Breaking Out The Creative Juices

June and I have been in a dry spell where we didn't get out to photograph much at all beyond what can be found in our yard.  Last night we tossed the cameras and tripods in the car and headed to the mountains to see what we could find to photograph around sunset.  It was a great evening where the juices started to flow again.

When we drove through Johnson City and the way to Unicoi the temperature was 88 degrees.  By the time we reached Beauty Spot on Unaka Mountain, the temps had dropped to 73!  Much nicer!!  When we arrived we discovered more cars than I had ever seen up there.  There were many people enjoying the cool mountain air and spectacular mountain views.  Most appeared to be college-age and I think we were the oldest by about 30+ years.  No worries.  We picked our spot and waited for the show to begin.

June's Sunset Photo

When we think about sunsets we hope for a beautiful scene like June's photo above.  I'm proud of her photo.  It was the first one I posted after getting home around 10:30.  But there are many ways to photograph a sunset.

One way to change it up is to shoot wider.

Wide-angle 14mm (21mm full-frame equivalent)

Maybe use that same wide-angle lens to emphasize the foreground while including the sunset in the background.

Maybe swapping out the lens for a telephoto zoom to include just part of the sunset.

46mm (69mm)

66mm (100mm)

104mm (156mm)

By swapping to a longer telephoto zoom lens I can zoom in on just parts of the sunset.

177mm (266mm)

400mm (600mm)

400mm (600mm)

Too often we shoot from the same spot using the same lens and the same focal length.  Don't let this habit squash your creativity. These photos are just an example of how changing the lens and focal length can result in vastly different photos of the same subject. 

Change Your Perspective

Here's an example that shows how changing your camera position relative to the subject can make a difference in your photo's composition.

I took these two photos earlier this week in Joshua Tree National Park.  The first one was taken at 5:52 PM using a focal length of 52mm (78mm in full frame equivalent terms). 

52mm from closer

I intentionally stood where the crescent moon would be between the branches.  I like that composition, but I didn't stop there.  I took several more shots of the moon and that tree.  

88mm from farther away

The second photo was taken less than two minutes later.  I stepped back several feet from the tree and zoomed in to 88mm (132mm).  Simply moving changed the position of the moon relative to the tree.  Zooming in also increased the size of the band of warm sunset color and made the moon appear larger relative to the tree.

Neither composition is "right".  With all art, it is a matter of personal taste.  I hope you enjoy one of these photos and get some value from this blog post.  Please leave a comment and let me know.

Wait For It

This weekend we "Fall Back" and starting Sunday morning, sunrise will be an hour earlier than this week.  June suggested we take advantage of this last week and go see a sunrise somewhere.  We decided on Wednesday afternoon to take off the next day and go to the Smokies for a day trip.  Being retired is nice that way.

It's a good idea to plan to be to the sunrise spot 30 minutes before the sunrise, which meant we had to be at the Oconaluftee Valley Overlook by 7:20.  Even with the late sunrise, we had to get up at 4 AM, eat a quick breakfast and head on down the road. The thing about sunrises is you never know what you will get when you start out.  But if you don't get up and go, you'll never get a great sunrise photo.

The Oconaluftee Valley Overlook is on the Newfound Gap Highway just south of the Newfound Gap parking area.  It's a great spot for sunrise and we found several other photographers already there when we arrived a little after 7.  As the sky started to lighten, we were disappointed to see solid clouds in all directions, from horizon to horizon.

7:35 AM

By 7:35 it really looked like we should have stayed in bed.  The sun was to come up in 15 minutes just about in the V in the mountains.  We decided to stick it out.

Right at sunrise, there was a small break in the clouds off to the south.  We could see through that small opening a little of what was happening on the other side of the clouds.

7:52 AM

That was pretty much all we saw for a while, then the clouds started to break up off to the east where the sun was hiding.  At 15 minutes after sunrise, the sun was well above the horizon by this time, but things were starting to happen.

