Category: Smoky Mountains

Foreword Book Award Silver Medals!

Today we learned my book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Fifty Years of American Landscapes has been named a winner in two categories in the 26th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards. We won the Silver Award in both the Nature Book and Art Book categories!

I am humbled and proud to have won the Silver Awards with so many entries from around the world. You always hope people like your work, and it is gratifying to receive such recognition.

The Foreword INDIES recognize the best books published in 2023 from independent and university presses, as well as self-published authors.

With over 2,400 entries submitted across 55 categories, this year’s competition showcased the remarkable talent and diversity of the independent publishing industry. Foreword’s dedicated editors carefully selected approximately 12 finalists per genre, which were then presented to individual librarians and booksellers entrusted with the challenging task of determining the Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Honorable Mention winners.

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Great Smoky Mountains – Fog

This year we need to do a third printing of my book on the park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park; Thirty Years of American Landscapes. I headed down in January for new snow images and went back last week to see about getting the synchronized fireflies and some star images. Sadly, not many synchronized fireflies had come out yet, a few but not many, and the weather was cloudy every night. What happens then? You change strategy and get images of the streams – which were running full because of the rain – and details of the mountains and the vistas with the fog lifting.

Here is the first set of images of the rain and fog. I’ll do a second posting of the rivers and streams later.

It may not be what you envisioned as the images you wanted to capture but you must quickly decide that is simply fine, I can make images of other subjects. I shot video as well as we will probably have a eBook version with some of the video clips.

I have never had a bad trip to the smokies in my 40+ years of going to one of my favorite places. Always feels like a place I know even though there are parts of the park I have not been to as of yet. Hope you enjoy the images. Stay tuned for more!

Cheers, Richard


An Hour on Clingmans Dome

Firs & Sunset, Clingmans Dome 

This past weekend I had the pleasure of being in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to do two book signing events at Sugarlands and Cades Cove Visitor Centers. It is always fun to be down there and meet folks coming into the park and get reactions to the book first hand. I have some great notes from a few of those who have taken the book home and written me about how much they love the book. I am always humbled by their notes. This past weekend I also ended up giving some advice on where to go to shoot the sunset in the park to three gentlemen who had come for the weekend to shoot some images. I mentioned that on this night they could go up to Clingmans Dome and get two very different shots, one of the full moon rising in the east and then turn to the west and photograph the ridges of mountains in the sunset. I confessed I was going to try and head someplace else to shoot the full moon rising, since I had shot it from Clingmans Dome before – and I showed them the pages in the book. But I confessed if it didn’t work I might see them up there.

 

Well, as it turns out, the location I thought might work looked a bit to far to the southeast and ridges blocked where the moon was going to come up at 81º in the east. So I eventually headed up to Clingmans Dome and ran into these gents and we ended up shooting together, along with the dozens of others up there that cold, cold evening. I was too late for the moon rise, but got there to shoot the end of the sunset. It is always fun to see how you can have 4-5 folks within feet of each other and we all get different results and see the shots differently. It was also fun to give them some advice on the techniques I use to achieve some of the my images and how late into the darkness I end up shooting, usually being the last to leave an area in total darkness.

 

All three it turns out have studio’s down south but don’t do nature photography. I got a nice note back from one of them who it turns out is the photographer for the woman’s roller derby team in Atlanta – who knew they still had roller derby? He’s got some nice shots of them. Ironically, none of them bought the book – what’s up with that? – but we all had a great time anyway! In his note he said they all decided to come back often to shoot in the park, so maybe the next time I’m there over Halloween weekend I’ll run into them again.

 

Sunset, Clingmans Dome

 

To see more from this hour of shooting on Clingmans Dome use this link: Clingmans Dome Sunset

 

Cheers!

Richard


The Art of Editing

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes 

For the last few months I have been hard at work editing the images for my next book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. Part of the process of course is editing your work, both in deciding what images to use in the book, and then in working with each image individually to achieve the best possible printed piece. While this later part is done in Photoshop – it is much like being in the darkroom and making sure the “print” you end up with is what you had pre-visualized in the field.

I recently was on a friends blog where he talked about editing film and how there was a space of time between when you took the image and when you finally had a chance to see the image in film form after processing. His thought was that the distance in time helped you make better decisions about the images because the emotion of the day when you shot it was not as fresh. There may be something to that, especially in the day of digital photography where folks tend to edit their work even while it is still in the camera! This is never, never to be done! How can you tell what it really looks like on a 2” low resolution screen? It’s great for making sure your close on the exposure – although the histogram is better – I would never delete an image based on what I see at that point. But I digress.

 

Having worked on images from over a thirty year time span I have found the same emotions, or at least ones close to them come streaming back as I look at the images. I happen to be able to remember almost everything about a photograph I have taken – too bad I can’t remember things like that in real life – but it makes it easier for me to remember what I wanted the photograph to say and thereby make the correct adjustments to an image. Creating an image which comes as close as possible to what I was feeling and intended the image to look like in the first place.

 

The hardest part of editing is deciding which images should make the grade and be in the book. An example is the cover shot. Because of its importance it also has some additional requirements which must be met. It has to pull people in, take it off the book store shelf and make them want to open the book. Therefore, I tend to look at the covers of similar books, in this case other photographic books on Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I do this because I don’t want my book to look like theirs. I look for an image which will say something about the book but also have a more artistic bend to it. I had a working cover image for a long time from a shot I really loved. But when all was said and done it did not make the grade. Another shot seemed to work better and had a more emotional pull for those who saw all three covers (hey we started with a lot more ideas but narrowed it down to three before subjecting folks to give their opinions).

GSMNP Book Cover - Choice #2

GSMNP Book Cover - Choice #3

I think in some ways, my friend might have been right about distance and time in editing at least in this case. I let go of an image I really liked and had an emotional attachment to. And now that I see the new cover image I like it even better than my first choice. So what is your opinion – let me know – I’d love to hear your opinions too!

 

Peace,

Richard