Teamwork makes the dream work, so they say! I mentioned last week that my buddy Ryan Yoder and I had gone to Cades Cove together to photograph the fireflies. While we were hanging out, I enlisted him to help me sometime with an idea I’d been kicking around – one that I knew I wouldn’t be able to pull off by myself.
The view of Cades Cove from Rich Mountain Road is a famous one, in that many people have seen it in photographs and paintings, but it’s location is not immediately obvious. In fact, these days its incredibly easy to drive right past! The view of the Cades Cove Methodist Church is all but completely obstructed, save for one spot, right next to a tree with poison ivy growing all over it. It is such a small spot, Ryan and I had to weave our tripods together so that we could both set our cameras up, which were almost touching each other. It’s a really tight spot! What makes the shot truly challenging, however, is the distance and coordination that needs to happen to pull it all off.
For those unaware, Cades Cove Methodist church has no electricity, and there are no lights around it to illuminate the church. To create this scene, I used my own lights, while Ryan stayed back with the cameras to help me know what I needed to be doing with the lights so that it looked the way we wanted. As a crow flies, the viewpoint is a little over a half mile away from the church itself. To get there though, requires traveling about 2 miles on the road. Thankfully, Ryan has some nifty radios that allowed us to communicate, and I had just gotten a new eBike, which made all the back and forth with gear more doable. Like the firefly shot from last week, however, you never really know what you got until you get back home and look at the images on your monitor. Needless to say, I was thrilled how it worked out!
More next week!
–Dan Thompson