8:07 AM

 Then it happened!  The clouds parted and the sun broke through 20 minutes after sunrise.

8:10 AM

If we had given up and headed off to find other places to shoot, we would have missed one of the best sunrises we've seen this year.  We didn't get to see the Elk at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center this trip, but we saw God's Glory in the sunrise.

8:12 AM

Sunrises and sunsets are photographer's favorites.  The drama of the of brilliant warm colors in the clouds and God beams shining down on the landscape is hard to beat.  The skies don't always cooperate and we might think it's not worth going or waiting around.  Other times we might be tempted to leave right after the sunrise or sunset. Many times I will have my tripod still set up while I watch other photographers pack up and leave. My experience says wait and see what is in store.  Don't give into temptation and leave early.  Sometimes the best part is 15 - 30 minutes after sunset, or in this case, after sunrise.

It's Important To Plan Ahead

On a recent two week trip, I ran into a problem with the memory cards I use in my camera.  The problem was I made too many photos and ran out of cards!  That shouldn't be a problem.  SD cards are available in Target, Walmart, and most any store that sells electronics.  My problem was I was in the town of Munising Michigan.  Munising is a city of fewer than 3,000 people on the southern shore of Lake Superior on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is the best place to go to see Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  It's not the best place to find an SD card.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

The best option we found was a Dollar Store that said they had good SD cards.  When we got there we found they were

micro-SD cards for a smartphone.  Low capacity, slow, and expensive.  Then we learned that Munising had something that few other places have -- a Radio Shack store.  Really!  They are not all gone.  We did have a hard time finding this one because it was in the back corner of a local pharmacy. Once we found them I bought the best card they had in the store - a SanDisk 64GB XC I card. Now I'm back in business and heading down the road to the next beautiful photo destination with my new card.

I soon learned why getting the right card for your camera is so important.  My Fuji X-T2 camera makes really large photos really fast.  When I got the camera I did a little research and found the Transcend Ultimate UHS-II SDHC U3 was a good match for my camera.  That's what I have been using since I got the camera.  I now know how important a fast card is.

Shooting Fast on Lake Michigan

The Radio Shack SDXC card has a write speed of 4 MB per second. My Transcend cards have a write speed of 180 MB per second, 45 times faster!  But, what does this mean in the real world?

Most of the time I make five different exposures of the same shot, starting at - 2 EV and going to +2 EV.  When I get home I then either pick the best exposure out of the five or blend some combination of the five together on the PC.  The Fuji camera can make those 5 shots in less than a second and write them to the card in the time it takes me to take a breath.  That is if I have a high-speed card in the camera.  What I found was what appears instantaneous with a high-speed card takes about a minute with the low-speed card.  I would take the five shots then wait a minute while the camera saved those photos to the card.  That's a pretty frustrating experience. 

When shopping for memory cards for your camera I suggest doing a little research first.  Find out what the manufacturer recommends.  Then see if there is any additional information available online. I also found a few good sites with information that helped me decide which cards to buy. 

Camera Memory Speed - Performance Tests for Digital Cameras
https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/

Fuji X-T2
https://alikgriffin.com/fastest-memory-cards-for-the-fujifilm-x-t2/

Canon DSLRs
https://www.forthebecause.com/canon-5d-mark-iii-memory-write-speeds/

All my troubles could have been avoided if I had planned ahead and brought enough memory cards with me.  I've since solved that problem and am ready for the next big adventure.

Continuing With My 2016 Favorites - Colors Of Nature

Before there were photographers or painters creating beautiful works of art, there were beautiful works of art in nature. Since the beginning of time, God has been creating beautiful art in the natural world.  Every day when the sun breaks the horizon there are brilliant sunrises happening all around the world.  We may not see it where we are that day but it is happening.  Sometimes the edge between night and day is defined by bright orange and yellows. Other times it is more pastel pinks and purples that paint the sky. Below the sky, every color can be found in the leaves, flowers, and grasses. Most of the earth is covered with water, which reflects and sometimes intensifies the colors of nature. The photos for today capture the color of nature that is all around us. Color in nature is one of my favorite subjects.

