The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

This blog started in August 2009. During the first 10 years, I published 485 articles, close to one article per week on average. Much changed during that time. Social media had no “algorithmic” timelines, nor “like” buttons. 500px, Instagram and Google+ did not exist yet. The blog outlasted the later. Could it be that blogging is still relevant?

Thank you for reading and putting up with me. At the start, I didn’t know much about the basics of blogging. For instance, in the beginning, I seldom replied to comments. But as the years went by, I’ve tried to become more responsive and write posts that would create some value and be more useful. To help me on this path, I’d be grateful if you would take a few minutes and answer a quick, anonymous, reader survey. If you do not see the questions below, click here to access the survey.

P.S.: The image illustrating this short post represents “the reader”. If you have Treasured Lands, you can notice that the last image in the opening section before the national parks, is a “selfie”, it represents me about to embark on the journey. The book is an invitation to explore, so after going through it, now it is the reader’s turn to go on the journey, and he is represented in that image, the last one of the book. By the way, my friend Tom who was the subject is a seasoned mountaineer, and I generally do not recommend standing close to the edge.

I am honored to be included in a group show with six other local artists entitled “The Blue Marble: Art for the Environment” at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto, CA.

Astronauts from the Apollo missions recorded for the first time the beauty of the earth from a new perspective: space. Galen Rowell and others consider “Earthrise”, photographed by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968 from the lunar orbit, to be “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”. Last year, on the 50th anniversary of the photograph, Anders mused “We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth.”

Honoring this point in time, the show references the name given to these famous NASA images. It seeks to find those rays of light through the power of art, telling stories of progress and hope, and celebrating the unique beauty of the planet we all call home, with the goal of encouraging our community to take a more active participation towards solving local issues.

The exhibit runs September 6 – 25, 2019, at the Pacific Art League, 668 Ramona Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301 (650) 321-3891. The gallery is open Monday-Friday 9AM to 5PM and admission is free. There will be an opening reception Friday, September 6 (5:30-8pm) and I hope to meet many of you there.

At some point, we all want to leave a legacy, and in photography, short of being archived by a major institution, the clearest path is to publish a well-circulated book. That is a book that reaches beyond your existing audience, is sold in bookstores nationwide, and makes it way into libraries. Books travel through the ages. One of my inspirations for Treasured Lands was a hundred-year-old book. If you are thinking about publishing a photography book, or are just curious about the opaque world of book publishing and its economics, read on.

It is a given that you’ll need a great concept, photographs, selection/sequencing, design, editorial matter, and printing, but this article doesn’t touch those aspects and instead is about the business. No matter how excellent your book is, what is the use if it doesn’t get into enough hands to make an impact? Once you know the subject of the book and its audience, the most critical question is how many copies do you want to sell. That will lead you to the next steps. If that number is below a thousand, then with some determination, you could handle the sales by yourself, maybe with some help from your family, which leaves you with 100% of receipts. The problem becomes finding a cost-effective way to print the copies. There are two approaches to printing, print on demand, and offset printing.

Print on-demand

Print on-demand uses a digital press without plates, basically a high volume digital printer, so the cost of setup is relatively low. You can order as few books as you want, so it is a viable option even if you sell only a few dozen copies. You could even use print on demand to order a single copy for a special occasion like an exhibit! While print on demand works just fine with text-based books, for photography books the resulting print quality usually does not match what can be obtained with a traditional offset press. However, the main obstacle is the high cost per copy for photography books. How high? For instance a single copy of a 240-page, 8×10 book costs more than $100 on Blurb, while a 12×12 is a whopping $180. Costs go down for multiple copies, but not that much. You can offer those books as limited edition copies or artist books to your existing audience. On the other hand, selling the book at a price competitive with mainstream, commercially distributed books is very difficult.

Update I subsequently learned about Amazon KDP, which combines printing on demand and distribution in the form of sales from all Amazon stores. That combination and lower costs than companies such as Blurb make it a workable solution, although the print quality remains much below offset printing and the price hardly competitive.

176 pages, 11 x 8.5 inches, limited edition of 100. Initially offered at $85 (currently $125)

Offset printing

In offset printing (videos) one needs to set up printing plates, which for a photography book often can be a five-figure amount, but once the setup is done, large quantities of pages can be produced at a relatively low cost. Depending on the printing options, the quality can be extremely high, so high as to be indistinguishable from photographic prints. The problem is to be able to order (and sell!) enough books to offset the setup. While short runs are possible, and more economical than print on demand beyond approximately 300 copies, realistically you’d want to print about a thousand books to make it worth it. Here is a recent quote from the Asian printer of Treasured Lands for a different 250 page, 11×11 inch book – North American printers are just not competitive in price for color photography books:

• 750 copies @ $35.98/cp: total $26,985
• 1,500 copies @ $22.08/cp: total $33,120
• 2,500 copies @ $16.25/cp: total $40,625
• 5,000 copies @ $10.85/cp: total $54,250

Those costs have to be paid upfront, so you are looking at a sizable investment for printing alone. That is on top of the design, editing, project management, and marketing costs. In 2006, Publishers Weekly stated that the average book sells 3,000 copies in its lifetime. That figure has likely gone down since, and photography books are considerably more expensive than the average book, so they naturally sell fewer copies. Most authors do not do it for the money, instead, the game in self-publishing is to avoid losing money.

