Photography Trek: Chimney Tops Trail
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has hundreds of miles of hiking trails with never ending photographic opportunities. For this trip I visited Chimney Tops Trail which is only a few miles from Gatlinburg. Chimney Tops Trail is a moderately strenuous hike and is about 2 miles to the summit of Chimney Tops. While I didn’t reach the summit on this trip, there was plenty to see and photograph.
To get there, enter the park through the Gatlinburg entrance (or the Gatlinburg bypass). From the visitors center, it is approximately 7 miles to the parking lot at the start of the trail.
The Trail
The trail goes along next to a small stream and passes over it four times during the first mile. The first three bridges are fairly close to the beginning of the trail and also offer the best photographic opportunities so if you’re not up for a long hike, you can hit all three of these bridges in the first 500 yards or so.
There are lots of opportunities for water shots along the stream so be sure to bring polarizing and neutral density filters. The best time to go would be during an overcast day as the sunlight is not so harsh and does not cause the white water to become overly bright.
While you can get some good shots from standing on the bridges, getting slightly off the trail and climbing out onto the rocks will give you better angles. But be very careful as the rocks often have moss on them making them slippery. Better yet, if you have waders, you can get out there in the middle of the stream.
Taking the Shot
For good shots of the water you will need a sturdy tripod, and at least a polarizing filter or neutral density filter. The goal here is to get the shutter time to at least 2 seconds. And in the sunlight that requires a lot of shade over the lens. The slower the shutter speed the more the water gets that silky smooth look. Ideally, I like to shoot at about 4 to 8 seconds. This isn’t always possible depending on the sunlight and what equipment you have to work with.
Once you have the shot lined up it is good to meter off somewhere on the water that is white as this is likely to be the brightest spot. After taking the shot, check your histogram on your camera to make sure that you are not clipping the highlights. On most modern digital cameras this is shown as a blinking area on the LCD display. An overcast day will make this easier because often you will find in bright sunlight that the water is clipping while the scene is too dark. The only other way to deal with this is to use HDR (High Dynamic Range) which involves taking a few shots at different exposures and then combining them into one image to get the whole range of brightnesses into one image.
Post Processing
For post-processing of the images, I personally don’t like the blue tint in the water and prefer the water to be white. For this I have found that in most cases like it the pictures here, it is perfectly safe to desaturated the blue color entirely from the whole image. Obviously, if you have some sky in your shot you won’t want to do this, but since this was an overcast day the sky wasn’t very photogenic anyway. In Adobe Lightroom, I just set the blue saturation slider to -100%. In Photoshop, this can be done by adding a Saturation adjustment layer and setting blue to -100%.
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