Category: The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes

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

Chicago Suntimes article about me & Quiet Light Publishing

December 18, 2010
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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 

Three Years and counting…

March 20, 2008
BooksLimited EditionspublishingThe Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes

The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes Limited Edition

March 20, 2008. Some look at it as the day of the equinox, the day the sun passes over the equator and begins to warm the northern hemisphere. For photographers it marks the beginning of spring and the thought of wildflowers springing up, or light beginning to make its way to the north side of buildings and mountain slopes. For me it is also my 53rd birthday. But it is also the third anniversary of the release of my inaugural book The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes.

 

Some reflections of the past three years are what I would like to discuss here today. It has been an interesting ride. From the initial decision to start a project of this magnitude, spending 6 months planning the shoots, 2 years on and off the trail making the images for the project, finding a publisher, and ultimately thinking the best way to go is to become your own publisher (a notion made partly of the romance of being a publisher of fine art photography books and the hard line decision that it was the only way to make it financially rewarding). And once you make the decision to publish your own work, and maybe the works of others eventually (but will discuss that at a later date), then you must begin the process of making the book a reality and not just file cabinets filled with images. Editing the thousands of images, finding the perfect designer (or in my case two of them in Rudi Backart and Rich Nickel!), getting printing quotes from around the world before settling on a fine art printer right here in the United States – the Stinehour Press in Vermont.

 

But those are all of the production decisions which have to be made. There is an equally mind numbing set of decisions which need to be addressed on the marketing side. Now, you would think someone who has spent his career in the advertising industry as a photographer, would know how important it is to have looked at the end part – the selling of the book – before forging ahead on the production side. Nope. I was thinking to laterally. Get it done and they will buy. After all why wouldn’t they – the images are beautiful and the concept never done and there will be 40 million people along the different parts of the trail during the 200th anniversary years of the expedition. How can it not sell! This was the thinking I had. Fortunately, I had others around me who whacked me upside the head. Bryan Glaza, my first client and now a life long friend, sat down at one of our initial marketing meetings, with Kathy Weber-Mack, Rich Nickel and Kristi Mendez and asked – innocently enough – “What will you do if it doesn’t make it to the shelves of the Barnes & Nobles of this world? Then how will you sell it?” Bang on. And the brick hit me hard! Why would they not carry it? They carry a book about a couch being carried around the world, about stark images of small towns, how could they turn this down? But they initially did. When I actually received a letter saying they’d carry it online but not on the shelves I was stunned. They eventually acquiesced but only slightly it still seems. So Bryan’s original question still remained, “then what”.

 

Well, we hit the trail again, placing the book in every store and museum along the trail we could. Put out the required press releases, got some press in the papers, then on TV and radio, then more in the papers and then on national TV on NBC News! (And yes you can see them from our website just go to www.quietlightpublishing.com/news.html and follow the links for the various programs and articles). We also were lucky enough to win roughly a dozen book, design and photography awards for this book. So, in the three years since the release of the book, we have sold roughly 5,000 copies. Not bad for a photographic book. But, what I didn’t know was most photographic books have a print run of 1,500-3,000 tops. And that leads me to mention one of the biggest mistakes I made during this whole process. The decision to print 10,000 copies, based solely on the printing costs, and the fact that the more you print the less the per unit cost. I did not think about the fact the reprint costs would make up for an initial higher price per unit. In retrospect I should have printed at most 5,000 copies the first time out, maybe even less. But the book has done exceedingly well, we’ve made money on the project, and it is still selling each and every month. Of interest to me is the fact that most big book stores thought it would only sell along the trail. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve found, most of our direct sales through our website have been in states away from the trail, the northeast, southeast and southwestern United States buy as many as the Midwest and northwest where the trail winds its way through. Clearly this should be a book featured prominently at holiday time by the big stores nationally don’t you think?

 

We also released a Limited Edition version, limited to 200 editions in honor of the 200th anniversary of the expedition. It is presented in a leather slipcase and includes three prints, each representing a year the expedition spent on the trail. Each book and set of prints are signed and numbered accordingly. This edition is available from Amazon or directly on our website at www.quietlightpublishing.com. We also have an extensive collection of fine art prints from the book available online. Images from the book have been in exhibits in several galleries, and were the backdrop for an exhibit by the Newberry Library in Chicago on The Lewis & Clark Exhibition.

 

On this the third anniversary of the release party (www.quietlightpublishing.com/gal_opening.html) I can say it has been a great ride! I have spoken to many groups about the book, photography and the Lewis & Clark Expedition. It has enabled me to think about other books now in the works, one on Great Smoky Mountains National Park and one on the Great Lakes, as well as some other projects still in the idea stages. We have begun to look at the idea of offering more expeditions for folks to join us on where we’ll talk photography as we explore different national parks and places around the world. Do you have someplace you’d love to go with the expertise of a photographer along with you – let us know!

I want to thank everyone who has enjoyed the book, come out to the lectures, worked behind the scenes to make this possible and in the making of this book. One person can never make a project this size come about alone. It does take a team effort. Without all of you we would not be where we are now. Thanks!

 

Peace,

Richard Mack