I am guessing most of you have caught on to this already, but I am slowly trying to work through shooting all the iconic spots in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at night, just as a way to put my own spin on these classic scenes. This week’s image is one I am very excited about, but perhaps a scene you may not be as familiar with.
This week’s Picture of the Week is of what locals refer to as the Enchanted Lane in Cades Cove, which is actually part of the old road through the park. My good friend Bill Lea has some really classic shots of this scene (currently the third image in his Cades Cove gallery), but the challenge has been that the lane has been polluted with downed trees for years it seems. For whatever reason, the park service (or someone) cleared the lane this fall, making it a picturesque scene again, so I thought I’d try my hand at it. Here’s the funny part though, I was all excited about the scene, but because it had been so messy for so long, I hadn’t looked at it in person in forever. So I rode my bike out there in the freezing cold one night after dark, only to realize that the sky is almost entirely blocked by the trees! Given that the lane is surrounded by trees, which is what makes it cool, you’d think I would have thought of this, but nope!
I went ahead and setup the scene anyway, and I sure am glad that I did. After I started lighting the trees and seeing how it looked on the back of the camera, I quickly realized that I didn’t really care if you could see much of the sky or not. Truth be told though, when I got the image put together I did have to share it with a few friends and ask the question, “Is this cool? I want this to be cool… but is it?” I was met with resounding “yeses”, which I think on some levels allowed me to really like it as I do now. Sometimes it takes a team to get there, even in photography! In any case, the sky features through the trees glimpses of the Orion-Eridanus bubble, as well as the California Nebula (Pleiades is blocked by the trees nearly completely) and some of their neighbors.
More next week!
–Dan Thompson