Treasured Lands second edition. 480 pages, 10 x 12 inches. $50 on Amazon

Distribution

If you are going to print thousands of books to take advantage of economies of scale, distributing them yourself becomes a significant endeavor. For thousands of books, relying on your fan base will likely not be enough, you’ll need to reach new customers by selling them in bookstores. You’ll have to:

• Store them. Thousands of photography books can easily fill your garage, so may need to rent storage space.
• Sell them to bookstores, usually at a 50% discount, however, Amazon uses its dominant market position to demand a 55% discount plus other fees.
• Ship them. Photography books are heavy and easily damaged.
• Invoice and collect payment from many booksellers, most of them ordering just a couple of copies.
• Handle the returns/restocking/refunds. It’s a little-known fact that bookstores reserve the right to return books that have not sold fast enough. Quite a few get damaged in the round-trip.

Book distribution is highly technical, and you can spend a sizeable portion of your time dealing with it. Alternatively, a book distributor can handle all of those tasks for you. Large publishers have their own distribution operation, but small to medium publishers can use the services of book distributors that represent many publishers. For that, they take a commission of at least 25%, which is well earned. The attentive reader will note that your receipts are at most 37% of list price in the most optimistic case when using distribution. In practice, it’s more in the 30%-33% range, even if your print run sells out quickly, a big if. If your book takes a long time to sell, storage and cycles of shipping/returns (at the publisher’s expense) increase the fees to a point that the inventory becomes remaindered. Publishing is a tough business with small margins!

From a business point of view, securing a distribution contract is the most critical step in self-publishing. You have to do so before you start production at the printer, so they have a warehouse to ship to. Convincing a distributor to distribute your books is similar to convincing a publisher to publish your book. They want to have a sense that your books will sell reasonably, and will use your marketing plan and publishing program to ascertain that. They will market to booksellers, but not to end-customers. Like with a publisher, the relationship goes both ways. Maybe because many publish for vanity, the publishing industry is full of predatory actors, so you have to make sure you partner with a distributor who has established an excellent reputation and reach. Here is a solid list of book distributors.

500 copies of Treasured Lands (1/10th of the initial print run).

Terra Galleria Press distribution

Three years ago, it would have been difficult for me to secure a great distributor because I had no track record. On the other hand, with no distributor, one cannot sell books in large quantities – the classic bootstrap issue. I went to an existing publisher (with a co-publishing agreement) partly because they were working with a major distributor. In the intervening years, Treasured Lands has done quite well in the marketplace compared to other books by some of the well-known names in photography. This opens doors. The list above describes Ingram as the “world’s largest distributor of books to online and retail stores, schools, and libraries”, and it is a nice bonus that they are based in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live.

We at Terra Galleria Press are very pleased to have secured distribution for our books with such a major distributor as Ingram Publisher Services. We are honored to join a family of distinguished photography book publishers ranging from Aperture to Taschen who are distributed by Ingram Publisher Services. The arrangement was reported last week by the venerable Publishers Weekly.

Terra Galleria Press is a new publisher based in California specializing in photography books. We celebrate the diversity of our natural and cultural heritage. Our goal is to publish beautiful and useful books that inspire readers to embark on a journey of discovery and reconnect with the earth. The press’s initial focus is on books about America’s public lands, with the hope that via widespread readership they will help raise awareness and contribute to their preservation for future generations.

A main technical obstacle in making great prints from digital files is that you are translating an image viewed through the transmissive vehicle of the computer screen to a physical medium which is reflective. In this article, I explain with examples how to compensate for that difference, using as a step by step an improved page in the just released second edition of Treasured Lands.

Fundamental media differences

Modern digital cameras, like film, capture a very wide range of colors. That range is called the gamut. Monitors emit red, green, and blue (RGB) light to create colors, which are added together to generate the pixel color. On the other hand, on paper colors are created by absorbing light with pigments, and the process is subtractive, since adding more pigments results in less light being reflected. Because the process is opposite, opposite colors are used: cyan, magenta, and yellow, with blacK used to enable darker colors (CMYK).

The pigments are subject to physical limitations, so they always reproduce a narrower range of color (a smaller gamut) than available on the screen. This is particularly true of the offset printing presses used for books. For instance, Adobe RGB has a gamut volume of 1,207,500 whereas Fogra39, which characterizes the offset printer used for Treasured Lands, has a volume of 402,100. This means that two-thirds of the colors available in Adobe RGB simply cannot be reproduced in Fogra39. The same limitations apply to a lesser extent to photographic prints, including laser prints and inkjet prints. So even if you are not preparing a book, you can use directly the tips in this article when crafting a fine print. Just replace “convert to CYMK” by “convert to printing profile” in the descriptions and you are set.

Out of Gammut Color: Rododendrons and Redwoods example

Page 49 of Treasured Lands is an image from Redwood National Park in California. If you come between late May and mid-June rhododendrons are in bloom. From an esthetic point of view, although they are very small in the image, the color accent they add is important because their pink create such a contrast with the dark green woods.

By the way, one of the things that attracted me to large format photography 25 years ago is that with the high resolution of large format film, I didn’t have to frame the flowers tight for the detail to be there. The image on this blog may lack detail, but on the printed page, it is readily seen. That is because the image in this post has only 600 pixels across (a level of details equivalent to the thumbnails in the book) but the image on the printed page has the equivalent of 4287 pixels across (12.25 inch at 350dpi).

In my original transparency, as well as in the scan, the blooms are bright. However, if you look at the first edition of Treasured Lands, those blooms look a bit dark. What happened?

Because it had taken so much time to find a publisher (a story for another article), we had to rush the first edition of Treasured Lands in order to release in time for the NPS Centennial. Under this intense time pressure, when the publisher assured me that I could provide them the files in RGB and they would take care of the conversion to CYMK, I acquiesced.

