This afternoon we received the shipment of books from the printer, CS Graphics, of our new book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. We will start to ship out the pre-ordered books on Monday. Shipments to those stores which have ordered the books will also begin on Monday. Seems like it has been a long time in coming and now it is here! Pretty exciting when you launch a new book and a lot of work. We’ll be having a big release party in late August or early September – watch this space for information or email me and ask to be put on our list. You can purchase the book on our website at www.quietlightpublishing.com!

Have a fun weekend folks!

Peace,

Richard 

We also discuss new offerings from Quiet Light Gallery and new Workshops for nature and photography lovers in this issue. To view the full articles please use the link: http://www.quietlightpublishing.com/newsletters/200905.php  

Or visit us on the web at www.quietlightpublishing.com  Look forward to hearing from you! 

Richard Mack

Quiet Light Publishing

Another of these moments came a few weeks ago when for the first time I wrapped the dust jacket around the dummy book they sent – a book that is the exact size and makeup of my finished book but without any printing. It is one thing to see the dust jacket on the screen as you put it all together, another to see it printed out, but the best so far is that first time you wrap the jacket around the book and put it down on a table. Voila! Your book – kind of.

So, while they toil away in Singapore printing the 220 pages and 246 images for this monograph of Great Smoky Mountains

And as an additional incentive if you use the Discount Coupon Code: QB01 when promted at check out we’ll give you an additional 10% off!

Preview the book: GSMNP Book

Purchase an Advanced Copy: Quiet Light Publishing

Cheers,

Richard

 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes

ISBN: 978-0-9753954-2-4

220 pages, 245 images, 11×13”

Quiet Light Publishing

Publisher’s Price: $60.00

Pre-Order Price: $45.00 (until June 1, 2009)

Four years ago today we released my first book, The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes. As soon as you come out with your first book, the question is…so what’s your next project and when will it come out. Well, now. Kind of. You can now pre-order our second book, Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. I have been training my lens on the park for just over thirty years so it made sense that my next book would on the park.

I began my quest to become a landscape photographer while on my first trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park back in 1974 with my future wife, Kathy. I was not then as intense about photography as I am now. I was just beginning my journey and in all honesty wanted to find the closest national park to my home in Illinois. I chose the Smokies and the love affair began – between me and the park and between my wife and I. Since then I have visited many of our national parks, but I continue to be drawn back to the beauty, diversity, and complexity of the Smokies. It is, after all, a park that offers everything: historic buildings and living history, magnificent streams and waterfalls, a variety of old-growth and new-growth forests, large fields and coves with abundant wildlife, and of course, those stunning vistas into “smoke” filled valleys.

Over thirty years, many things have changed, and many others have stayed the same. The Fraser firs on Clingmans Dome have almost been destroyed by the Balsam Wooly Adelgid, yet younger trees now crowd the understory. Portions of the Alum Cave trail were inundated by a landslide during a thunderstorm. Cades Cove is no longer farmed. Logging operations cleared much of what is today parkland. Yet to the inexperienced eye, the places where lumber companies clear-cut mountainsides in the late 1800s and early 1900s are barely perceptible, a testament to both Mother Nature’s ability to regenerate and remove the scars of mankind, and to mankind itself for having the foresight to preserve this remarkable landscape. In some cases, entire species have disappeared from the area, like the buffalo and wolves, or even from the earth entirely as is the case with the passenger pigeon. But other species have been reintroduced. Elk have been returned to Cataloochee and have migrated into other areas of the park. The synchronized fireflies have been around forever, but only in the last 15 years have they become a popular treat if you are lucky enough to catch their 10-day show in early summer.

Some of these changes are reflected in this book, whether a black and white image of an old barn taken in 1976, or one of my last shots of a sunrise as seen from Newfound Gap in November 2008. I hope you will enjoy my vision of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is a jewel in our national park system. My wish is that you will come to love, as I do, the details of the leaves, the rush of water in the streams, the colors of the landscape as it changes from season to season.  

You can preview the book using the link: GSMNP Book Preview 

Our release date is July 1, 2009, but pre-orders start today, at the reduced price for readers of this blog of $45.00. So order now, and put the words BLOG in the comment area to insure your discounted price. We will not charge your card until we ship your order. Readers of this blog are the first to be able to order! GSMNP Book Pre-Order 

Thanks! Hope you’ll enjoy this new release! Stay tuned for more as we move forward! 

Richard Mack

     

I am at the point in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapesbook project where it is time to convert the images into the CMYK color space for the press. It is a very painful process. As photographers we see in a full spectrum of colors, shoot for the widest range in the color spectrum, in 16bit Raw files, import them into Photoshop in ProPhoto color space (you do use this now don’t you?) all of which gives us the largest color space we can have. This provides for beautiful images onscreen and in our fine art prints. But the book world uses the color space for commercial presses, the world of four to six color presses and the world of CMYK, a much smaller color space than we work in. So we suffer the long slow pain of watching our colors disappear when we hit the Convert to CMYK button.

Any color out of gamut (outside the target color space) will be clipped into the CMYK color space, which for me in this case is usually the bright yellows and greens of that early morning light in the leaves. So, after getting up early to be there for the golden light, taking care to bring the colors to life in Photoshop and having things look great, we end up cringing as we hit that Convert to CMYK color space. I am converting to the CMYK color my press has specified for their use, basically SWOP coated. So how do you get back some of the colors which have been clipped?

Well, if you look online for answers, you will find everyone has a different opinion. So here is how I have come to process images. Once you have your final RGB file set (and saved), flatten the layers and then take a look at it. Click the Preview button on and off to get an idea of what things will turn into and I have on occasion then upped the saturation of the greens only by about 10% and then converted to CMYK, although this seems to work only occasionally.

As you hit the convert button, please, and this is important, utter the words “bye bye color”.

Most often the beautiful light yellow greens will turn into a cyan bluish color. So what now? I go to the levels and change the cyan levels slightly starting with the middle which I put at 1.00 or 1.15 then adjust the high and low sliders to taste. Then select Hue/Saturation and once again go to the greens and yellows separately and up them 10-20% be careful though you don’t go too far and wash out detail. You might want to also add some black in the greens and/or on the black channel as well. You might find there are more things to try as well, maybe in the curves adjusting each channel separately, or going into the selective colors and adjusting the Cyan and yellow levels in the green layer. Depending on the image you are working on it may take any combination of these actions. Make sure you save it as a different named file – I put CMYK at the end of the file name. No most likely you still won’t be happy with the results but they should be fairly acceptable.

One last thought. Don’t go back and forth between the original file or transparency and try to match it. You won’t be able to. All you can do now is make it look as good as you can given the smaller color space you have to work with. While this is something all of us photographers hate to think about – our work not being shown at it’s absolute best, have faith that your printer will be very good at what they do and things will turn out alright – especially if you’ve selected the right printer to work with. And remember, every photographer who has had work printed in any form has faced this dilemma at some point. I happen to be lucky enough to have an original Ansel Adams print, one which is also in one of his early books. While the reproduction in the book is very good, it does not compare with the original print. So he had the same problem.  

On my last book, The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes I worked with Stinehour Press and they made the separations from the original transparencies. There I had the magic of John Stinehour to help. They have, sadly, gone the way of many presses in the United States and are no longer around. I could say to John – “It needs your magic to make it pop” and he would do something and it would happen. There are moments in this process I wish I had John and his wisdom sitting next to me telling me what to do. The Great Smoky Mountain National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes book is mostly digital images which I am now converting for our new printer CS Graphics. And I am confident they will be able to make these images as beautiful as before, but I still hate it when I push that Convert to CMYK button.

Peace,

Richard Mack