In October, June and I took a day trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway to see the brilliant colors that are painted across the hills and valleys each fall.  We started our day enjoying a sunrise from the Parkway near Boone NC.  While others were looking east to the rising sun, I walked up the road a bit to capture a photo of the winding parkway leading over a hill to the clouds lit by the low sun.  By looking north instead of east, I found a beautiful scene that others missed.   Nature's beauty is all around in every direction.  We just need to look around.

Blue Ridge Sunrise

Click on the images for a larger view.

From a sunrise in the mountains of North Carolina, we travel to a sunset on the shores of Lake Michigan. This photo may not appear that impressive. The sun had gone down 45 minutes earlier and the sunset colors had become more soft and soothing. The lighthouse is not an impressive structure. You might wonder why I picked this as a favorite.

I'm proud of this photo because it was made under very difficult photography conditions. It was after 10 PM and there was very little available light, which meant I had to had to push the camera to get a reasonably fast shutter speed. The shutter speed was important because the photo was taken from a moving boat without the benefit of a tripod. Too slow and everything would be blurry and the photo would have been sent to the bit-bucket. With a shutter speed of just 1/9 of a second, the lights in the distance are blurred but the people hanging out on the pier are not.  This was one of those situations where the odds were against me and I might not have bothered to take the shot.  I'm glad I did.

Lighthouse at Sunset

We're now moving into the darkest part of the night when the sky is painted by billions of stars. June and I were again out taking photos with our friend Lynn from Dallas. This time we were at Clingmans Dome in the Smoky Mountains. We had gone there for the sunset and waited around for another hour and a half for the stars to come out. Because it was still summer, the Milky Way was still visible in the sky.

Milky Way

Due to light pollution, most people in the US rarely see the Milky Way.  You have to travel to a place with a dark sky, far from city lights, with clear air.  When it's not shrouded in clouds, Clingmans Dome can be a great place to see the Milky Way.  I've gotten more interested in night sky photography and this is one of my favorite Milky Way shots.

Fall in the Smoky Mountains and Blue Ridge can provide the photographer with the most brilliant colors of the year. For a few short weeks, entire mountainsides turn to gold, red, and green.

For most of the summer and fall our area suffered through an extended drought. This made the water in the Bald River low enough that we could easily walk out on rocks that are normally underwater. The low water flow also made the river surface smooth as a mirror, reflecting and intensifying the fall colors. These are unusual conditions that came together to make one of my favorite fall photos.

Bald River

Water is something I enjoy photographing.  I like mirrored reflections such as the Bald River photo above. Waterfalls are probably my favorite subject and I almost always use a slower shutter speed to make the falling water appear silky and soft. A technique I have tried a few times involves very long shutter speeds to change moving water into a fog.

Waves or Clouds

Today's final photo was taken on a beach where waves were breaking over old coral formations. This was taken well after sunrise on a bright sunny morning. With that much light, it's difficult to get the slow shutter speed I wanted. I used something called a neutral density filter to block much of that light.  It is basically sunglasses for a camera lens. With that filter and a small aperture (f/22) I was able to slow the shutter speed down to 2 1/2 seconds. This made the waves appear like clouds. It's an artsy kind of effect that I like and will try to do more of.

Those are my favorite photos of nature's colors. I have 5 more favorite photos to share.  Come back again to see the finalists.

Being in Awe

How often are you truly in awe of something?  I'm not talking about superficial awe, as in "that's awesome!" I'm talking about stop you in your tracks beauty and spectacular majesty.

Students in a recent study who reported feeling awestruck frequently had the lowest levels of interleukin-six, which is an indicator of inflammation and poor health.  Who knew there are health benefits of being in awe?