For that image, it turns out that the blooms were out of gamut, meaning that the inks could not reproduce the colors of the blooms, a saturated and bright pink. In that case, to simplify things a bit, the automated RGB to CYMK conversion maps the unprintable color to the nearest printable color, which was a darker pink.

With more time and care, that outcome was entirely predictable. Having taken charge of the entire pre-press process, I fixed it in the second edition of Treasured Lands, whose reproductions are overall more accurate. How?

Setting up soft-proofing

When you work in a color-managed workflow, you use a digital file called an ICC profile to characterize each of your devices. Monitor calibration creates an ICC profile for your monitor. ICC profiles for prints depend on the printer used, and on the printing medium. Sophisticated vendors provide you with an ICC profile for the precise type of print you are making. Once you have downloaded and saved the profile in the appropriate folder on your computer, you can use Photoshop to preview your print by applying the profile, which is called “soft proofing”, as opposed to “hard proofing” with an actual print.

First, save a soft-proof setup (View > Proofup > Custom) with the relevant profile (in my case, Coated Fogra39). The “Rendering intent” specifies how out-of-gamut colors are reproduced. I recommend creating two setups, one with “Perceptual” and the other with “Relative Colorimetric”, Black Point Compensation should be enabled for the later. When you preview the image, you can visualize which one produces the best results. In general, Relative Colorimetric works best. You should use Perceptual only if an important color changes too much using Relative Colorimetric because that Perceptual akes more of the whole picture shift, whereas Relative Colorimetric will shift only a few colors.

Using soft-proofing

Once your soft-proof is set up, you activate it by selecting it (View > Proof Set up > Your_Proof_Name), and then toggling “View > Proof Colors”. As you see below, once activated (checkmark next to “Proof Colors”) the preview shows correctly that the blooms get darker compared to the original file before soft-proofing.

Sometimes, when you soft-proof, you get the impression that the image is dying in front of your eyes. It is because you have a side-by-side comparison, but eventually the relative balance within an image matters more that absolute color. Here is my recommended workflow to optimize the conversion:

• Bring image in RGB and duplicate it
• Apply CYMK soft-proof to the duplicate
• Tweak soft-proofed image (duplicate) so that it “feels” as close to the RGB (original) as possible, using adjustment layers so that the effect can be easily turned on and off for comparison
• Save the tweaked image separately
• For production, flatten layers, convert it to CYMK, apply appropriate sharpening

Note that some people convert the image to CYMK and then try to tweak the converted image to feel close to the RGB. I advise against that approach. If problems occur with gamuts, the damage is inflicted at conversion, so tweaking afterwards will not help!

Fixing the rododendrons

For our image, after playing around with hue, saturation and brightness, I determine that in CYMK, although I cannot have saturated light pinks, I can have either saturated dark pinks, or less saturated light pinks. Since color cannot, nor should not exactly be matched between different mediums, what you try to preserve is how the image feels, so that is a subjective decision. Since the feeling that I want to preserve is the brightness of the blooms in the dark forest, I opt for the later. I select the pinks in the image and then selectively desaturate them with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (see “Hue/Saturation 1, Layer Mask” on title bar). Here is the image with the tweak, and without proof.

When I apply the proof (note “CYMK Relative Colorimetric” in title bar) the blooms do not become significantly darker compared to the image without soft-proof. Although I have lost a bit of the color of the original, I have gotten around the limitations of the medium to make a print that now conveys the brightness that struck me when I was in the forest.

Two more examples

Intense greens were famously captured by Fuji Velvia, and well captured by digital cameras, but they are challenging in CMYK. In the first example (page 91 of Treasured Lands), you can see that with the default CMYK conversion, the structural texture of the corn lily leaves in Sequoia National Park is barely visible, whereas it has been restored in the custom conversion with lowered saturation. The cave image on the same spread also illustrates the exact same issue.

In the second example (page 208 of Treasured Lands), the default CMYK conversion renders the right part of the colorful cloud above El Capitan in Guadalupe Mountains National Park as a uniform blob. Reducing the saturation and shifting slightly the hue in the custom conversion for the second edition brought back the subtle detail from that superb sunset. See also the other sunset image on the same spread.

What was happening in both examples is that when several distinct out-of-gamut colors get mapped to the same in-gamut color, what in the original image exhibited gradations and texture will be reproduced in the print as a more uniform color area, losing fine differentiations. Since saturated colors are much more likely to be out of gamut than unsaturated colors, often slightly desaturating the problematic colors is enough to fix the problem. In fine printmaking, often less is more!

The second edition of Treasured Lands has just been released (order your copy here). That it was the fourth printing in three years shows that the book was successful enough to just reprint without changes. Nevertheless, with each new printing, I had been trying to improve the book. Changes in the second and third printing were small and maintained the page count. With the fourth printing, the sum of them became significant enough to warrant calling it a second edition rather than just a fourth printing, with a new ISBN number. This post summarises the differences while giving at the same time a broad overview of the production process.

Two new national parks

Treasured Lands first publication was timed for the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service in the summer of 2016. Since then, two additional parks have been designated: Gateway Arch National Park in February 2018, and Indiana Dunes National Park in February 2019.

Because they are the newest additions, even though they are among the smallest national parks, I have dedicated four spreads (8 pages) to each of them. Inserting a single page entails changing the multiple references by page numbers for each subsequent page in the book, including in the index, which alone has more than 2,000 lines. At least that wasn’t an issue when I changed the back cover to an image of our latest national park. As of this writing, Treasured Lands is the only photography book to include all 61 U.S. national parks.

