Start your holiday shopping anytime at Quiet Light Publishing for the best photographic books and prints for all your gift giving. You don’t have to wait and stand in lines for Black Friday deals – get them from the comfort of your own home online – and all books sold are signed by our photographers! You can buy prints and notecards as well – all at special pre-holiday deals now through November 30. Just enter FALL2011 during checkout and receive 25% off on your entire order!

Get Their Love of Music by Stephen Azzato or The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes by Richard Mack or his beautiful book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes – noted on their website as the best book Great Smoky Mountains Association has had to sell!

We also have prints from all three books, portraits of the artists from Their Love of  Music, landscapes from both The Lewis & Clark Trail and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Plus other locations around the world. We also have note cards for those who still enjoy writing personal messages.

So don’t wait for Friday or even Small Business Saturday – get the best deals of the holiday season right now at Quiet Light Publishing. The ones you give these gifts too will be glad you thought of them in such a great way! And remember - enter FALL2011 during checkout and receive 25% off on your entire order!

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Quiet Light Publishing Team

 

Does your dad like history, the outdoors, our national parks, music, photography? Then we have the perfect gift! Quiet Light Publishing specializes in fine photography books. Choose anyone of our books and you’ll receive 25% off the price!  

We have a book The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes for those interested in history and nature. Richard Mack travelled the trail at the same time of year as the expedition did in order to bring to life the images of the trail as the expedition would have seen them in the 1800’s. This book has won 7 book awards including a Silver Medal in the International Photography Awards for Best Nature Book. 

Want to give him a travel idea? How about a trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park? Richard’s second book was a collection of images taken over his thirty years of travelling to the park. Our most visited national park, this book has also won a half dozen awards including a Gold Medal from the Association of Partners for Public Lands 2011, Non-Partner Published Works. And just last week was recognized by the International Book Awards with yet another Gold Medal for Best Nature Photography Book. Why wouldn’t dad love this? 

And if that weren’t enough we have Steve Azzato’s book, Their Love of Music, which captures 117 different musicians in an intimate portrait before they took to the stage with each portrait paired with one simple quote on why the artist loves playing night after night. This is a must have for any lover of photography or music or both! And yes this book to has won a few awards recently with the International Book Awards bestowing a Gold Medal for Best Photography Book – People. It also just last week won the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Cover Design.

Already have these three books? No problem, check out our website for prints, note cards and posters. Surely you can find something deserving for your father! Don’t wait to long though as we ship FedEx Ground and it may take a few days…we do offer overnight shipping but as you can guess that is more you’ll have to spend on dad! Go ahead click on the shopping cart above and enjoy shopping! 

Cheers,
Quiet Light Publishing

Dave Hoekstra from the Chicago Suntimes has written a great article about me and how Quiet Light Publishing came to be. He writes about how I did my first book on the Lewis & Clark Trail and my second book on Great Smoky Mountains National Park before expanding to publishing Steve Azzato’s book Their Love of Music. Here is what Dave wrote – it appears online with this link or in tomorrow’s Sunday Chicago Suntimes – December 19, 2010. First the link to the article online http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/2831128-421/book-mack-clark-lewis-trail.html and now his article here…

Evanston photographer feels call of nature in new book

BY Dave Hoekstra dhoekstra@suntimes.com  Dec 17, 2010 09:45PM

Richard Mack’s ember photograph of the Missouri River at twilight gently moves off the page into your soul. I’ve never been absorbed by a photograph in a coffee table travel book as much as this spiritual picture in The Lewis & Clark Trail: American Landscapes. Taken from the crest of the Double Ditch Indian Site, about 30 miles north of Bismarck, N.D., it was the last shot of the Evanston resident’s first book project. “I knew at the moment it could be the cover,” he said during a conversation at a Ukraninan Village coffee shop. “It was the end of a two-and-a-half year project. I was standing on a cliff. It was where the Mandan Indians had camped. As Lewis and Clark came by it was fall [Oct. 21, 1804]. You have to frame and wait for the right light, but in the landscape world, most of it is given to you by what’s going on in front of you. That was during the days of film, so if it came out I knew it would be stunning.” The Lewis & Clark Trail is a 2007 companion piece to Mack’s 2009 Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. In October, USA Book News named the Smoky Mountains effort as “Best Book, Nature Photography 2010.”  

