As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, the Smoky Mountains are one of my favorite places to visit. But, if I had to take it step further, I would have to count Cades Cove among my favorite parts of the Smokys. I find that part of the park very peaceful and relaxing and often find myself imagining what would be like to live there.
Of course, the number of cars and tourists detract somewhat from that peaceful and relaxing feeling. But, normally even that doesn’t bother me that much unless it someone doing something stupid and completely inconsiderate. Like stopping their cars right in the middle of the road so they can jump out to see how close they can get to the bear to get a selfie. But, what can one do about such outrageous behavior other than wish the bear a delicious meal. Anyway, I digress.
I have visited Cades Cove on numerous occasions, and I usually go early in the morning. So early, in fact, that I often have to wait in a small parking lot until the park ranger arrives to open the gate. Fewer cars, fewer people, more tranquility. I rarely visit later in the day.
But, I took this picture on one of those rare times when I went in the late afternoon. I had already gone early that morning, but I had gone alone because my wife decided she didn’t want to get up at 4:00 in the morning.
That morning dawned cloudy and foggy with rain threatening the whole time. I drove the entire Cades Cove Loop road and stopped to get a couple of pictures, but I just wasn’t feeling it, so I made my way back to the cabin. When I arrived, my wife was ready to go, go, go, so we drove around to see a few things until the rain arrived.
By mid-afternoon, the rain had stopped, and the sun was beginning to peek out from behind the clouds. We decided it was the perfect time to take another (for me) trip to Cades Cove.
Shortly after entering the cove, I came upon this scene. What struck me the most was the way the lighting was creating a strong contrast between the bright field in the foreground and the dark mountains and stormy clouds in the background. I quickly found a place to pull over and grabbed my camera and tripod.
I set the tripod up beneath a tree and let some of the limbs hang into the top of the frame. I wanted to convey the feeling of sitting under the tree while gazing across the field toward the mountains and clouds and enjoying the view.
Because of the contrast, I was concerned about overexposing the sunlight field. To mitigate this, I used the exposure compensation feature to reduce the exposure by 2/3 of an f-stop. Obviously, maintaining complete depth of field was paramount, so I selected an aperture of f/22. With my ISO set at 200, this resulted in a shutter speed of 1/20 of a second, which was fine since there was no wind.
Upon returning home, I processed the file in Lightroom. I then opened it in Photoshop where I applied the Tonal Contrast filter in Nik’s Color Efex Pro, which further enhanced the clouds.
One problem I always had with the picture was its lack of general sharpness, which I had not been able to correct to my satisfaction. At least, not until I ran it through Topaz Lab’s Sharpen AI software. That resolved the issue resulting in the image I had been wanting to create when I first captured the scene.