Additional locations and photos

I felt that the first edition was a bit unbalanced towards the West Coast – since I live there, I know those parks better. The addition of the two new national parks helped restored the balance. In addition, I have also inserted a new two-page spread for four other midwestern and eastern national parks:

• Voyageurs National Park
• Isle Royale National Park
• Shenandoah National Park
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park

They were the result of re-visits I did after the book was first published. Some of them were intended to refresh my memory. It is easy to get all the Skyline Drive overlooks mixed up if you don’t have very precise notes! There were also new sights, such as the extraordinary synchronized fireflies. Those additions bring the total number of additional pages to 24. If you compare both editions side by side, you will notice that the new one is slightly thicker. The additional pages and higher quality materials make the book weight increase from 7.4 lbs (3360g) to 7.8 lbs (3545g).

More changes

A number of changes and additions were also made within existing pages, bringing the number of new locations described to 28. I’ll highlight a few of those changes since they would be more easily missed than page additions.

For Cuyahoga Valley National Park, I added one waterfall location, and illustrated it by swapping the top left image in the main spread. This caused the bottom left image on the same spread to feel out of place, so I swapped it as well. I gave one of the replaced images its own page on the information spread, where the larger reproduction size made it possible to appreciate its texture better – this necessitated a change in aspect ratio. The initial page had an interesting backlight theme, yet I think the new spread is more harmonious.

For Joshua Tree National Park, I described an existing location in more detail, adding a thumbnail for illustration. Several other changes were to the text only, in order to make the information more accurate and up to date. Treasured Lands at first appeals because of the photography, but the book contains more than 140,000 words, the equivalent of a 400-page paperback. In January, I conducted an online survey of readers, and was surprised that most of the respondents had read more than 50% of the book’s writing.

Conversely, there are places where I replaced images to improve the design of spreads with minimal text change, such as for the Mesa Verde National Park spread. When you just have one image per spread, like in many art books, you have to worry only about sequencing, but multiple images in a spread are more demanding, since you have to make sure they work well together.

Maps revised

One of the elements that sets Treasured Lands apart from other books is the maps. Some of the few criticisms of the first edition concerned them. An Amazon customer mentioned that they were “not graphically consistent across all Parks”, and David Leland Hyde found them “a bit hard to read due to their tiny type font”. For this edition, I revised each of the maps to address both concerns. Suffices to say for now that this was a complicated process. It is not possible to see the fonts on such small images, but you can readily see in the previous section some of the changes in color scheme.

The image above shows a set of printer “bluelines”. They are a photocopy-quality (as opposed to reproduction quality) mock-up of all of the pages that allow for checking contents in printed form, and I laid out them together visualize the consistency of the maps across the different parks.

Color revised

The previous printings were high quality, but there was still some room for improvement – heard that before? I re-processed individually each image in the book. The details about RGB to CMYK conversions are the subject of another article that you will want to read if you are making fine art prints. For now, let’s look at an overview of the process. Once the bluelines have been approved, the printer sent me a set of digital proofs, one for each page in the book. Those are inkjet prints that simulate precisely what the press output would look like. I used for reference a previous printing of the book, as well as prints made on my Epson 9800. I marked the corrections to be made on each relevant page, and sent the set back to the printer. Click on image to enlarge and see if you would have agreed with my correction.

The printer sent me a second set of proofs for the pages where I had requested corrections. Although express Trans-Pacific shipping isn’t cheap and the printer charges for proofs, it is easy to go overboard on this process and do multiple iterations. Fortunately, with the delay caused by the inclusion of Indiana Dunes National Park, there was time pressure, so I limited myself to two rounds. After the final proofs were returned, they would be used as a reference by the pressmen to match the output of the printing press. Click on image to enlarge and see if you can spot the differences.

The subtle hues of the dawn light in Glacier Bay are challenging to print. Here is a comparison between two of the previous printings of Treasured Lands, the reference inkjet print, and a proof for the second edition. Aren’t you surprised by the variations between all the printings? Click on image to enlarge and see if the corrections in the second edition go towards better color accuracy.

A new publisher

At this point, you may wonder why I had been doing all this complicated design and production work, instead of the publisher. The answer is that to release this edition, I established my own publishing company, unsurprisingly named Terra Galleria Press, accompanied by new printing and distribution agreements.

Because of my previous particular “hybrid publishing” agreement with the excellent local boutique publisher Cameron+Company, I had considerable control, at the cost of a high investment. The resulting royalty share made it possible to offer the book for a relatively low price (for what you get). However, in the past, for each change, I had to instruct an editor, sometimes wait for a designer to get involved, while they were understandably busy on other projects. Communications with the printer and distributor also had to be relayed. By taking charge of the production, I was able to act more efficiently. This enabled me to stop the printing and add a new national park chapter in less than two weeks. I also suspect the publishing team’s patience would have been taxed by my numerous incremental revisions and the resulting back-and-forth.

Since I believe that more than ever, this book should be on every table, with one middleman out, I was able to keep the retail price the same $65 despite the rise in production costs and this insistence of my publishing consultant that it was a $80 book. However, taking total charge of the publishing means that even more so, the investment and risk fall squarely on me, while I am the tiniest of publishers. As a consequence, I depend more than ever on readers to pass the word around. I would be grateful for your help.

