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Arkansas Stock Photography We provide the most diverse, in-depth, and stunning Arkansas photography available anywhere. Native Arkansan Terry Smith has photographed Arkansas his whole life. If you are looking to license photography, then we would love to assist you. We frequently supply art directors, editors, publishers, and image researchers with the stunning and unique pictures their projects require.
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September 24, 2009
Arkansas Post is one of the most historic places in Arkansas. From Wikipedia:
Arkansas Post National Memorial, located about 8 miles (13 km) southeast of Gillett, Arkansas, commemorates key events that occurred on site and in the vicinity: the first semi-permanent European settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley (1686); an American Revolutionary War skirmish (1783); the first territorial capital of Arkansas (1819–1821); and the American Civil War Battle of Fort Hindman (1863).
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Arkansas Post was founded in 1686 by Henri de Tonti at the site of a Quapaw Indian village named Osotouy near where the Arkansas River enters the Mississippi River. This place is where the first recorded Christian services occurred in what is now present-day Arkansas. The site became a strategic point for France, Spain, the United States, and the Confederate States at different times during its history.
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During the American Civil War, the Post became an important strategic site, as it was the confluence of two major rivers. In 1862, the Confederate Army constructed a massive earthwork known as Fort Hindman, named after Confederate General Thomas C. Hindman. On January 9–11 of 1863, Union forces conducted an amphibious assault on the fortress backed by ironclad gunboats, and destroyed both the fort and the civilian areas of Arkansas Post.
Quite honestly though, there's not much of anything left. All of the settlements are gone, and the fort is now underneath the Arkansas River. However, the area is actually one of the best places in the state for wildlife photography. There are a lot of deer, a bald eagle nest, Armadillios, and kinds of other critters. Oh, and alligators! I haven't been lucky enough to photograph a wild alligator there yet, but I plan to return soon. I saw one, or rather he saw me, very briefly on my last visit and then played hide and seek. This picture below was recently licensed:  10-pound Parrott rifle at the Civil War era rifle pits at the Arkansas Post National Memorial in the Delta region of Arkansas
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August 19, 2009
This was undoubtedly the best shot from this past weekend's shoot at Devil's Den State Park. Thanks goes to my wife for helping make this happen.
For the photographers out there, the warm window light is not actually coming from inside the cabin. An SB600 and SB600 with two shoot-through umbrellas are camera left, both gelled with 1 CTO each to give it that warm tone. A tiny bit of the warm light made it's way to the deck chair and the male model, but not much. I would liked to have lit the couple more, but we were working fast. My wife literally saw them sitting there in this beautiful scene, and they were gracious enough to let us intrude for just 5 minutes into their vacation. We moved the lights from the next door cabin we had been shooting at, setup, shot, and moved out in five minutes.
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August 19, 2009
I recently shot Bambi:
His/her mother kept showing her fluffy white tail and saying, "Danger! Danger! Strange man with camera!", but Bambi was very hungry and kept eating and eating and eating. This plant was apparently quite tasty.
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Wildlife Photography
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August 18, 2009
Jennifer took this picture of me last Saturday morning when we were at Devil's Den State Park:
After all the must have shots were in the bag, I spent some time experimenting with my camera on a painter's pole setup which allows me to raise the camera about 5' above my head. I may get a longer painter's pole eventually, but for now this will do. I purchased it at a yard sale several years back for practically nothing. In this shot below I'm configuring the camera, not taking a picture:
I plan to post a video on this soon, but the basic setup is a Bogen Super Clamp with a Manfrotto 056 junior head. B&H sells this combo as a kit for, at the time of this writing, only $66.50. You can clamp your camera into a lot of strange places for $66.50! :-) It's a great deal.
I use the Phottix Plato 2.4GHz wireless set from Hong Kong purchased off of eBay to fire the camera wirelessly while I hold the pole over my head. Just in case, I drilled a hole through the painter's pole and tied on a string with a small metal clamp on the end which I attach to the camera as a safety cable.
