Sublime Spring

Southern Appalachia is a place of untold beauty, unexpected vistas, and stunning sunsets. In a way, this stretch of the Blue Ridge parkway overlooking Cherokee is a place that time simply forgot. Surely the scars of human hands run deep here, the deforestation efforts still show brightly for those who know what they’re looking at. Even still, one cannot help but look over these tranquil hills and realize that despite our efforts, the mountains and forest thrive. Spring, often ignored in this part of the world, is quite possibly just as, if not more stunning than the fall that just past.

The itch to shoot landscapes, grand vistas still burns bright in me. While my efforts in portraiture has been in no small way influenced my shooting times here in the mountains, it’s good to return to the roots of what made me fall in love with photography to begin with. Pure grand vista landscapes. Surely I could work the scene more, search for simple foreground elements to support the story, give depth. Somehow I think it would be disingenuous to this scene. One doesn’t stop here to glance at the yet to bloom bushes, we stop to look out over this vast expanse, and dream of days long forgotten.

Editing this photo was an exercise in patience. I like to dive into a landscape and work it from the ground up during the edit. yet nothing was really clicking at first. I had ideas, but it simply wasn’t working. A friend suggested a more Japanese style forest, and I opted to try such a thing, and while that doesn’t really translate here, it did put me in the mindset of colors. Finding, or even placing colors into a photo is a challenging affair. At the end of the day, this photo was edited with the memory, and ideals of Bob Ross, and to be frank, I think it worked out splendidly.

Until Next Time!

Aperture: f10
ISO: 640
SS: 1/20th
Focal: 63mm

Fujinon 50-140mm