I brought several cameras with me to my two-month residency at The Bascom Center for Visual Arts, and though I focused on the Sinar F2 4x5, I also used my Pentax 6x7. For one thing, the Pentax is smaller—still heavy and cumbersome, but it allows me to get into tighter spots. One of those spots was on a boulder above the Little Pigeon River on the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains. One thing about photographing the Smokies: this is not a place for grand landscapes. Ansel Adams himself, traveling the country on a Guggenheim in 1948, said of the Smokies that they are “OK in their way, but they are going to be devilish hard to photograph.” I’ve found the same issue along the Blue Ridge Parkway; these mountains are nothing like the Sierra Nevada, or the Rockies, or the Tetons. My solution is to get close. And so this lichen, which is very figurative, called my attention, not least for the excellent contrast.