The assembled contraption allow me to be downhill from the CCC Scenic Overlook at the park and get a wide-angle shot that wasn't looking up, and thereby distorted. It's not as could as it could be because the brilliantly warm sunrise light had already gone, but I was mainly just testing the setup:
A few minutes can make a big difference in light. This was shot just a few minutes earlier (on a tripod, not on the painters pole):
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Behind the Scenes
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August 17, 2009
Over Friday evening and Saturday morning I, together with my art director/stylist/photographer's assistant/wife, shot about a thousand frames in Fayetteville, Arkansas and at Devil's Den State Park. I've been in contact with a major national magazine that needs images of the park, and I needed the same shots for my Arkansas image archive anyway. The park was on my "to do" list since I haven't shot there in a few years. I plan to go back in October when the fal leaves are in peak color was well. It's really an awesome place then.
The overlook shown below at Devil's Den was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in the thirties and overlooks the Lee Creek Valley of Devil's Den State Park:
Here I'm going to give an example of blending exposures from multiple shots to achieve the desired final result. It would be impossible in this scenario to capture the exposure properly from the areas inside the structure to the outside landscape and rising sun within a single exposure. Cameras simply don't have that wide of a dynamic range. For the human eye though, it's a piece of cake. Your eye's iris opens and closes and you look from inside to outside and back and forth and you never even notice it.
So with my camera on my tripod I took 5 frames at f/22 with my wide-angle zoom lens set at 12mm. The exposures ranged from 1/10 of a second to 1.6 seconds. It makes you appreciate the power of the human eye doesn't it?
Starting with the image thumbnails in Adobe Lightroom, I selected all five images and launched the LR/Enfuse plugin to blend the exposure together. This is not normally the technique called "HDR", or high dynamic range, but it is a version of HDR and method of achieving a higher dynamic range. Enfuse is just blending the exposures, something I could do manually myself in Photoshop with layers. I still do blend exposures manually on occasion, but generally though, Enfuse saves time.
After Enfuse outputs a TIFF with the blended file, it looks kind of bland. I opened the over-exposed frame as a layer within the image and used it to paint in areas that needed more light and brighter highlights. While Enfuse will lighten the dark areas, the light areas will get darker. In some places you don't want that.
The resulting image is below:
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Tutorials
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May 05, 2009
This Arkansas snow photograph is from this past February in Northeast Arkansas during a brief "blizzard", at least by Arkansas standards, which... mostly melted away the next day. The snow was blowing hard for awhile though. Look how it's sticking to the sides of the trees. The moment I saw the scene it looked so much like a great calendar shot that my heart and brain both were racing as I was composing the scene, checking all corners of the frame, and trying not to screw it up!
 Arkansas winter snow scene with an antique rusty pickup truck and a snow-covered barn in the distance.
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September 08, 2008
The first shot below is an example of a simple architectural shot that was licensed in the past week. The second shot is a wider-angle view of the same building.
The Pulaski County Courthouse in Little Rock, Arkansas is on the National Register of Historic Places. I made this picture on an early Saturday morning so that downtown traffic and parking would not be of any concern. I actually arrived so early I had to wait in my vehicle for the sun to rise high enough over the gigantic skyscrapers we have here in Little Rock in order for the building to be lit. With the exception of a single liquor-smelling street beggar who apparently didn't get drunk enough the prior night to sleep late, I was left undisturbed to wander the streets, setup my tripod wherever I wanted, and frame some pictures. Here, the crisp blue sky made things easy as pie. In fact, I drove on to Memphis after this shoot and shot several other photos on the same day which have also been licensed. When the light is great, take advantage of it!
 
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Architectural Photography
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September 04, 2008
Last year a female fox raised her two pups in the band of woods between my parent's house and Greers Ferry Lake. I spent a lot of time photographing the fox family from behind a self-made photo blind, an old bed sheet with a hole cut in it for my lens! Over the winter they left for denser and warmer, I presume, forests. I believe my mom has seen one of the foxes only once this year. This past spring all the rain that we received caused the lake level to rise higher than it ever has before, and their old territory was completely under water for many weeks.