The landscape books launched Mack’s Quiet Light publishing company to a space where he could do a third coffee table photography book. Released last month, Their Love of Music features 117 color photographs from Libertyille-based NBC cameraman Steve Azzato. It is the first non-Mack book for the Evanston-based imprint. (All books are $65, quietlightpublishing.com.)“Book publishing is harder than you think,” said Mack, 55. “You have to become a publisher and everything that entails. But this is the only way you make money — even though it’s not a lot. It’s like the musicians [Dave Alvin, Aaron Neville, Dave Specter and others] in the book. They do it for the love of the music, you do it for the love of the book.”Great Smoky Mountains National Park is Mack’s best seller and the No. 1 selling large format book at the park.Steve Kemp is Interpretive Products and Services Director with the Great Smoky Mountains Association. He contributed the foreword and chapter introductions.“Richard has a sensitivity for light that’s pretty rare,” Kemp said from his office in Gatlinburg, Tenn. “He can coax a richness out of landscapes and low light conditions that you don’t see other photographers experiment with. His photographs have an emotional depth that is superior to a lot of other work. It’s the best large format photography book we’ve ever been able to offer our visitors.”Mack explained, “I’ve been going to the Smokies almost every year since I was 18. It was the closest national park to Chicago. You could get there in a day. I spent two years (2006-08) going there every season just to shoot for the book.”Between 2002-2004 he ventured out from Evanston for trips that ranged from a week to 10 days for the Lewis & Clark book. He did one three-week trip to Idaho. For the first year he drove a silver Jetta and pitched a tent in campsites in places like Montana, where motels are scarce. He also wanted to replicate the solitary nature of Meriweather Lewis and William Clark. They camped in what became downtown Kansas City, Mo. In the second year, Mack ramped up to a pickup truck with a camper on the back. The trail stretches from St. Louis, Mo., across the Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean.

“My goal was to be in the same place Lewis and Clark were at the same time,” he said. Mack studied the explorers’ journal and relentlessly plotted out his trip. “About half of the trip was by myself, the other half with my brother-in-law,” Mack said. “He started coming along when we had the camper. It made all the difference in the world. You weren’t setting up at 10 o’clock at night and trying to clean cameras in a dusty old tent. Plus, I was tired of sleeping on the ground. If there was a morning and I was in the rain and didn’t feel right, I’d just drive.

“And if I drove 200 miles before sunset, that was fine as long as I got to a place where there was a good shot.”Now, that’s an artist on the road.Mack’s parents John and Betty gave him a Minolta camera when he was attending Evanston Township High School.“I liked it but I didn’t think about doing it as a profession until I took a course at the Evanston Art Center,” he said. “[Ebony photographer] Vandel Cobb and [fashion photographer] Paul McCall were the teachers. I went from there to study at Columbia College.”Since 1980, Mack worked on ad campaigns and architectural reports for many of the top Fortune 500 companies across the country, including photography for Hyatt resorts and argicultural equipment for Caterpilllar. But he always had wide open spaces in the back of his mind.“I’d like to do my next book on all five of the Great Lakes,” he said. “Its 20 percent of the world’s fresh water and a hot topic, as it should be. I’d like to hook in with a group like the Sierra Club or the Great Lakes Foundation, possibly, for funding. These books cost a lot to make.“People buy our books,” he said. “Our problem is getting them into stores. Barnes and Noble won’t put Lewis and Clark anywhere except along the trail. I’ve shown them my biggest sales direct are from the Northeast and Florida for some reason. Because I’ve been a photographer forever, the production side was pretty simple. I had a designer (Rich Nickel) that wanted to work on the book. He and I had worked together for years on various projects. He knew the design side I didn’t know. Marketing was the hardest part to learn and I’m still not sure I know it well.”Thanks Dave for writing such a great article!

Happy Holidays!

Richard  

Let’s face it – there are always a lot of choices one can make when shopping for gifts over the holidays, so why then do we always ask ourselves, “Now what can I possibly get for…”

Well look no further as this year you can give the BEST GIFT OF CHRISTMAS (or any other Holiday you may be celebrating!) The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes! Many of folks who have bought the book as a gift before come back and buy more just because it was such a great gift the first time. So get one for the traveler, photographer, historian, nature lover or Lewis & Clark buff on your list this year. We’ve been told by many folks, once this book hits their coffee table, it stays right there. What could be a better endorsement! Or for the ultimate gift give the Limited Edition of the book, which comes in a Leather Slipcase and includes Three Fine Art Prints.

