Grandfather Mountain State Park isn’t your typical walk in the park! Even the parks main attractions are extreme. The “singing bridge” boasts of being 1 mile above sea level and the short hike from the bridge to McCrae peak (the closest peak to the bridge) is the most strenuous and dangerous trail I’ve ever hiked, recommended only for experienced hikers and requiring ladders and ropes to ascend the tree-less, windswept cliffs!

Before knowing how strenuous the trails actually were, and upon discovering we could avoid a $18.00/person entrance fee if we hiked in on the back trails, we decided to take the 6 mile route to McCrae peak, All the trails were marked strenuous, but we figured we would be fine if we gave ourselves enough time.

The first four miles were as expected: climbing switchbacks counting off the 2000 feet we needed to climb. However, after reaching Calloway Peak, at 5,964ft, we began the treacherous hike across the Linville Range crossing a few smaller peaks to McCrae Peak. What an experience!

Even after reaching McCrae Peak, we had to make the decent to the parking lot at the Singing Bridge: one full mile of the most difficult trails in the entire park. Thankfully, we were just descending, but still, with water running low, energy depleting fast, and the afternoon waning away quickly, we focused on nothing else but reaching our final destination! It was a long hike, but it certainly was worth it!

One of my favorite things about the Blue Ridge mountains is the abundance of waterfalls! Crabtree Falls is a gorgeous, perfectly shaped, 70ft waterfall on milepost 339 along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Reaching the falls required a one mile hike downhill, and a rocky one at that. The waterfall was larger than I expected and thus a challenge to compose. At mid-morning, the sun was shining directly on the falls so a three-stop ND filter was imperative to keep the highlights in the water from washing out and preserving the silky texture. There was a lot of debris and clutter at the bottom of the falls, so I decided to cover it up with some more simple foreground growth and rocks. Praise the Lord the foliage was quite a bit more green down in the valley!

To learn how you can capture shots like this, check out the CAPTURE North Carolina photography workshop; it’s only a month away!

Imagine having this view out your living window! It was just so handy to throw on a jacket and step outside this morning at this quaint, little house that my Uncle is letting us stay at for the week!

Sunrise over Grandfather Mountain

I thought about quite a few things while taking this picture:

• Even this far south, spring really hasn’t arrived at the higher altitudes. Instead of going for the rich green colors like I was expecting, I had to focus on utilizing the warm colors of the still barren trees.
• Including the sun in the image caused a lot of lens flare, so in the above image I composed the shot to crop out the sun just enough to keep that deep contrast over the image.
• I had to zoom way in for that shot and I discovered that lens flare looks especially bad when zoomed in. At wide angles, however, it doesn’t have to look bad if you keep a few lens flare rules in mind.

Just added more than 50 new pictures to my portfolio; click on the picture below to get a fresh wave of inspiration from creation! And for the effect, when you’re viewing the collection, click “Dim the Lights” under the “Menu” button that appears when you hover your mouse over the pictures. Enjoy!

Recently Added

Want to take pictures like these? I haven’t officially announced it yet, but I’m working on putting together a real, hands-on, landscape photography workshop in June where we’ll visit some “wow” places in North Carolina to learn how to take “wow” pictures! Check out the Workshops page for what details there are so far. Stay posted; can’t wait to officially announce it soon!

Hadn’t posted a new wallpaper in a while so, here’s a shot I thought was pretty nice from the beautiful state of Oregon. Latourell Falls is one of those off-the-beaten-path gems that I happened to see a sign for along the road I was traveling en route to another destination. I was really quite taken back when I saw it for the first time. For this shot, I made sure to include a lot of foreground branches to increase the perception of depth.

Latourell Falls

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The sunrise of March 10 was simply spectacular! God must have known it was my Mom’s birthday. Right as it was getting light that morning, I saw these stratocumulus clouds spreading out evenly across the sky and I knew it was going to be a pretty sunrise. So, with tripod and camera in hand, I slipped out on the roof in my slippers and coat to wait for the perfect morning to unfold before me, half expecting to see the shapely clouds spell out the words “Happy Birthday” in big puffy letters across the sky!

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In all seriousness though, I enjoy keeping an eye on the sky in the mornings. After a while, you can start to tell whether or not it’ll be worth lugging the camera and tripod outside to the best vantage point (hence climbing out on the roof). And as long as you have a nice view toward the east, you really don’t have to travel anywhere spectacular. For the observant person, spectacular shots are actually more likely to be taken close to home because he’s already there when the spectacular occurs.

Valley of the Staddons

As I was going through archives today, looking for some grand pictures to use in a new set of greeting cards that are in the works, I ran across this great shot from an excursion in the Sierra foothills near Mammoth Lakes, California. It didn’t quite make the cut for this set of cards, but I thought it was at least clever enough to show to the world on the blog. I can’t recall using a foreground object to frame any of my shots recently, so this was a great inspiration for me to keep my eyes open to objects that might, well, appear to just be in the way.

The verse that stood out to me on the morning that my brother Michael and I drove from Waxhaw to Marble for the North Carolina FEW Conference happened to be Proverbs 26:13: “The slothful man saith, ‘There is a lion in the way…’” In other words, instead of viewing obstacles as opportunities, a slothful person just lets obstacles stop him from reaching his goal. Little did I know what obstacles I would run into that day that would attempt to stop me from reaching my goal of scouting various scenic locations in preparation for a future landscape photography workshop in that area.

One of the locations we planned to scout out was Courthouse Falls. Though located several miles off the beaten path and with only a drop of 45 feet, I was told it was one of the most beautiful waterfalls in the state. However, as we wound down the gravel, State Forest road to the falls, we were forced to stop at a crossing were the swollen stream was too deep for our minivan to cross. It was difficult to admit that it would not be possible for us to continue on to the waterfall, but remembering the verse I read that morning, I determined this disappointment would not defeat my ultimate purpose for coming. Michael and I scouted out the area around the crossing anyway, walking up and down the stream, shooting and critiquing each other’s pictures, and were pleasantly surprised at the abundance of hidden beauty that we would have been otherwise overlooked! It’s good to have a backup anyway if the road would happen to be blocked again in the future.

Just wanted to announce that I have added two more desktop backgrounds to my Wallpapers page! It’s fun to go through pictures and find pictures like these that really focus in on the detail. They make perfect wallpapers.

Colors of Winter

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This first shot was taken at Coopers Rock State Forest in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia (exact location). It was one of the only times I had ever done serious hiking in winter, especially with snow on the ground. My brother Jonathan and I hiked several miles out to the Coopers Rock overlooked and shot the sunset over the Cheat River valley. These leaves caught my eye along the trail on our way in.

Mountaintop Mystery

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Wherever there’s color, zoom in on it! There weren’t many clouds in the sky to reflect the colorful light of sunset over Two Medicine Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana (exact location), but there were pockets of clouds that surround the peaks of several mountains surrounding the lake. With a 200mm lens, those clouds were all that were needed for capturing something colorful!

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters
of the very same story which is written across the whole world
in letters too large for some of us to see.” –C. S. Lewis

About the picture: My brother David and I watched the sunset over Two Medicine Lake in Glacier National Park last October (exact location). He likes to sketch and I like to take pictures, so we have great fun exploring exciting places together! At this location, facing west, the light isn’t as dramatic in the evenings because the sides of the mountains are in shadow, so this got me looking for something other than simply immaculate scenery to be my subject. After watching David sketch for a little while, it hit me that him sitting on this bench would make a great subject! So I stepped back from the bench and waited for him to look up at his subject before taking the picture.