Shanghai is China’s most populous and properous city, while Mount Huangshan is China’s most well known national park. As the country is marching towards urbanization and industrialization, traditional villages have largely disappeared or changed during the last century. Located in South Anhui province, Hongcun and Xidi are rare surviving examples of those traditional villages.

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the villages are now popular attractions, and I recommend to combine them with a visit to nearby Mount Huangshan. They have been developed quite tastefully and their character is well preserved, making them an excellent place to appreciate China’s history and traditions.

Both villages were built by successful officials or merchants returning home and were a model of conventional Chinese village construction from the 14th and to the 20th centuries. The overall layout and architecture retain the original features of traditional non-urban settlements of China created during a feudal period. They share a similar architecture and street plan, with most streets being narrow alleys which are very picturesque. The size of the villages make it possible to see everything within a few hours of walking. Within each village, you’ll also find a number of historic buildings, mostly large halls, open to visitation.

The villages are surrounded by mountains and remarkable for the utilization of water in a different way. Hongcun is famous for its two pools, the Moon Pond in the center of the village and the larger South Pond. The reflections evoke coexistence and the harmony of man and nature and are an inspiration for hundreds of art students who descend daily in the village to sketch and paint. Maybe because of this classic scene, Hongcun is very busy for most of the day. In the evening, shops remain open quite late, and lights adorn the streets.

Xidi is built along and between three streams running east-west, and those streams running within the village’s streets make them distinctive. Xidi was noticeably quieter than Hongcun, especially in the early mornings and late afternoons, which made for a nicer experience. I saw many residents engaged in traditional activities such as working in the nearby fields, which came as a surprise given that the village is a tourist attraction.

A hill south of the village, as well as a multi-storied hotel within the village, whose rooftop is accessible for a small fee, give access to interesting bird eye’s views that let you have a good look at the distinctive rooftops.

For both villages, visitors park in a large lot outside. No private vehicles are allowed into the villages, and the only motorized transportation you’ll see are service vehicles used by villagers. To navigate the narrow streets, they are the size of a golf cart. A few hotels and hostels are tucked inside the villages, some of them quite hidden away from the main streets. Staying there allows you to enjoy the relative quiet of early morning before the opening of the shops (most of them sell traditional crafts) and the arrival of tour groups. In photographing streets, while I try to avoid including tourists, I look for villagers.

Many ancient-looking areas in China have been re-built or restored for tourism. The ancient villages of Anhui are the real thing, and despite the development, you can still catch glimpses of traditional village life there.

More images of Hongcun
More images of Xidi

The scenery of steep peaks and ancient pine trees emerging out of mist and floating above a sea of clouds is an iconic subject in Chinese representations of the landscape. Since the Tang Dynasty around the 8th century, the inspiration for these paintings is the most famous of the Chinese mountains, Mount Huangshan, or Yellow Mountains, which has been called ‘the loveliest mountain of China’. Does the reality live up to those images?

Mount Huangshan is a granite massif consisting of 36 separate peaks, culminating above 1,800 meters. It is located about 450 km east of Shanghai and 250 km east of Hangzhou. In the past, long-distance bus travel was necessary, but a few years ago, high-speed train service and flights to the gateway town of Huangshan City have become available. No private vehicle is allowed into Mount Huangshan scenic area, instead, you board a bus that takes you to a trailhead or cable-car station.

Even though the cable cars save you about 2-3 hours of steep walking, once you get to the top, you’ll have to do a fair amount of walking to explore the complex of peaks, and most of the trails are up and down with steep stairs. From the cable-car station, it took an hour to walk to our hotel, so I was glad that I packed light. Most visitors stay at the base of the mountain, where hotels are affordable, and visit the mountain as a day trip. However, there are a few hotels located on the top of the mountain. Staying there let you to easily catch sunrise and sunset and enjoy some relatively quieter hours, but this comes at a cost. For a party of three, the least expensive room we were able to find at the Beihai Hotel cost over $400 (for comparison, a nicer double room within walking of the Bund in Shanghai cost $75) and meals were quite pricy.

From a photographic point of view, the key to great photographs on Mount Huangshan is the right amount of legendary low clouds. This is one place where weather is the subject. Inside and near the hotels, I saw many photographs displayed. Hardly any of them did not feature low clouds or mist. Without them, the mountain just doesn’t have the same allure and mystery, however, when the cloud cover is too dense, you don’t see anything at all. It usually takes more than a day to observe the right conditions. Low clouds form during or after rainy days. The area is very moist, and I saw a sign indicating that they were present on average 3 out of 4 days. The most favorable period is September to May, as summer tends to be drier. I visited at the beginning of May.

As the first day was mostly overcast and without low clouds, I focused mostly on the flora, especially the shurbs in bloom. We hiked in the late afternoon to Purple Cloud Peak. The scenery from there wasn’t great, but the location would have offered a view of the sun setting, and as such was quite popular despite the steep climb, even though the conditions were not promising at all. As expected, no color occurred at sunset. The second day was more clear, but it was still lacking low clouds. With no precipitation in the forecast for the next few days, and given the high cost of the hotel, we decided to spend only one night at the top.

For sunrise, we went to the viewpoint named “A Monkey Gazing at the sea” after a characteristic rock, planning to arrive there half an hour prior to sunrise. This was a big miscalculation! A photographer in our party had already been to Yellow Mountain four times, and I assume that in his previous visits, such timing had proved adequate, but not this time, probably due to increasing popularity. As the viewpoint is less than fifteen minutes from the Beihai Hotel, the limited number of spots with a view of the eastern sky were already all staked. I had to content myself with a photograph in a different direction, isolating a few pinnacles with a telephoto lens. It looks like the other visitors were there to watch the sunrise. Merely a few minutes after the event, they began to leave, after which I was able to squeeze in and make a few photographs with some color in the eastern sky, although my compositions were limited by the available positions.

