One of the best parts of my artist-in-residency at The Bascom, in Highlands, North Carolina, was that it was only an hour from the gate of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was a place I’d never been, and that late winter and early spring, I would go many times. I’d enter from the south at Cherokee, following the Oconaluftee River upstream. One morning—in early March, I’d guess—I parked along the road and walked down to the river, looking for a picture. I saw this perfectly proportioned boulder in the river, pyramidal in shape. I lugged the 4x5 from the car and through the trees on that very cold morning—one’s hands don’t cooperate when the temperature is near or even below freezing, naturally—and set the shot up carefully for one of my favorite kinds of shots from that residency: the object of stillness within a landscape of movement. It requires only a bit of dodging in the darkroom to remove any semblance of the far shore; I used, if I recall, my long lens, the 360mm Schneider Tele-Xenar that comes in very handy now and again.