There are definitely emotional and spiritual benefits of being awestruck.  In our travels, June and I are often in places where wonderful sights are all around us, such as majestic snow capped mountains.

Mount Denali

Olympic Mountain Range

Or mighty creatures just a few feet away.

Killer Whale

It's not always the huge and majestic but the small and beautiful that bring awe and wonder.   Take time and look closely at all the details of a flower.  They are beautiful creations of tiny intricate elements, each one worthly of awe.


Sometimes all we have to do is walk out on a clear night and look up into the night sky to be awestruck.

Milky Way

If you think about the sky overhead you can't help but be amazed and in awe.  That swipe across the night sky, the Milky Way, is 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter and has over 200 billion stars. It is part of the Virgo Supercluster, at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters that are located within a 110 million light-years diameter.  Try to put your head around that!

We don't have to travel to distant places to become awestruck.  Sometimes a sunset right outside our back door is an awesome wonder.

Sunset From Our Backyard

Let's slow down and check out the awesome wonder that has been created all around us.  It will do our body, soul, sprit and mind good.

"As I stand here in Your presence

Of Your beauty I will always stand in awe

I reach my hands out to the Heavens, yeah

And I lift my voice to You alone"

In Your Presence by Jeremy Camp

Right Place, Wrong Time of Year

The main road in Grayson Highlands State Park in Virginia has a pull off with this great overlook of the valley below.

There are some fantastic compositional elements in this scene, such as the road leading from the lower left corner, the red and white barns, the curved road in the middle, and the layers of the hills in the background.  This is an OK photo, but it lacks depth because the sun was almost directly behind me and you can't see any of the shadows that can give a two dimensional photo a feeling of 3D depth.

Close up of church in the middle showing direction of the sun

I would like to shoot this again when the sun is shining from the left or right side.   But, when will be the right time?   Using one of my favorite software tools TPE (The Photographers Ephemperis) I can compare the direction of the sun from Friday to any other day.  I picked October 17 because it might be a great time for fall colors.   These two diagrams show how the direction of the sun changes with the seasons.

June 6

October 17

The red marker shows the approximate position of the barns and the dark orange line shows the direction of the sun around sunset.  The photo was taken on Grayson Highlands Lane about where the word Highlands starts.    You can see the sun was almost directly behind me on Friday, however on October 17 it will set much further to the south and will be off to my right when taking the same shot.  If all other conditions are the same the photo taken in October will be better than the one taken Friday.   I could also take the same photo just after sunrise (yellow line) in June and get some nice shadows, however I think the hills might block the sun and keep the barns in the shade until later in the morning.

Why bother figuring out all this stuff?  Because a landscape scene never looks quite the same and knowing the right time of day and the right time of year to capture the scene is important to making the best photo.  Don't be satisfied with one shot at one time.  Visualize what the shot might look like under different conditions and plan to come back and shoot it again.  I hope to be up there mid October to see if my vision matches reality.

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The Calendar Chronicles - January 2014

It's here!  2014 has arrived.   I hope you have started the year off right and that you are blessed in 2014.

It's also time to share a little about the photo for January - Second Beach, Washington State.  If you're like me, you're thinking that is not a very creative name for a beach.  One of three beaches (yes First Second and Third Beach) just south of the village of La Push Washington.  Like the other two, Second Beach is hemmed in by dramatic bluffs and headlands. To get to Second Beach you have to hike 2/3 of a mile up and then back down a forested trail.  It was a bit confusing at first because we started out above the beach and hiked up.   After a while we made our way down to the beach.

Path to Second Beach

We were there as part of a photography workshop with Bill Fortney and  His Light Workshops.   There was at least one other photography group there that afternoon so there were plenty of photographers wandering around the beach.      We arrived at the beach at 8 PM and stayed about an hour while the sun was going down.  It sure is nice photographing sunsets on west coast beaches than sunrises on the east coast beaches.

