Category: Quiet Light Publishing

The Presses are Rolling!

April 27, 2009
BooksGreat Smoky Mountains BookQuiet Light PublishingSmoky Mountains Book

Today is Monday April 27, 2009 and in Singapore at CS Graphics the presses are rolling with my next book, Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty years of American Landscapes! There are many points in a process as involved as the making of a book where you stop and say to yourself – “This is pretty cool!” This is one of them. It is very cool to know that half way around the world there are people who are dedicated to making your book the best are working away on it, as they have for the past few months just to get to this point – ink on paper. So it is, underway.

Another of these moments came a few weeks ago when for the first time I wrapped the dust jacket around the dummy book they sent – a book that is the exact size and makeup of my finished book but without any printing. It is one thing to see the dust jacket on the screen as you put it all together, another to see it printed out, but the best so far is that first time you wrap the jacket around the book and put it down on a table. Voila! Your book – kind of.

 

So, while they toil away in Singapore printing the 220 pages and 246 images for this monograph of Great Smoky Mountains National Park maybe it is time you took advantage of our preorder pricing! You can view the book using the links below or purchase a copy for delivery in July at the advanced sales price!

 

And as an additional incentive if you use the Discount Coupon Code: MB01 when promted at check out we’ll give you an additional 10% off!

 

To See Inside the Book: GSMNP Book

To Purchase the Book: Quiet Light Publishing 

 

Cheers,

Richard

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes

Celebrating Earth Day

April 22, 2009
Earth DayenvironmentQuiet Light Publishing

Sunrise, Deep Creek Overlook       

In celebration of Earth Day 2009 I am posting this photo from my upcoming book on Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This image was taken last November at Deep Creek Overlook. This was an unusual day, in that it was crystal clear. The mountains in the background showed sharp edges – not just the fuzzy outline as most often seen. On this day the air was particularly clean because of the weather patterns. Most of the time there is a haze and visibility is limited. Often the mountains at the far side are not visible. Smog from the cities of Knoxville, Chattanooga and Atlanta to name a few tend to drift eastward and affect the air quality in the Smokies. So this earth day as we celebrate our earth we can be a bit more optimistic – maybe – because more and more cars are alternative fuels, natural gas and electric vehicles seem to be on the horizon (ever wonder why most cars in Argentina are LP Gas yet not here?  Me too). We, as a country, are finally focusing our attention back on our natural environment as part of our national goals. And for this we can be thankful. But now comes the time we must all take part in that effort, by using our resources wisely, conserving energy, recycling better and all of the other things we can do as individuals which will collectively make a difference.

 

Firs, Clinmans Dome

But it is not just air and water quality, there are many environmental issues. Another one in the Smokies is the Wooly Adelgid a beetle which has devoured the Douglas Firs on the tops of many mountains, most notably Clingman’s Dome. A few years ago it seemed every tree on the top of the mountain had succumbed to this beetle. Now some younger trees are growing once again, but they too will become victims of this beetle if we can not find a way to control or eradicate it at some point.

 

So, let’s celebrate our environment on this day, and once again pledge ourselves to making this physical world a better place, through our individual actions, which collectively do amount to big changes.

Happy Earth Day!

Richard

To see inside my new book Great Smoky Mountain National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes click here. See Inside the Book

Pre-Order the book: Quiet Light Publishing

Pre-Order Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes

March 20, 2009
Great Smoky Mountains BookNew BookNew WorkPre-OrderpublishingQuiet Light PublishingSmoky Mountain National Park

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes

ISBN: 978-0-9753954-2-4

220 pages, 245 images, 11×13”

Quiet Light Publishing

Publisher’s Price: $60.00

Pre-Order Price: $45.00 (until June 1, 2009)

 

Four years ago today we released my first book, The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes. As soon as you come out with your first book, the question is…so what’s your next project and when will it come out. Well, now. Kind of. You can now pre-order our second book, Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. I have been training my lens on the park for just over thirty years so it made sense that my next book would on the park.

 

I began my quest to become a landscape photographer while on my first trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park back in 1974 with my future wife, Kathy. I was not then as intense about photography as I am now. I was just beginning my journey and in all honesty wanted to find the closest national park to my home in Illinois. I chose the Smokies and the love affair began – between me and the park and between my wife and I. Since then I have visited many of our national parks, but I continue to be drawn back to the beauty, diversity, and complexity of the Smokies. It is, after all, a park that offers everything: historic buildings and living history, magnificent streams and waterfalls, a variety of old-growth and new-growth forests, large fields and coves with abundant wildlife, and of course, those stunning vistas into “smoke” filled valleys.