Half an hour after sunrise, the overlooks were mostly empty. I found that on this cloudless day, photographing backlit was the best way to create a bit of atmosphere thanks to the receding ridges. Backlight also helped emphasized characteristic shapes, both of the rock pinnacles and the uniquely local Pinus Huangshanensis which clings precariously clinging to cliffs.

As the day progressed, crowds grew steadily again. Guides used amplified speakers to herd large tour groups. Cell phone service was working in most places, with a strong signal. When I made a phone call to my wife, with all the voices in the background, she thought that I was in some kind of public market rather than on the top of a mountain! Yosemite’s Mist Trail sounded quaint in comparison. It is ironic that all the misty images from Mount Huanghuan evoke the peace and solitude of nature, whereas the place, as the most famous mountain in China, is a prime example of a location overran by Chinese mass tourism. And this was a weekday in May. I can only imagine what a weekend of summer would have been.

Besides the multiple cable cars and several large hotels at the top of the mountain complex, porters are available to carry luggage and even visitors on sedan chairs. They also shoulder all the food sold on the mountain, which may explain its high cost. Some tourists, instead of the hiking gear expected in such a place, wear chic clothing so they look good in photos. The trails are all paved with excellent craftmanship that includes guardrails, drainage system, and traction-maximizing texture. Compared to U.S. national parks, that level of development was striking and certainly contributes to the high visitation. On the other hand, erosion and litter were well-controlled, and it looks like the authorities have managed to achieve some level of protection for the place in spite of its popularity. The natural beauty remains extraordinary, even on a cloudless day.

It could have been difficult to know where to start in largest city in the world, with a population of 24 million. However, Shanghai has a clear focal point, called the Bund, full of iconic photographic possibilities. The Bund refers to a roughly mile-long promenade along the west side of the Huangpu River, where you can glance China’s past on one side and China’s future on the other with plenty of life on the promenade itself.

From the mid 19th century to the second World War, the Bund was the site of a foreign concession to the British and American governments. Western interests built a row of magnificent European-style buildings that housed foreign banks and hotels. The Beaux-Arts style architecture is an incongruity in China, and the stately buildings are particularly striking at night when illuminated.

Across the Huangpu River lies the modern skyscrapers of the Pudong district, which form the particularly futuristic skyline, made iconic by the Oriental Pearl Tower. From approximately half an hour after sunset to 11PM (which gives you half an hour before the sky is dark), the Pudong district skyscrappers are illuminated, with the Oriental Pearl Tower and other skyscrapers enlivened by lights of changing light show – compare the colors in the two skyline photos of this post. The Huangpu River makes a sharp bend at that spot, which gives the impression that the skyline lies on a Manhattan-like island. At dawn, the buildings have only few lights, but their silhouette against the dawn sky is striking.

The skyline views from water level are excellent, but higher viewpoints are also available from rooftop bars. One of the best is the Vue Bar on the 32nd floor of the Hyatt hotel. It has an outdoor terrace with excellent views, accessible for a cover charge of 110 yuan, which includes a drink. The catch here is that tripods are strictly prohibited. I had to check mine at the entrance. With modern cameras, even night hand-held pictures are possible, but for better image quality, I used my camera bag as an improvised bean bag on the ledge. A clamp or table-top tripod would have been preferable.

Situated at the north end of the Bund, there are also two other structures of interest. The People’s Memorial is a communist-style structure symbolizing three riffles leaning against each other. The concrete structure is a bit bland by daytime, but is illuminated a striking red at night. The Garden Bridge, built with steel imported from England at the begining of the 20th century, was the first metal bridge in China.

The Bund is not just a great place to photograph buildings of various types, it is also a great location for people watching and street photography. Although at dawn the place is strangely quiet, shortly after sunrise older men show up with elaborately decorated kites. One of them flew three Chinese flags along the kite’s line, prompting salutes to the flag from passerbys. Individual and groups exercised via Tai-Chi, jogging, or gymnastics. In the evening, the place becomes an even more popular evening stroll for many, and you should make sure to join the crowd!

The Havasupai Indian Reservation, home to the “people of the blue-green water”, is located in a side canyon of the Grand Canyon out of the way from the South Rim. The oasis with waterfalls dropping over red rock into turquoise pools is a uniquely enchanting location in North America with a Shangri-La quality reinforced by the significant effort necessary to get to, as the main waterfall and campground is 10 miles from the trailhead. In this article, I provide current 2019 logistics updates and contrast them with my experience of 20 years ago.

What?

The highlight of the canyon is 100-feet Havasu Falls, located 2 miles downstream of the village. The classic elevated side view cannot be missed as it is found along the trail, and from the base, you can photograph the falls with beautiful travertine terraces in the foreground. From time to time, flash floods rearrange the configuration of the falls. A particularly big one occurred in 2008, after which Havasu falls lost its distinctive two separated parts, as well as many travertine terraces.

Mooney Falls, 0.5 miles farther down, is twice as high (200 feet) and a starker simple ribbon enclosed in a steep bowl. After the two tunnels, there is a high view from the trail with travertine stalactites as foreground. To photograph the fall from the bottom, you’d need to go down a nearly vertical section using ladders and chains, so good footwear and free hands are necessary. Keep in mind that Mooney Falls is named after a prospector who died while trying to find a way down to the bottom of that waterfall.