I took 60 shots in those 60 minutes on the beach, which is less than what I usually take.  There was a lot of time waiting for something to happen, the light to change, people to move, or new ideas to pop into my head.

Sea Stack and Sea Gulls

I was fascinated by the sea stacks offshore.  We don't have anything like these where I grew up.   These forbidding landmarks are part of the Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge. Inhospitable to humans, they're productive breeding grounds to thousands of seabirds, oystercatchers, murres, gulls, petrels, cormorants, and auklets among them.

You never know what you will get at sunrise or sunset.  This time we were blessed with beautiful clouds and a break in the clouds that allowed the sun to shine up and light up the under sides.  As the sun set I positioned myself at this cool rock surrounded by a pool of sea water.  I could see that the sun was going to set directly behind the headland to the right of the primary sea stack and might shine through the natural arch.  Now it was just a matter of getting ready and waiting.  I was rewarded with warm colors from the sunset and blue of the darkening skies for some nice color contrast.  The rock and reflections in the pool made interesting foreground for my photo.

For the photographers that might be interested, this was shot at a 32 mm focal length using a 24-105 mm lens with a small f/22 aperture.  The wide lens and small aperture allowed me to have the foreground rock and the trees in the distance all in focus.  This was a one second exposure so I was using my tripod.  I set the camera down low to the ground to be able to include the sand, rock and clouds.

I hope you enjoy this photo during January and it reminds you that His greatness can be seen through His creations all around us.

Good Idea Poorly Executed

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

- Oscar Wilde

Sometimes I come up with a good idea for a photograph.  Unfortunately, I don't always turn those good ideas into good photos.  

We were at Walnut Log Road on Reelfoot Lake for sunset on Friday and Sunday night last weekend.  It's a great place for sunset with plenty of Cypress trees in the water with the sun setting behind them making dramatic silhouettes.  The wind that had blown strong all weekend calmed down at sunset making the surface of the lake look like a mirror.  God blessed us with a beautiful painting across the sky and  I came home with 115 shots from Walnut Log Road on Friday night alone!  Some of my favorites from this trip are available viewing and purchase in the Reelfoot Lake Gallery.

I had both my cameras with me - the Canon 7D had a 300mm prime lens with a 1.4 teleconverter.  With the 7D's cropped sensor this is equivalent to a 672mm telephoto lens.   I also had a 17-40mm wide angle zoom on the Canon 5D.  In compact camera terms this is a 40x zoom range between the two camera/lens combinations.

Almost all the shots from Friday night were with the 5D/17-40 combination on a tripod to capture as much of the landscape and sunset as possible.  Here's one of those shots

This is was shot with a 32mm focal length.  It took 1.6 seconds at f/13, ISO 200.   I was hand holding a 2-stop graduated neutral density filter to darken the top half of the photo.  Normally hand holding a graduated neutral density filter (Grad) is not all that difficult.  This night I had to do it with gloves on and my had was still shaking from the cold.  This shot is what I came for and am pretty happy with the results.

However, an idea popped into my head to use the that long lens to isolate some of the tree branches with the sunset reflected in the lake behind it.   I picked the area on the left side of the cypress tree where the color went from yellow to rich dark orange.    In my mind I saw a very dramatic shot.  What I got was not what I envisioned.

I picked the wrong composition and ended up with an image that is too cluttered.

There are too many branches in this picture and there is nothing for the viewer's eye to settle on.   I could have made a better composition if I had pointed my lens a little to the left and isolated the branch that dips down from the rest.

I think it was a good idea but I rushed and didn't think through it.   The good news is I see what I should have done and if I get a similar opportunity and can remember what I learned I might come away with a good picture and not just a good idea.

Joy

In early September I had the privilege to get to spend 13 days on a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta with my wife June.   We were blessed with safe travels and good weather as we checked off one more place on our bucket list.   It was a time of relaxing, refreshing, and recharging.