Over thirty years, many things have changed, and many others have stayed the same. The Fraser firs on Clingmans Dome have almost been destroyed by the Balsam Wooly Adelgid, yet younger trees now crowd the understory. Portions of the Alum Cave trail were inundated by a landslide during a thunderstorm. Cades Cove is no longer farmed. Logging operations cleared much of what is today parkland. Yet to the inexperienced eye, the places where lumber companies clear-cut mountainsides in the late 1800s and early 1900s are barely perceptible, a testament to both Mother Nature’s ability to regenerate and remove the scars of mankind, and to mankind itself for having the foresight to preserve this remarkable landscape. In some cases, entire species have disappeared from the area, like the buffalo and wolves, or even from the earth entirely as is the case with the passenger pigeon. But other species have been reintroduced. Elk have been returned to Cataloochee and have migrated into other areas of the park. The synchronized fireflies have been around forever, but only in the last 15 years have they become a popular treat if you are lucky enough to catch their 10-day show in early summer.

Some of these changes are reflected in this book, whether a black and white image of an old barn taken in 1976, or one of my last shots of a sunrise as seen from Newfound Gap in November 2008. I hope you will enjoy my vision of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is a jewel in our national park system. My wish is that you will come to love, as I do, the details of the leaves, the rush of water in the streams, the colors of the landscape as it changes from season to season.  

You can preview the book using the link: GSMNP Book Preview 

Our release date is July 1, 2009, but pre-orders start today, at the reduced price for readers of this blog of $45.00. So order now, and put the words BLOG in the comment area to insure your discounted price. We will not charge your card until we ship your order. Readers of this blog are the first to be able to order! GSMNP Book Pre-Order 

Thanks! Hope you’ll enjoy this new release! Stay tuned for more as we move forward! 

Richard Mack 

Painful for a Photographer – Converting RGB to CMYK

February 22, 2009
Converting to CMYKdigitalGreat Smoky Mountains BookPhotoshoppublishingQuiet Light Publishing

smnp-20060502-1670-rbg.jpg    smnp-20060502-1670-cmyk.jpg

I am at the point in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes book project where it is time to convert the images into the CMYK color space for the press. It is a very painful process. As photographers we see in a full spectrum of colors, shoot for the widest range in the color spectrum, in 16bit Raw files, import them into Photoshop in ProPhoto color space (you do use this now don’t you?) all of which gives us the largest color space we can have. This provides for beautiful images onscreen and in our fine art prints. But the book world uses the color space for commercial presses, the world of four to six color presses and the world of CMYK, a much smaller color space than we work in. So we suffer the long slow pain of watching our colors disappear when we hit the Convert to CMYK button.

Any color out of gamut (outside the target color space) will be clipped into the CMYK color space, which for me in this case is usually the bright yellows and greens of that early morning light in the leaves. So, after getting up early to be there for the golden light, taking care to bring the colors to life in Photoshop and having things look great, we end up cringing as we hit that Convert to CMYK color space. I am converting to the CMYK color my press has specified for their use, basically SWOP coated. So how do you get back some of the colors which have been clipped?

Well, if you look online for answers, you will find everyone has a different opinion. So here is how I have come to process images. Once you have your final RGB file set (and saved), flatten the layers and then take a look at it. Click the Preview button on and off to get an idea of what things will turn into and I have on occasion then upped the saturation of the greens only by about 10% and then converted to CMYK, although this seems to work only occasionally.

As you hit the convert button, please, and this is important, utter the words “bye bye color”.

Most often the beautiful light yellow greens will turn into a cyan bluish color. So what now? I go to the levels and change the cyan levels slightly starting with the middle which I put at 1.00 or 1.15 then adjust the high and low sliders to taste. Then select Hue/Saturation and once again go to the greens and yellows separately and up them 10-20% be careful though you don’t go too far and wash out detail. You might want to also add some black in the greens and/or on the black channel as well. You might find there are more things to try as well, maybe in the curves adjusting each channel separately, or going into the selective colors and adjusting the Cyan and yellow levels in the green layer. Depending on the image you are working on it may take any combination of these actions. Make sure you save it as a different named file – I put CMYK at the end of the file name. No most likely you still won’t be happy with the results but they should be fairly acceptable.

smnp-20060502-3109-rgb.jpg     smnp-20060502-3109-cmyk.jpg

One last thought. Don’t go back and forth between the original file or transparency and try to match it. You won’t be able to. All you can do now is make it look as good as you can given the smaller color space you have to work with. While this is something all of us photographers hate to think about – our work not being shown at it’s absolute best, have faith that your printer will be very good at what they do and things will turn out alright – especially if you’ve selected the right printer to work with. And remember, every photographer who has had work printed in any form has faced this dilemma at some point. I happen to be lucky enough to have an original Ansel Adams print, one which is also in one of his early books. While the reproduction in the book is very good, it does not compare with the original print. So he had the same problem.

  

On my last book, The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes I worked with Stinehour Press and they made the separations from the original transparencies. There I had the magic of John Stinehour to help. They have, sadly, gone the way of many presses in the United States and are no linger around. I could say to John – “It needs your magic to make it pop” and he would do something and it would happen. There are moments in this process I wish I had John and his wisdom sitting next to me telling me what to do. The Great Smoky Mountain National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes book is mostly digital images which I am now converting for our new printer CS Graphics. And I am confident they will be able to make these images as beautiful as before, but I still hate it when I push that Convert to CMYK button.

 

Peace,

Richard Mack