SOLITARY TRAVELER PHOTOGRAPHY

On a rainy Friday, just before Christmas, in a singular, freak moment that night - I slipped on wet concrete, my feet giving way from under me, with all 200 of my pounds landing on my left wrist and arm as I vainly tried to break my fall..... And I knew as soon as I landed with a sickening thud, I'd hurt myself. I stumbled back to my feet, bought an ice cup at a convenience store, poured the ice into a bag, placed it against my swelling wrist and arm, and carried on. I even w

For the better part of the last few months, I was in a funk and I needed to find a way to break out of it. Heck, if it took gettin' down wit' my bad self, dancing like a freak to some James Brown funk in order to break out of my funk, then funk yeah. Gotta get the funk out. Okay, I just ran slap out of horrible puns; and besides, I have two left feet anyway. I'm a lover, not a dancer. Seriously, if you saw me dance, you'd collapse in uncontrollable laughter. Right after I col

As I was wrapping up the writing on my blog "Heading For The Light" on November 28, news reports were slowly filtering in from the other side of the Smokies: Gatlinburg was literally on fire. The Chimney Tops fire that I mentioned in the previous blog had suddenly, wildly expanded, as promised and much-needed rains were preceded by hurricane force winds, some reaching up to 90 MPH. Those winds picked up burning embers from the Chimney Tops fire and rapidly deposited them at r

When I was a kid, I had my own little Saturday morning ritual. Starting around 1980, not long after my father passed, I'd make a bee line to the grand room in our house, sit on the couch, and turn the radio to Z-93 in Atlanta to hear Casey Kasem on American Top 40. And for four hours, I'd sit and be mesmerized by the tunes Casey played, some of which weren't even on Z-93's playlist. I'd listen as he counted them down, from 40 to number one. And I did this for years, all the w

In recent weeks, the steady flow of images from Yours Truly began slowly diminishing to a near halt. And it was no fault of my sometimes dodgy Honda Civic, a car that has developed a habit of starting when she darn well feels like it - with nearly 230,000 miles on her, I'm grateful that she even starts at this point. Somehow I made it through the entire fall foliage season without being stranded, even though the ol' Civic sometimes does nothing at all when I first turn the ke

I had great hopes for Sunday morning. The rain that had soothed me to sleep the night before (and believe me, there's nothing more soothing than falling asleep to the sound of rain here in the Smokies) was scheduled to move out at sunrise Sunday morning. So I dutifully set my alarm for 5:15 AM, with two options for an epic sunrise shot dancing in my head. As it turned out, neither option became reality, because Mr. "My-body-feels-like-it-got-hit-by-a-Greyhound-Bus" here decid

Winter is always the toughest season for photography - at least for myself, anyway. If you've kept pace with my blogs, you already know that winter and I are engaged in a sort of "peaceful co-existence" - in other words, I (mostly) don't like it, but I cope as best I can. So I count the days and salvage whatever images I can until I see the first spring blooms, so I can give the wintry season the send off I think it deserves: "Don't come back now, ya hear?" Since winter isn't

For the better part of the latter months of 2015 and even into the new year, it seemed as though the expected cold weather in the Smokies and High Country - heck, the entire southeastern United States in general - joined the bears in hibernation. There I was on Christmas Day, sporting a t-shirt and shorts, walking along Dauphin Island, Alabama for a sunset shoot - the outside temperature a toasty 78 degrees. I was half-seriously debating whether or not to bring the sunscreen.

Things were becoming a bit.......stale. From the day I arrived here in Western North Carolina, I've had very little trouble finding lovely scenes to capture. Living only six miles from the Soco Gap entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway gives me quick access to some of the most breathtaking scenery in the Southeast. And on most days, I've had no trouble capturing that beauty: The trouble was ("and he's complaining??", you say) my work had become repetitive - variations on a them