The waterfalls are in the shade in the early morning and in the late afternoon. As often with waterfalls, shade provides the most foolproof conditions for photography. They are sunlit from late morning to mid-afternoon, with the most even light at midday. During the warm months, you are likely to see many people in the water at the base of Havasu Falls except early and late in the day.

There are a total of 5 waterfalls. Less than a mile downstream from Supai village, Upper and Lower Navajo falls are on your way to the two main waterfalls. 2.5 miles downstream from Mooney Falls, Beaver Falls is wide and drops in several tiers. With the 2019 mandated 4 days/3 nights campground stay, a good plan would be to hike in the first day and out the last day, and devote each of the full days to Havasu/Navajo Falls and Mooney/Beaver Falls.

When?

The creek’s flow doesn’t vary much during the year, but the deciduous vegetation of the canyon does. Trees turn green in April and May. Spring and summer have verdant vegetation, and the greens add to the visual appeal of the canyon. However, they are also the most popular times. In warm weather, people are likely to be found hanging out in the pools at the base of Havasu Falls for most of the day. Summer (June, July, August) temperatures can reach 100F-115F and there are risks of flash floods during the monsoon season, which extends to September.

Autumn is quieter and brings moderate temperatures and fall colors in October and November. Winter is the quietest season, during which overnight freezing temperatures are possible, which is not an impediment for photography. Although many trees are bare, I still found some remnants of autumn colors in the canyon.

How?

Getting a permit

As detailed in the final section, back twenty years ago, I just showed up at the campground. Since then, regulations and fees have steadily increased. At one point, you were allowed to come to the campground without a reservation, but you’d pay a double fee. Since 2016, you must come with a reservation either at the lodge or the campground, and it doubles as a permit. You need to present a photo ID and reservation at the tourist check-in office to obtain a wristband, and nobody is permitted to proceed past the village without a wristband. Reservations are highly competitive and fill up quickly after the opening time, so be sure to keep current with the latest registration process and mark the relevant date in your calendar.

Sleeping

The lodge is located in Supai village, requiring a 4-mile roundtrip hike to the falls, but in addition to not having to carry camping gear, you can find food and restaurants in the village. In 2019, reservations opened on June 1, 2019 for the year 2020 with a price of $440 per room per night (for up to 4 people), plus a permit fee of $110/person. All reservations were processed by phone only. See the official site for details.

The campground is located 2 miles downstream from Supai village and is very conveniently situated between Havasu Falls and Mooney Falls. Campsites are not designated, but one should minimize the impact by using existing sites. The cost has increased dramatically over the last few years. Back in 2017, there was a permit fee of $60 and a camping fee of $25 per night for each person. In 2018, the permit fee rose to $110. In 2019, this changed to $100 per night (+$25 for weekends) inclusive of the permit fee, but with a new minimum stay of 3 nights. The price hike hasn’t lessened the demand. Reservations opened on February 1, 2019 at 8am for the entire calendar year, and I read that they sold out in just a couple of hours. All reservations are now processed online only at havasupaireservations.com. Creating an account is necessary to access the detailed and useful information available on the site and to make a reservation.

Getting there

Havasu Canyon is situated outside the limits of Grand Canyon National Park and far west out of the way from the South Rim. The trailhead, called Hualapai Hilltop is a 3.5 hours drive from Las Vegas or Flagstaff. Hualapai Hilltop is located at the end of Indian Road 18, 60 miles from the turnoff from Route 66, 7 miles east of Peach Springs, Arizona, which is the nearest town. Even lodging there fills up fast.

From Hualapai Hilltop, the trail descends about 1,000 feet in the first 1.5 miles, and then the other 1,400 feet in the remaining 8.5 miles to the campground and main falls. There is no water and little shade along the way. The well-used trail is easy to follow and as scenic as classic Grand Canyon National Park trails. Hiking early in the morning is a must in warmer months, but note that per current regulations, night hiking is prohibited.

Unlike for most locations 10 miles from the trailhead, there are options to make the journey easier. Helicopters are used as a means of transportation for tribe members, and after they are done giving rides to them, they offer rides to visitors ($85 one-way) on a first-come, first-serve basis. Signing up early in the morning is enough to guarantee a ride later in the day.

The pack animals issue

Pack animals are also available, either in the form of horse rides or mule trains which can carry bags. Given the general poverty of the area, it is not entirely surprising that compared to the strict NPS standards under which the national park concessionaires must operate, the animals work in conditions that have been described as abusive by some witnesses. This appears to have been going on for a long time, but it is only recently that a group has documented and publicized the abuse, presenting a compelling case for not using pack animal services in Havasu Canyon. Hopefully, they may have effected some change, judging from the site havasupaireservations.com that now handles pack mule reservations. They mention “New in 2019: […] significantly higher standards for Pack Mule care and welfare”, as well as limitations on sizes, weight, and prohibitions of hard-sided items (such as coolers) that could help.

Although not exactly welcome, an attentive look at the village’s dwellings reveals third-world living conditions, unfortunately all too frequent on Indian reservations. Those seem to get less attention on social media than the animals. As the pack animal services provide much-needed revenue to the tribe, the site linked above recommends hiring pack animals as a way to enhance one’s experience. There is a delicate balance to be struck between economic development and conservation there. Having seen at other places the degradation caused by over-visitation, I would have to disagree with the approach of trying to make the place accessible to many, especially given the social media fueled explosion in popularity of Havasu Canyon. People who have acquired the ability to visit a location 10 miles from the trailhead unassisted are more likely to have also learned to be more respectful of the environment and to be more aware of “leave no trace” principles.

