by Michael Frye | May 18, 2014 | Photography Tips
Minnehaha Falls, GA; 1 sec., f/16, ISO 100
Waterfalls are abundant in the southern Appalachians. It seems like you can hardly throw a stick without hitting one.
Of course I’ve spent the last 30 years in Yosemite, which might have the most spectacular collection of waterfalls in the world. But they’re different. Yosemite’s waterfalls are big and dramatic, and often leap hundreds of feet in a single drop. The waterfalls in the southern Appalachians are smaller, more intimate, and more complex, often containing multiple tiers and channels. This complexity can make them both more challenging and more rewarding to photograph – challenging because there’s rarely an immediately-obvious composition, but rewarding because once you start looking you might find a dozen or more good compositions in a single cascade.
During our last trip, one of the first places we visited was Minnehaha Falls in northern Georgia. Since this fall is on the cover of two different waterfall guidebooks it seemed worth checking out. And we weren’t disappointed. Minnehaha is graceful enough to lend itself to overall views, and intricate enough to offer many smaller-scale compositions. The day was overcast, which is often ideal for these kind of waterfalls. I spent an hour and a half there working just one side of the cascade before we had to move on.
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by Michael Frye | May 11, 2014 | Light and Weather
Rainbow and Looking Glass Rock from the Blue Ridge Parkway, NC, USA
On our recent trip to the Carolinas Claudia and I visited the southern section of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and what a treat that was.
Before our trip I asked my friend Charlie Cramer about the area, as I knew he’d spent some time there, and he told me he loved the southern stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and pointed me toward some good areas for dogwoods. He also put me in touch with his friend Nye Simmons, author of Best of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Nye generously gave me some photography suggestions over the phone, as well as an advance copy of the Photographer’s Edition of Best of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was a great resource. I’m not sure when this edition will be available, but I highly recommend it to photographers visiting the Blue Ridge Parkway, both for the information and the photographic inspiration. And for further inspiration, check out Nye’s beautiful coffee-table book, Blue Ridge Parkway Celebration (see a preview here, or order from Amazon here).
During our first day along the parkway, while scouting for our workshop, it was raining off and on, and at higher elevations the road climbed into the clouds, where we encountered thick fog. It was interesting to stop at some of the viewpoints the parkway is famous for and not be able to see more than 50 feet. But I loved it, because interesting weather makes interesting photographs, and I relished the opportunity to photograph trees in the fog.
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by Michael Frye | May 8, 2014 | Travels and Stories
Dogwoods, Great Smoky Mountains NP, NC, USA
The last two weeks have been a whirlwind, with back-to-back workshops and two cross-country flights. But Claudia and I had a great time during our visit to the mountains of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. We got to see some beautiful country, and experience lots of that famous southern hospitality.
Now I’m back home, catching up on sleep and processing photographs. I made this dogwood image near the Oconaluftee Visitor Center in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We just caught the tail end of the dogwood bloom, and it was nice to photograph eastern dogwoods in their native habitat.
While the dogwood bloom was almost over, the sarvis were just getting started. I had never heard of these trees until just before our trip, I found them to be highly photogenic. I’ll post more images of sarvis, waterfalls, and many other things soon.
— Michael Frye
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by Michael Frye | Nov 28, 2011 | Workshops
Table Rock at sunrise
To those who celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you had a great holiday. And if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you had a good weekend anyway!
The week before Thanksgiving I flew to South Carolina. A couple of people who had previously taken my Spring Digital Camera Workshop got some of their friends together and invited me to come to their home and teach a workshop.
I’d never been to this part of the country before, and found it to be quite beautiful. This region, in the mountains along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, is home to a great concentration of waterfalls. Of course I live near another great waterfall area, Yosemite, but the character of the falls is quite different in each place. Yosemite is known for its big, thundering, dramatic, vertical drops like Yosemite Falls and Bridalveil Fall. The Carolina waterfalls are smaller, and usually slide down less-than-vertical rock faces, but they have braids and channels that lend themselves to slow shutter speeds and more intimate compositions, and in their own way they’re equally photogenic.
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