Let me start this week’s post by saying thank you to everyone for the kind comments and likes on last week’s images across social media. Those were fun images to capture and share, and I’m glad so many people enjoyed them. The Neowise comet was definitely something neat to see!
With that, back to our normally scheduled series of images! 🙂 This week’s image was again from the early days of the COVID lock downs, when most parks were closed here in Tennessee (and across the US). As part of my branching out and exploring new places, I discovered the Gee Creek area of Cherokee National Forest, a little over an hour south of me here in East Tennessee. Gee Creek was an interesting place to explore from a photography standpoint because the stream runs almost exactly east to west (at least for the section immediately near the trailhead), and was completely unprotected by mountains, like in the Smokies, which meant that as the sun was setting, it basically never disappeared behind a ridge, putting the stream in a shadow. That is my preferred time to shoot because you end up with shade on the stream, and then some light still on the mountains in the background, which gives all my stream images that glow in the distance. Well, on Gee Creak, that doesn’t happen! That definitely threw me for a loop artistically, but it was a fun challenge. What I ended up doing was waiting until the sun got low enough that the light was off the stream, but still in the trees, giving the dappled lighting on the rocks and slope (which I frankly try to avoid – I tend to like nice even lighting, but in this case it was unavoidable). The sum total of all this is an image that definitely different from my other stream images, and a different looking stream altogether.
More next week!
–Dan Thompson