Great Smoky Mountains National Park

I spent several hours the other day watching video tutorials on photography. I need to do that regularly if I'm to remember the lessons when I get out in the field to shoot. Who'd have thought getting old was so hard? This study day coincided with a cold front blowing through Austin - not yet a "blue norther", but give it a few weeks or a month. The cool-down took immediate effect and I started thinking about Autumn. In large portions of the Lone Star State, the difference between Summer and Autumn tends to be that you don't sweat quite as much in Autumn. The problem is, they look pretty much the same, at least through Thanksgiving. So when I think of Autumn, I tend to think about Autumn in the North Carolina mountains. I'm not ready to go anywhere just now, but I was in Asheville last Sept/Oct. Well, that was for my Class of '66 50 Year Reunion so I really didn't get out to take many pictures of Autumn.

But, you're in luck! I spent much of the 2nd half of October, 2014, taking pictures in the Smokies, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I even made it up to Chimney Rock after all these years. So I checked old posts on Whiskey Papa, and images I put up on Flickr, and it seems that my 2014 Carolinas tour was covered, albeit with a broad brush. But when I went back to my archive, I found I had apparently posted my typical road trip report, then moved on to something else and hadn't actually reviewed all the images I'd taken. So now, I present  some brand new 3 year old pictures. I hope you enjoy them.

These shots were all taken in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on October 15, 2014. If I'd included these pics, they would have fit in the November 11 and November 12 posts. But I opted to describe my trip, rather than all the details of the shots; so, different images. You can re-read those two posts for background on the trip if you wish (the two bottom posts in the November 2014 archive).

Some of the pics (the larger streams) are the Oconoluftee R, the Little Pigeon R, or the Little R. The up close details (the smaller streams) in many cases don't even have names - they just popped up during the heavy rains that drenched the Smokies between October 12-15, 2014.

The Park's Facebook page at the time posted several videos of the many new cataracts and waterfalls that had come to life throughout the Park and with commentary from Rangers and other old hands that had never seen anything like it before. What a wonderful time to be in the Smokies.

This group of three (below) are obviously just different compositions of the same (very photogenic) freshet. As I recall, I had pulled off the road (US441) on the drive down the mountain on the NC side of New Found Gap and shot them by shooting across the cab of my Sierra through the open passenger window. The window necessarily limits the available camera angles and I wasn't up to actually getting out of the truck and approaching the subject white water.

I slipped on some wet leaves about half an hour earlier (with a camera in each hand) and slid/rolled about 20ft down the slope I had been attempting to navigate. After resting a moment  at the bottom of the hill I got up covered with mud, but importantly, not a bit of it sullied either camera. I drove on, taking pictures here and there for about 20 minutes till my blood sugar cratered. When that happened, I suddenly didn't give a damn about taking any more pictures.

When I spotted this water feature close enough to the road with room enough to pull off safely, I decided I could actually muster the enthusiasm to take a few more shots on the way down the mountain. The question, "Who knows when you'll be back this way again?" came to mind and I succumbed to Nature's enticement. Then, on down the mountain.

Whoa! One more. On the way up the mountain, earlier in the morning, I took a sequence of shots to create a panorama when I got home, then I started shooting some video and I'm not much of a videographer. As soon as I finished that (chore), it was back to the truck and up the mountain. Coming down the mountain, I remembered working on the video but didn't remember whether I'd taken any stills. The shot above is similar to one in the panorama sequence but, being a lucky photographer, the lighting was better when I stopped on the way down.

Finally, it was straight through Oconaluftee without stopping and on into Cherokee to find something sweet and tasty to arrest the hypoglycemia. I think it was a cheese danish and chocolate milk.

Sunrise in the Garden of Mayfield Park

I'm still practicing with my Canon EOS-70D, two and a half years after I bought it. It has more bells and whistles than I'll ever need, but it's so much fun playing with it. Of course, I never expected the learning curve to be as steep as it turned out to be. I guess I need to practice more - if I'm going to master it - but there are so many video tutorials. And what about post-processing, you know, Photoshop. There are even more tutorials for that than for taking pictures. And, to compound that problem, I find playing with Photoshop every bit as much fun as taking the pictures in the first place.

If you've been following this blog for very long, you've seen this spot - the dove cote at Mayfield Park. I used to bring Mom here on a fairly regular basis, first of all because she absolutely loved it. Of course, my lack of imagination played a part too - I had only a limited number of places on my list that made her as happy as this one, and I could shoot pictures and watch the peacocks while she evaluated the garden itself.

This visit was my first at this time of day, and it was a conscious decision to evaluate how the quality of the morning light compared to that at mid-day or later in the afternoon. Any of the photography books and many of the tutorials would address the "Golden Hour" after sunrise and another before sunset, but the magic is in the combination of the warm light and the location itself. You can imagine what it might look like, but you won't really know till you've seen it.

In this instance, because of all the trees, it was already light enough when I arrived to wander around and decide where I wanted to be when the sun burst into the garden. At Cape Hatteras I wandered around in the dark for nearly an hour trying to get my gear set up. This is a much more civilized arrangement. I didn't anticipate the picture above, but I love it. The light's awesome. Next time I find myself in a similar locale, you can be sure I'll remember to look up.

It's like having two different sunrises out here, something else I hadn't anticipated. I sat for probably a quarter of an hour waiting for the sun to break through the trees. Then I had to wait again for it to break through the reflection of the leaves. But what the hell - it was worth it!

Now, this one was a treat. Most of these shots focus on the dove cote, for instance, or the limestone gateway to the nature trail or the perimeter stone walls. This one focuses on the morning light on the trees adjacent to the garden, which is still pretty much in shadow.

The sun did its job here - a great flare makes getting up early seem so much more worthwhile. I didn't even notice that red flower to the left of the gateway until I saw the pictures on my computer. Then, when I zoomed in to inspect the image, the flower had turned into a red plastic cup. If I'd seen it - and seen it for what it actually was - I would have been impelled to remove it to a trash receptacle. . .

Do carp/turtle habitats like these ponds make you think of Renoir? They do me. I guess it's the lily pads. They (the ponds) also make me look for frogs. Above the lily pads on the right, notice the dust. I usually find it on scanned photographs that I haven't taken very good care of - and I remove it in Photoshop. However, in this case I'm blameless - the dust is on the surface of the water. Ergo, it gets to stay.

I framed this bed of Philodendrons several times, starting when the sun first started back lighting it but, until sun flare at top left improved the balance, the composition simply failed. Now, the flare isn't as good as the previous one - two shot up - but perhaps I can take some liberties with Photoshop later when I have a bit more time. This is where Mom would have camped out had she been here.

Back where we started, at the dove cote. Good lighting, but the warm glow of the Golden Hour has flown. Perhaps I just missed it. This was an easy and very pleasant expedition, so maybe we'll catch it on the flip side.