I'm glad to have had the chance to photograph them though, especially from the comfortable setting of home. The picture below is one of the pups after it was approximately three months old (personal guess). This image was licensed today for a children's book.
 Wild red fox in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.
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Wildlife Photography
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August 21, 2008
I'm getting excited about the fall foliage outlook for Arkansas. We've had a lot of rain this year, and if we keep falling into fall with as much rain as we've had this week then the landscape photography prospects will be GREAT!
In the past few years most of the leaves have been dead and falling off before fall even arrives. In places where there was good color, it would only last at most 2 to 3 days. More rain this year, and hopefully more to come, will keep the leaves on the trees longer and in good shape for a slow transition into peak color. The fall color in the Ozark Mountains and Ouachita Mountains could be really spectacular this year!
October is certainly one of the best months in Arkansas. If you're planning to get out with a camera in Arkansas this fall, keep in mind that the trees in the Ozark Mountains in the northern third of the state peak first. The leaves in the central part the state peak 1-2 weeks after that, and then the foliage further South, especially in Ouachita Mountains around Hot Springs, peaks after that.
All really great fall landscape photography is all about catching the PEAK. At the right time anyone can take a great picture!
 Blazing orange maple tree on the campus of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
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August 17, 2008
I took some test shots this past weekend with the Canon PowerShot G9. I'll be using it a lot on an upcoming trip and have yet to really test it out after owning it for several weeks now. It's been a busy summer! 
I lot of professionals are using the G9 as their point-in-shoot "fun" camera to just keep on them all the time. This is my second digital compact, and at 12.1MP plus RAW files it packs quite a punch. In the pictures I've taken so far the noise is very noticeable, even at 80 ISO. The shutter delay is very annoying too, but both of these problems are to be expected in small compacts. Still, I find it very frustrating to use digital compacts after being used to Digital SLRs that do exactly what you want precisely when you want them to.
This photo of a Railroad Crossing in Northeast Arkansas was shot hand-held at at f/4.0, 1/1250 sec., at ISO 80. I cleaned up the noise slightly in Lightroom 2.0:
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Trains
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August 02, 2008
My family is from the North East corner of Arkansas which is part of the agricultural Mississippi Delta, and several times during the summer I photograph crops while visiting them. Textbooks and editorial magazines often need good agriculture shots. I took this photo below at the end of August one year ago. This past week it was licensed worldwide for a textbook.
 Agricultural rice crop on farmland in Walnut Ridge on the Mississippi Alluvial Plain region of Arkansas.
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Agricultural Photography
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August 02, 2008
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June 16, 2008
A few weeks ago I was driving back into Little Rock on a late Sunday afternoon after having been gone over the weekend, and I decided to drop by the Arkansas State Capitol since I was so close. The light looked decent but turned out to be even better than I thought. The pictures below only are a few of the many selects from the shoot, all with good potential to be used for textbooks as well as regional advertisements for the state and local businesses. It was well worth the time!
Shooting a state capitol like this is not the most adventurous form of photography, but it's fundamental to developing a deep stock photography archive. These images will become apart of my Arkansas Picture Library.
It's also great practice in shooting LARGE SCALE architecture! Plus, I don't have to beg for a property release.
     
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May 15, 2008
No, I'm not using the Lord's name in vane. Literally, it's Jesus Christ:
More specifically, it's a picture montage of the Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. (Yes, I know the montage is a bit cheesy, but I needed to practice my outdoor portraiture and he stood really still.)
Annie Leibovitz may get to photograph Queen Elizabeth II, but has she photographed Jesus lately? I don't think so. At least I didn't ask Jesus to take his crown off like Annie asked the Queen.
What is this? Is it the Tree of Life in the same blog post? (Minus the apples and snakes and stuff?) Or maybe it's just a Oak tree with Spring foliage shot from above?