And of course if you don’t want to give a book, look at our Note Cards, Posters or Fine Art Prints. Or for the photographer on your list how about a spot in one of our Nature Photography Workshops?

Why fight the crowds at the mall for yet another tie or pair of socks…Check out the better options at Quiet Light Publishing!

March 20, 2008. Some look at it as the day the of the equinox, the day the sun passes over the equator and begins to warm the northern hemisphere. For photographers it marks the beginning of spring and the thought of wildflowers springing up, or light beginning to make its way to the north side of buildings and mountain slopes. For me it is also my 53^rd birthday. But it is also the third anniversary of the release of my inaugural book The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes.

Some reflections of the past three years are what I would like to discuss here today. It has been an interesting ride. From the initial decision to start a project of this magnitude, spending 6 months planning the shoots, 2 years on and off the trail making the images for the project, finding a publisher, and ultimately thinking the best way to go is to become your own publisher (a notion made partly of the romance of being a publisher of fine art photography books and the hard line decision that it was the only way to make it financially rewarding). And once you make the decision to publish your own work, and maybe the works of others eventually (but will discuss that at a later date), then you must begin the process of making the book a reality and not just file cabinets filled with images. Editing the thousands of images, finding the perfect designer (or in my case two of them in Rudi Backart and Rich Nickel!), getting printing quotes from around the world before settling on a fine art printer right here in the United States – the Stinehour Press in Vermont.

But those are all of the production decisions which have to be made. There is an equally mind numbing set of decisions which need to be addressed on the marketing side. Now, you would think someone who has spent his career in the advertising industry as a photographer, would know how important it is to have looked at the end part – the selling of the book – before forging ahead on the production side. Nope. I was thinking to laterally. Get it done and they will buy. After all why wouldn’t they – the images are beautiful and the concept never done and there will be 40 million people along the different parts of the trail during the 200^th anniversary years of the expedition. How can it not sell! This was the thinking I had. Fortunately, I had others around me who whacked me upside the head. Bryan Glaza, my first client and now a life long friend, sat down at one of our initial marketing meetings, with

Well, we hit the trail again, placing the book in every store and museum along the trail we could. Put out the required press releases, got some press in the papers, then on TV and radio, then more in the papers and then on national TV on NBC News! (And yes you can see them from our website just go to www.quietlightpublishing.com/news.html and follow the links for the various programs and articles). We also were lucky enough to win roughly a dozen book, design and photography awards for this book. So, in the three years since the release of the book, we have sold roughly 5,000 copies. Not bad for a photographic book. But, what I didn’t know was most photographic books have a print run of 1,500-3,000 tops. And that leads me to mention one of the biggest mistakes I made during this whole process. The decision to print 10,000 copies, based solely on the printing costs, and the fact that the more you print the less the per unit cost. I did not think about the fact the reprint costs would make up for an initial higher price per unit. In retrospect I should have printed at most 5,000 copies the first time out, maybe even less. But the book has done exceedingly well, we’ve made money on the project, and it is still selling each and every month.

Of interest to me is the fact that most big book stores thought it would only sell along the trail. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve found, most of our direct sales through our website have been in states away from the trail, the northeast, southeast and southwestern United States buy as many as the Midwest and northwest where the trail winds its way through. Clearly this should be a book featured prominently at holiday time by the big stores nationally don’t you think?

We also released a Limited Edition version, limited to 200 editions in honor of the 200^th anniversary of the expedition. It is presented in a leather slipcase and includes three prints, each representing a year the expedition spent on the trail. Each book and set of prints are signed and numbered accordingly. This edition is available from Amazon or directly on our website at www.quietlightpublishing.com. We also have an extensive collection of fine art prints from the book available online. Images from the book have been in exhibits in several galleries, and were the backdrop for an exhibit by the Newberry Library in

On this the third anniversary of the release party (www.quietlightpublishing.com/gal_opening.html) I can say it has been a great ride! I have spoken to many groups about the book, photography and the Lewis & Clark Expedition. It has enabled me to think about other books now in the works, one on

I want to thank everyone who has enjoyed the book, come out to the lectures, worked behind the scenes to make this possible and in the making of this book. One person can never make a project this size come about alone. It does take a team effort. Without all of you we would not be where we are now. Thanks!

Peace,

Richard Mack