My Experience then

Twenty years ago, packing camping gear and my large-format photography equipment, I was planning to buy food at the village, but by the time I got there at dusk in the short days of winter, I was disappointed to see all stores and restaurants closed. At the campground, I didn’t see anybody else, and as a result, became the prime target for one of the many stray dogs that wander around. It was so aggressive that to keep it quiet, I had to give it one of my few energy bars, the only food that I had left.

I spent the next day photographing the falls on an empty stomach. After the morning session, I waited until the afternoon for soft reflected light. By the time I got back to the village, stores were closed again. Out of food, I decided to hike out at night, but a few miles from the village, I encountered a man and an elderly woman who were having trouble on the trail because their flashlight had died. Since I had only one light, I couldn’t give it to them. I retraced my steps with the villagers to Supai before hiking out, arriving back at Hualapai Hilltop well after midnight. Although shorter than I wished, it was quite a memorable experience!

The Basin geographically defines the state of Nevada. That word may confuse you, since it is included in Great Basin, Great Basin Desert, Great Basin National Park, Basin and Range Province, Basin and Range National Monument. What are they, and how do they relate to each other?

The Great Basin is like a huge bowl. No water falling into this area reaches the oceans, which is remarkable considering its size, one-twentieth of the United States. The Great Basin Desert, the northernmost, highest, and coldest of the four North American deserts (the others are the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan) occupies most, but not all of it – to the south the Mojave desert overlaps the Great Basin. Basin and Range refers to another geographic phenomenon. The stretching of the earth’s crust and block faulting has created hundreds of sharp and narrow mountain ranges generally running in a parallel way north to south, alternating with wide and flat desert basins, forming the Basin and Range Province. It just happens by coincidence that the Great Basin is part of the Basin and Range Province. Great Basin National Park protects one of the tallest of those ranges, the Snake Range, where thanks to the high elevation, one finds alpine lakes, forests, and bristlecone pines. However, those attractive scenery elements make up only a tiny portion of the Great Basin so that the terrain of Great Basin National Park is not typical of the Great Basin. Other conservation areas in the Great Basin encompass more mountain ranges. However, rather than the ranges, most of the region consists of the basins, their endless sage flats rimmed by pinon-juniper woodlands. Because of the ease of access, the basins are more developed than the mountain ranges, with extensive mining and secretive military activities taking place. Basin and Range National Monument is representative of the Great Basin, as it protects the two last undisturbed of those basins, Garden Valley and Coal Valley, as well as the connecting mountain ranges.

Located about a hundred miles north of Las Vegas, Basin and Range National Monument was designated in 2015, on the same day as Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, and is one of the most remote, least known, and empty areas of a state famous for its emptiness. It makes Great Basin National Park, the 10 least visited national park (the 4th least visited in the continental U.S.) sound outright popular and famous by comparison. During my entire visit, I saw only a few other cars, and nobody that I know had heard of it.

The monument protects a large array of resources, as expected from its sizable area of 704,000 acres (1,100 square miles), stretching 50 miles from north to south and 40 miles from east to west. It is almost ten times larger than Great Basin National Park (77,180 acres). The two basins in the monument connect eight mountain ranges, three of which are entirely contained within the national monument. The vast area is home to a diverse geology that includes remarkable rock formations. It would seem that many parts of Nevada look similar. However, besides being almost undisturbed, what makes Basin and Range National Monument remarkable is a number of remarkable cultural resources spanning the range of North American human history, all in harmony with the huge landscape. Three major archeological areas (White River Narrows, Mount Irish, Shooting Gallery) feature countless ancient petroglyphs as old as 4,000 years. There are also remains of 19th-century settlements and abandoned mines. Traditional ranching practices continue. Starting in 1972, the land artist Michael Heizer has been working on “City”, one of the largest sculptures ever created, more than a mile long, which, when completed next year (2020), will open to the public as part of the national monument – visitors are unwelcome while it is still a work in progress.

Currently, the national monument is entirely undeveloped. You will find no facilities like visitor centers, restrooms, campgrounds, and no paved roads. However, this does not mean that it is difficult to access. Surprisingly, unlike the locations described in the five other posts of this series, the unpaved roads are generally wide, well graded and easily passable by any vehicle. There are only a few road signs, so following the map requires some attention since all the roads look somewhat similar, but my navigation apps were able to identify them. In a few places information panels with a map of the monument offer precious information not found on the BLM website. Like in most monuments managed by the BLM, there are no entrance fees nor restrictions on dispersed camping. The opportunities for solitude are tremendous.

I initially had planned to spend the better part of a week there, but the call of the super-bloom further south was irresistible, and instead I went only on a quick exploratory trip. I started at the White River Narrows Archeological District, which is the most easily accessed part of the monument, with petroglyphs in the setting of a narrow gorge. I drove Seaman Wash Road to a natural arch highlighted on the national monument’s onsite map. There is no established trail, 38.1944757°, -115.2592076° is the closest point accessible by car via Coal Valley North Road and then a one-lane access road marked by a single wooden fence post on the left shortly before the turn NW. It was then back via Mail Summit Road before visiting the Mt Irish Archeological District, where the road climbed higher and was significantly more rough than the others. Petroglyphs there are carved on boulders rather than on cliffs. I hope that the following photos inspire you to explore for yourself this vast and ancient wilderness where there is much to discover. I am already planning a return trip after the opening of “City”. Take your time, as with most other Great Basin locations, this is not often love at first sight!

Part 6 of 6: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6