Arkansas Scenics Blog

Happy 4th of July!  

On Sunday night, I drove out to Lake Leatherwood. This lake is located just outside of Eureka Springs in Northwest Arkansas. I had hiked around the over a decade ago but never seen the fireworks show there. Last week, I wanted to seek out a firework show in a natural setting with few structures, preferably with a lake where I can also capture colorful reflections in the water. Lake Leatherwood seemed like the best option to me that was within an hour of my hometown. I wanted to find a way to incorporate the landscape with the firework display, not just point a camera up to the sky. One way to do that is to back off from where the fireworks are fired and use a mid-range zoom lens instead of a wide angle lens that is more typically used in firework photography. If you are close to the show, you then a restricted to using a wide angle lens that often is pointed mostly up into the sky. The image above was at a focal length of 90mm to capture the fireworks that were about a mile and half away from where I was standing and is a composite of eight firework images stitched together into one image.

We are now wrapping up one of the coldest 2 week stretches in Arkansas history and central Arkansas is seeing one of its snowiest months ever. Many areas in central Arkansas have seen over a foot of snow this week...

Today there was a winter storm that affected the higher elevations of the Ozarks.

I have been monitoring this week about the possibility of some accumulating snow in parts of northern Arkansas...