How did I get this shot? It helps to have a Friend in Jesus.
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May 11, 2008
Back in January a photo editor from National Geographic Adventure contacted me and inquired about some mountain biking and rafting pictures of the Ouachita Mountains in my backyard here in Arkansas, so I pointed him to what I had available. I never heard back from him, but a month later the top image that I had directed him to was licensed through one of the agencies that I am with.
The coincidence peaked my interest, however, when a photographer makes a sale through an agency you don't know who the client is because the agencies don't want photographers to bypass them and market directly to their clients. At best, you only know generic information about the usage. In this case, I knew it was for either a retail book, magazine, or newspaper; one within the travel sub-industry; licensed to all English-speaking territories; and with a print run up to 750,000 (pretty large). It sounded very coincidental.
I am very blessed that my images are licensed quite often, but it is still rare that I ever know the specific publications or advertisements unless the sale is handled directly from my office and not through an agency. So I began checking the magazine rack nearly every time I went to the grocery store! And I made a special trip or two to Barnes & Noble as well. The photo editor had listed NG Adventure in his email, but I suspected that stories frequently got moved between NG Adventure and NG Traveler. Each month I attempted to find and check both, and even some of the other national outdoor adventure magazines. In retrospect, I remember I had trouble finding NG Traveler though. However, I knew that if it appeared in a magazine it would be a few of months from the date of sale before that issue was printed. I kept my eyes open for it, but eventually I had given up hope of ever finding it in print.
Which brings us to this past weekend. I was visiting my family in Northeast Arkansas, and Saturday afternoon we went to a couple of nearby flea markets. Photographers love flea markets! I won't go into details, but I have purchased something at one of these flea markets before which has netted me several images and image sales. But that's a story for another time. I had also purchased a Jay Maisel photo book in great condition at one of them before. At one of the tables I ran across a stack of magazines. Two of them were issues of National Geographic Traveler, the April 2008 and June/July 2008 issues. Both were in great shape, in-date no less, and a steal for only 25 cents each.
Did I think about my image being in one of them? Absolutely, but after thumbing through them quickly in the store I didn't see it. It was only when we got back home that I noticed the April issue had "Hot Springs Nat'l Park" on top of the magazine. Sure enough! There it was! On page 50 with an image credit in minuscule type in the margin. Needly to say, I was quite excited!
Below is the image that ran in the magazine. This particular photo trip has proved quite productive. Another image of a vista of the Ouachita Mountains, taken only a few minutes earlier and a few meters away, was also licensed recently for a different publication.
I think the magazine was well-worth 25 cents!
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May 07, 2008
Here are some waterfalls I photographed a few weeks ago. The light wasn't best for waterfall photography. Overcast days are ideal because they minimize the contrast of light shining through the trees. But... after you've driven a couple of hours to reach your destination and hiked down a very muddy trail for 20 minutes, you take what you can get.
When I arrived the trees had not budded out as much as I expected. Actually, not at all in most places, like in the shot below. This shot is actually quite horrible in color, but in black and white it works fairly well. I wouldn't call it spectacular, but it's decent.
 Whenever you are doing waterfall photography it's essential to use a tripod in order to get a nice blur to the water and create that smooth, flowing effect. The shot below was a half-second exposure but the wind joined the party and created a nice abstract effect to the leaves. I doubt this image will ever be published anywhere but here (it's too wild and crazy for most publications), but I've learned over the years that you can never tell which pictures editors will pick. I think it's neat though.
 This is a more traditional waterfall shot. All of these falls are unnamed as far as I know. I also took a shot like the one below where I put myself in the picture wearing a bright shirt. This makes the work I put into framing the shot (and hiking down and back up a very STEEP hill) pay off twice. Some publishers will want a person in the shot as a "get out and have an adventure pic" and some will need a straight nature/wilderness shot.
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May 06, 2008
Spring has sprung in the Ozarks Mountains of Arkansas.
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