The Great Smoky Mountains National Park covers more than 800 square miles straddling the
border of Tennessee and North Carolina as shown on the map above. In October of 2017 I took
a landscape photography workshop in the Great Smoky Mountains with Andy Cook of Rocky
Mountain Reflections. I drove from Maryland and we stayed in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and made
trips into the park each morning and afternoon for photographic opportunities. The first
day we went along one of the main roads running into the part from Gatlinburg to go to the
cabins that were homesteaded in the 1800s by Bud Ogle and Alex Cole. These were meant to
be opportunities to photograph the wooden cabins, outbuildings and barns with fall foliage.
Unfortunately it rained hard the entire day. We we able to take a number of photographs
despite the rain but found it difficult to really explore different shots because of the
necessity of spending so much time keeping the equipment dry.
The second day, after the deluge of the first day, we went to the Pidgeon River that was
running very high with muddy water as is evident in a couple of the pictures. After that we
did hikes up a number of creeks to take interesting pictures of the flow out of the Autumn
colors and of small waterfalls. We went to Clingmans Dome at both sunrise and sunset to
photograph the vista over the smoky mountains. We also drove through Cades Cove to see the
mill and some of the fields in the valley.
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