I've got a lot of images from this trip and it's taking me a while to work through them.   When I finish I'll post my favorites in a new gallery on my website.  For now, I'd like to share one from one evening in the Many Glacier area of Glacier National Park.

This row boat is on the shore of Lake Josephine not far from the Many Glacier Hotel.  We had stopped to photograph it around 9:30 on our way up the Grinnell Glacier Trail.  At that time the sun was behind me and the light was OK, but not very dramatic.  By the time we made it back down to this point it was 5:30 in the afternoon and the light had completely changed.   Instead of a low contrast uninteresting photo I now had fantastic warm afternoon light including God Beams coming out of the clouds and reaching across the frame to the other side.  What a gift!

The name of the boat pretty much sums up that day in Glacier.  We had woken up to a fantastic sunrise right outside our hotel and I was given enough time to set up to take nine shots to stitch together to create this panorama.   After a big breakfast we had one of our best hikes of the trip up to Grinnell Glacier.  The best part was I was able to share it with June.


As joyful as this day was it pales in comparison to the joy of being forgiven through the sacrifice of Jesus.   The word joy occurs 217 times in the Bible and this joy is available to all.  What a blessing!  I'll leave you with Paul's words.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. - Romans 15:13

Appreciating My Backyard

This is what I see right now when standing in my backyard.   It looks a little different from the March 25 view I posted earlier.  The field is full of yellow buttercups.   Cattle graze here and I wondered why they didn't eat the buttercups.   I've learned that buttercups are poisonous and the acrid taste and the blistering of the mouth caused by their poison means the buttercups are left alone to grow and spread across the hills. 

I've been watching for dramatic skies at sunset but it does not happen very often and when it does it's usually gone by the time I can get out there.  I'll keep watching and trying to get out there in time.

This photo reminds me just how blessed I am.   Sometimes I focus too much on the material things and miss the blessings God has placed right in front of me.   This view is just one of those blessings.   My photography has made me appreciate God's gifts of beauty all around us.   June and I both notice that we are stopping and looking at things we would have passed right by without noticing a few years ago.   Canada Violets are pretty common around here in the spring.  They're not something that you would stop and take time to appreciate, especially in the rain.  But this one was taken last weekend in the Smokies in between rain storms.   If we hadn't taken the time to stop and been willing to risk the rain, we would have missed this wildflower decorated with jewels of rain.

What else has God placed before us?   The grand panoramas and the little jewels are all around us and say "Look what God has done here!".  A friend sent me an email this week with this verse that says it better than I can.

"God's invisible qualities and divine nature have been clearly seen in all creation, so that men are without excuse."  -  Romans 1:20

Let's slow down and appreciate God's invisible qualities and divine nature all around us.

View From Our Backyard

I was washing dishes Saturday afternoon and looked out the kitchen window to see this.

We get some awesome sunsets across that pasture and I've tried to capture them before.  Most of the time by the time I get my camera and tripod out, run outside, and set up the light is gone.   I've never been able to capture any of those light displays.  This time was different.  I had just gotten a new Canon 5D Mark ii the day before and it was sitting out where I could grab it on the way out the door.   I didn't bother with the tripod and decided to do the best I could without it.

The bright sky and relatively dark field was much to big of a dynamic range of light for the camera to capture.  Either the sky was going to be blown out bright white or the field and trees were going to be very dark.  I shot three exposures (-1 EV, 0, +1 EV) to capture the entire range of light.   I should have gone with a wider spread because the brightest part of the sky was blown out at -1.   After I made those shots I changed the settings and poof the light was gone!   Unlike the light in my last post, this time it only lasted a couple minutes.

I used ISO 800 and f/22 to try and get a star burst from the clouds.  At that setting I got shutter speeds of 1/20, 1/40 and 1/80.  I was hand holding with image stabilization on.  I had no idea if the three images would line up or if I had too much camera shake.

