Gatlinburg Photo Blog etc

Enough catching up. Its time to jump back in with both feet. I had been taking things a little light, getting caught up etc, etc, but now its time to get moving again. I need to feel the camera in my hands again. I got a little burned out with the gallery, but now the itch has come back. Yesterday I hiked about 5 miles up the Big Creek trail in the GSMNP. I’d almost forgot how gorgeous it is. It was an almost perfect day, largely cloudy, a bit cooler, and I took the little camera, so I could focus more on the hike and why I moved here. Days like this help get perspective remind me that I’m not in charge of things. Kudos to Darwin and all that, but it is difficult to perceive such a perfect beautiful scene could be evolved from survival of the fittist. Survival tends to bring out mean ugly details, beauty lies in the communal harmony of coexistence on a grander scale.

Anyway I took the little camera and no tripod, so I could move easier and try to get out that perfect grand scene mentality. Its time to put some fun back into the art. The little one is a Panasonic Lumix Fz50. A not bad fixed lens SLR like point and shoot. One of the biggest factors in choosing this one was ability to manually focus. So yesterday was all about enjoying the day and playing around. Sometimes its nice to just shoot the scene and not have to worry with setting a grand shot. Probably nothing print worthy out of the day, but it was an excellent shoot just for the change of perspective.

Here are a few of the shots:

A random cascade along the creek with a bit of birch bark to spice up the foreground

Another of the many cascades with a couple leaves as foreground.

And of course you can’t pass Mouse Creek Falls without a token shot.

Mouse Creek Falls

All in all, a very good day, just to be out clikin.

Gotta do some real work now. Keep on clikin.

Bc

Or least the flowers are popping up. The Dogwoods and Redbuds outside the park have had a happy spring, the ones inside the park are not popping yet. We had some cold weather last week that may have slowed them down a bit. I saw very few flowering Dogwoods in the Greenbrier area this Saturday, and only 1 Redbud. The Cosby area had a number of Dogwoods flowering, but it looked like the cold affected them, the blooms did not have the usual white pop to them. Good news for the Trillium though, they are going strong along the Porter Creek Trail. Yellow Trillium are very abundant, and the Large Flower Trillium, and Sweet White Trilliumare plentiful. Pahcelia is blanketing the the forest floor and areas, and if you look close you can find Dutchmans Breeches in full bloom. The Crested Dwarf Iris along this trail have about a week to go, although I heard they are already blooming near the Ramsey’s Cascade trailhead. It looks to be a good year for wild flowers, providing we don’t have any suprises through the spring. Here are a few shots from Saturday. These have not been edited yet but they will give you an idea of what is going on.

Back to work. Keep on clikin!

Bc

It almost seems as if winter has decided to leave town. While I’m sure there will be more cold nights to come, having temperatures in the upper 60’s makes me wonder. We have a storm bearing down on us today, but that will be rain and wind. Although once it passes we will return to more normal seasonal temperatures of lows around freezing and highs in the 40’s.

It will be a rough day hiking today. The showers are projected to start around 1pm, and will bring wind gusts up to 60 mph. A good gale force blow. Yesterday though was almost ideal. I hiked up the Mt Sterling trail to the fire tower and campsite there, and then hiked a little ways down the Mt Sterling trail. For the uphill I definitely did not need the jacket. The trail starts from Cove Creek road (Old NC 284). Getting to the trail head was the adventurous part. When I got to the point where the road enters the park, a ranger was coming up the road. He asked where I was going. When I told him I was going to the Mt Sterling trailhead he said it was iffy for my little Hyundai Tiburon because of the mud on the road. He was right it was a little iffy at times surfing the shark on the steep switchbacks going up. But the little guy weighs about as much as a tricked out go kart, so I was able to get enough traction to keep going. Although it was pretty interesting at times. The hike from Cove Creek road is relatively steep. The trail ascends about 1900 feet over 2.7 miles. The trail is rocky in parts, to too much mud considering it is also a horse trail. I’ve never seen horse trailers at the trail head though. Its a pretty constant slope up. Once at the the top where the trail meets the Mt Sterling Ridge trail, it is a short hike to the fire tower and campsite #38, which is one of the higher campsites in the park. The view from the fire tower is spectacular, although the haze yesterday precluded any good shots. But this was more of a scouting trip anyway. The mountain top is covered in Firs, so the only scenic views are from the fire tower. It is open so it is accessible. At the top you are shooting through small window panes though so shooting panoramas from the top of the tower would be difficult. All in all it was nice hike. Beautiful weather for a February day, light jacket was all that was needed. I took the little camera on this hike (Panasonic Lumix FZ50 point and shoot) and forgot about shooting a little video while I was up there. The hills were definitely blue yesterday. So far this looks to be one of the best spots I’ve found for Sunrise shots, although you would pretty much have to camp up there to get it. And definitely not be afraid of heights. You would have to be very self conscious of your footing in the fire tower to make sure you do not fall through the opening. Especially while it is dark. So not an easy shot to get. But I may go for it in March.

