There is a particular kind of light that only shows up in the last two weeks of August in these mountains, when summer hasn’t yet let go, but the goldenrod has already started answering the sire call for fall. That was the light I had to work with the evening I met Alyssa and her fiance, Sam, on Heintooga Ridge Road, the old spur that climbs off the Blue Ridge Parkway near Haywood County and threads its way into the Great Smoky Mountains. Nine miles of pavement, the first stretch still inside the Parkway boundary, the rest given over entirely to the park, and every mile of it worth the drive if you know where to stop.
From the trail we worked our way up toward Black Camp Gap, where a Masonic memorial holds stones gathered from states and countries around the world, set there to mark the founding of the park itself. It’s easy to miss if you don’t know to look for it, tucked into a pull-off along the ridge, but it gives the whole corridor a sense of having been chosen on purpose, long before any of us showed up with a camera.
From Black Camp Gap to Mile High Overlook
We kept climbing from there, past Balsam Mountain Campground, the highest tent camping in the Smokies, until the trees opened at Mile High Overlook. The view drops north toward Cherokee and the Qualla Boundary, layer after layer of blue ridge folding into haze, and it was there, in a meadow gone soft gold with early evening sun, that Alyssa and Sam danced by their car, held hands through tall grass, and kissed while the sun dropped behind the farthest ridgeline. I didn’t have to ask them to be tender with each other. Some couples you photograph and some couples you simply get to witness.
What Genuine Warmth Actually Means
Alyssa told me she chose me because my images carry genuine warmth, and I’ve turned that phrase over in my mind more than once since the session. It matters to me more than almost anything else I could be told about my own work.
Here’s the truth behind it: she and Sam both have red hair, and skin that carries freckles the way a creek bed carries stone, unevenly and beautifully. A decade ago, when I was retouching everything by hand the long way, I spent the better part of a year doing nothing but studying skin with the best artists in the business, Lindsey Adler and Lee Varis.
Not skin in general, but the real variation in it, because no two people carry color the same way and a photographer who doesn’t understand that will edit a redhead the same way she edits everyone else and, without meaning to, edit the person right out of the photograph. Freckles disappear. Undertones go pink or go pale. The very things that make a face someone’s own get smoothed into a kind of nobody.
I decided a long time ago that I would rather leave a little texture in than take a person’s particularity away from them, and that philosophy is exactly why Alyssa’s freckles and Sam’s coloring look, in these images, like themselves rather than like an Instagram filter’s idea of them.
A Woodland Wedding Still to Come
They don’t have a wedding date locked down yet because they are still shopping venues, but they know the shape of it. A woodland wedding, they told me, surrounded by the same kind of trees and light we found on Heintooga Ridge, which tells me everything I need to know about how well this engagement session matched who they actually are. I’m already looking forward to whatever they build next, and to the chance to be there again with a camera when they do.
Plan Your Own Engagement Season in Western North Carolina
If you’re planning a proposal or an engagement session of your own in Western North Carolina, this corridor along the Blue Ridge and into the Great Smoky Mountains is one of the richest stretches of ground I know for it. Heintooga Ridge Road is open seasonally, generally late spring through the end of October, so if a late summer or fall session is calling to you, the window is worth planning around rather than waiting on.
And for what it’s worth, since it made me smile writing it down: both Alyssa and Sam drive Subarus, and it suits their relationship perfectly.