My workflow for this photo was longer than most:

1. Ran the three exposures through Nik Define to remove the digital noise due to the ISO of 800.
2. Combined them using Nik HDR Efex Pro using a Natural setting.  I used some control points to tone down the dramatic clouds that HDR processing created.  I used another control point to brighten up the tree on the right that had come out too dark.
3. Edited in Photoshop Elements to remove some severe lens flare created by shooting into the sun and some power lines in the distance.
4. Edited in Nik Color Efex 4 to fix the clouds (they came out light brown), make the rolling hills more distinct, and bring out the "God Beams" of sunlight.  Also added a little dark vignette  around the edges.

I am truly blessed to live in such a beautiful part of the country, have such a great view right outside my back door, and have a God that creates such beauty each and every day.  I'm also thankful for my wife June who first pointed out the light and offered to finish the dishes while I went out and played. My photography would be dull and uninteresting without her spotting the shots for me.

Of course, you can buy prints of this photo online 

Here's a blog any landscape photographer will enjoy

On the right side of my blog page is a list of other blogs that I keep up with.   You can find these under the "Other Great Blogs I Follow" section.   These blogs are from people I find to be great photographers that are willing to share their knowledge with others.   Every day there is are new posts in this list that contains exceptional photography, interesting stories, great instruction, and inspiring words.  I check it every day.

I want to point out a blog post that I found very useful.   The February 25 blog on In the Moment: Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog Site is a critique of another photographer's photograph.  Michael does these critiques on a regular basis and you find find all of them on his blog site.   This one is almost a landscape photography lesson in a single blog entry.  He spends a good deal of time analyzing the photo, making suggestions, and even photoshopped in a slightly different composition to illustrate a point.   Reading this blog has given me some new ideas and reminded me of things I need to know but tend to forget.  


Take a look at this blog post.  Then browse his site and read some of the others.  You'll find a wealth of good info to improve your landscape photography.

Sunrise and Sunset

Fall in the Southern Appalachian Mountains is a beautiful time.  God paints the hills with blazing oranges, yellows and golds with some greens left in for good measure.   It's a great time for outdoor photography, but it is way too short.  Seems like just a few weeks between when the trees start to change and the ground is covered with fallen leaves and the colors fade.   This year has been no different.  I started October out with a trip to Greyson Highlands State Park, then followed it with a trip to West Virginia, a couple trips to Bays Mountain Park in Kingsport, Tennessee and finally a weekend photography workshop in Max Patch North Carolina.  All this was over a period of 24 days.  Whew! 

All these outings have resulted in lots of photos in the post-processing backlog.   I'm working through them, but not necessarily in the order I took them.   I'll be posting some photos from those trips and am starting with some of the last ones I took.

Eight members of the Eastman Camera Club spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday in a photography workshop in Max Patch, North Carolina.   Lori Kincaid was a fantastic instructor and we all had a blast. I learned several new photo skills in the workshop and I can't wait to try them out.  Max Patch is a naturally occurring bald mountain on the North Carolina - Tennessee boarder with 360 degree views of the surrounding mountains.   We got up very early on Saturday morning to drive down to the Max Patch bald for the sunrise.  We were treated to clear cloudless skies and a full moon setting over the mountain ranges.  I learned about the Belt of Venus, which is the band of red, pink or purple above the dark blue. The dark blue is the earth's shadow.

That evening we were treated to a beautiful sunset from Lori's rental place, which is where we were based for the weekend.   She has the most beautiful setting for a home I have ever seen.     I got the sunset and maple tree shots from her place on Saturday night.

On Sunday morning we got up, walked just a few feet from her place and were able to shoot the sunrise over Mount Mitchell and other near by peaks.



As we watched, the sky got more and more dramatic as the sun lit the underside of the clouds with brilliant reds.  

This is a great place to photograph to fall colors and beautiful sunrise and sunsets.   I'm already planning to go back in the spring!