Mt Sterling Firetower - View to the west

For February though It was a great hike. Gorgeous weather. I would not want be up there today though. Despite the fact that my car probably would not make it after it gets the downpours today, and the winds gusting to 60 mph in a little box 100 feet off the earth, supported by a metal tower, with possible lightning strikes……… I don’t think so. Not worth the shot today.

Mt Sterling Fire Tower

A little hot and cold

Have a great today

Keep on clickn.

We just had a couple of days with single digit lows, cold enough for here, but it definitely beats the 25 below in Aurora, IL. I think I can live with this. It was nice to get out and get a couple shots yesterday morning. I haven’t done any below freezing work lately. I stopped at Noisy Falls on the way to Pigeon Forge for the Smokies Wilderness Week. The cascade was pretty much frozen over with just a few spots where you could still see the water flowing. It had some nice formations on it, but the falls are a pretty busy scene so in the shots of the whole cascade its kinda tough to find something for your eye to rest on. Shooting the 100 to 400 yielded some not bad close ups though. I’ll have to see what they look like after a little processing. For some reason I decided not to shoot a vertical panorama of it, settling for straight hdr shots. I was there in mid day so I was also shooting into the sun which may or may not yield a decent image. I don’t think I’ve done an extensive HDR shot with the sun in the image yet, so I will have to see how that turns out. I did a 6 shot HDR at 1 stop increments, so hopefully I can cover the range and maybe get a decent fire and ice kind of theme. After about 1/2 hour though the battery in the camera died, and the backup did not have much charge to it, so its time to take the batteries out of the camera bag and put them in my coat pocket so they will stay warm. I was out to big creek a couple weeks ago practicing the HDR panoramic technique, and shot a 10 shot pano x 3 shot HDR for a 30 shot composition. That’s a lot of fun to process. After processing each of the 10 shots for the HDR, I have to split the photomerge into to 2 5 shot batches and then merge those together. I’m only getting 3 gb memory on my main computer so photoshop was choking on me. The resulting image was 2.8 GB, but once I flattened and cropped the image it was just under 2 GB. If I decide to print it, at 24 inches tall it will be roughly 6 1/2 feet wide. It may make a decent canvas. It covered about 270 degrees at Midnight Pool so it covers the area before the pool with the interesting tree roots, all the way around to the downstream view of Big Creek. Right now I’m mostly trying to get a good handle on the technique, so that when spring hits I’ll be comfortable with it. It’s a lot of fun seeing what the camera can do, but it does require quite a bit of backend processing.

Todays forecast calls for a decent chance of snow later and tonight, continuing through Monday and a slight chance Tuesday. Accumulation will probably not be more than an inch in Gatlinburg, although they could get 2-4 inches around Newfound Gap. We did have some freezing rain in the area last night so 321 north of Gatlinburg was pretty slick early this morning, although it was mostly gone by the time I went through it. There were quite a few areas around that had slick roads, with I-40 being closed for a while west of Knoxville.

If possible plan ahead for next year to catch Wilderness Week in Pigeon Forge. It is a great event with lots of info on photography, music history,  and everything Smokies related, including classes on dowsing! And its free! Its tough to beat this one.

Have a great day! And keep on clicking.

Bc