drove a silver Jetta and pitched a tent in campsites in places like Montana, where motels are scarce. He also wanted to replicate the solitary nature of Meriweather Lewis and William Clark. They camped in what became downtown Kansas City, Mo. In the second year, Mack ramped up to a pickup truck with a camper on the back. The trail stretches from St. Louis, Mo., across the Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean.

“My goal was to be in the same place Lewis and Clark were at the same time,” he said. Mack studied the explorers’ journal and relentlessly plotted out his trip. “About half of the trip was by myself, the other half with my brother-in-law,” Mack said. “He started coming along when we had the camper. It made all the difference in the world. You weren’t setting up at 10 o’clock at night and trying to clean cameras in a dusty old tent. Plus, I was tired of sleeping on the ground. If there was a morning and I was in the rain and didn’t feel right, I’d just drive.

“And if I drove 200 miles before sunset, that was fine as long as I got to a place where there was a good shot.”Now, that’s an artist on the road.

Mack’s parents John and Betty gave him a Minolta camera when he was attending Evanston Township High School.

“I liked it but I didn’t think about doing it as a profession until I took a course at the Evanston Art Center,” he said. “[Ebony photographer] Vandel Cobb and [fashion photographer] Paul McCall were the teachers. I went from there to study at Columbia College.”

Since 1980, Mack worked on ad campaigns and architectural reports for many of the top Fortune 500 companies across the country, including photography for Hyatt resorts and argicultural equipment for Caterpilllar. But he always had wide open spaces in the back of his mind.

“I’d like to do my next book on all five of the Great Lakes,” he said. “Its 20 percent of the world’s fresh water and a hot topic, as it should be. I’d like to hook in with a group like the Sierra Club or the Great Lakes Foundation, possibly, for funding. These books cost a lot to make.“People buy our books,” he said. “Our problem is getting them into stores. Barnes and Noble won’t put Lewis and Clark anywhere except along the trail. I’ve shown them my biggest sales direct are from the Northeast and Florida for some reason.

Because I’ve been a photographer forever, the production side was pretty simple. I had a designer (Rich Nickel) that wanted to work on the book. He and I had worked together for years on various projects. He knew the design side I didn’t know. Marketing was the hardest part to learn and I’m still not sure I know it well.”

Thanks Dave for writing such a great article!

Happy Holidays!

Richard

Richard Mack in Great Smoky Mountains National Park