A Journal of a Western Carolina Photo Odyssey:  Photoshop Beta, and Real Fake Pictures

By: Jon Swindall, Travel Musings and Photography Notes

I got out the door at 6:15, just like I had planned. Three minutes later, the tire pressure light flicked on.

Yellow warning glowing on the dash, that immediate gut drop of “what now?” Is this a good omen? A bad omen? 

I filled the tires, checked the pressure and once again on the road – the light disappeared. 

That kind of thing stays in the back of your mind, though. Especially when you’re setting off solo with a van full of camera gear, with a plan that’s more wander than filled with details, and a son who advised me before I left: “Put the camera down.”

He’s eight.  “I’m going on a photo trip,” I tried to explain. “I need the camera.” 

He repeated: “Put the camera down.” 

I thought about this more than I expected. Kids pick up messages from the world about dangers, screens, devices. It made me wonder… do we see more or less when we’re holding a camera?

The Pre-Trip Dilemma

Before I left, I was wrestling with questions photographers and creators often ask: What am I really going after here? What am I trying to experience? What should be remembered?

Should I restrict myself to black and white for coherence? How can I tell a story and will there be a vision that emerges, or just a scattered collection of moments?

I had packed with a vision that was to travel the backroads as much as possible and knowing I’d encounter lush, dense forests and streams, and interesting local treasures. 

I figured the Mitakon 65mm would be my go-to lens to capture us some Appalachia. That creamy subject separation on the medium format Fuji GFX 100S would give it a nostalgic feel, perfect for isolating subjects from the woodland backgrounds. And – it’s a pain to use as it’s all manual and still I masochistically enjoyed the idea.  

I had my 45-100mm for wider landscapes and longer reach when I needed that sharper, more clinical look. And my 80mm, which I’d pretty much decided I wasn’t going to use at all (reserved as “a just in case lens”), and the TTArtisan 100mm Macro.

The plan was stitched panoramas for wide shots, black and white forest studies, maybe some streams/waterfalls, maybe something cohesive enough to call a series. 

What actually came out was something completely different – an eclectic expression of beauty, creation, missed opportunities, happy accidents…and ultimately what I chose to see and not see.

The Guiding Thoughts and Road Wisdom

In film school, I read Every Frame a Rembrandt by Andrew Lazlo. This idea stuck out for this trip: every picture could – and should be taken with care and thoughtfulness. Every shot matters – so take care in the creation. 

At one point the road offered its own wisdom on a flashing road sign: Drive alert, arrive late.  

A reminder to stay alert to life as it’s happening, not just rush through it. (Flashing sign not pictured)

Warmth, Coral, and Elvis

I’ve always been drawn toward warmer images, maybe because I grew up in Florida. Back in the film days, I carried a coral filter just to give everything a touch of warmth.

Around 8 a.m., I pulled into a roadside spot filled with stone art, complete with a carved bust of Elvis and  geese with toupees.  

Elvis and the Goose needed to be in color and that’s all there is to it. So much for my black and white series.

Document or Refuse?

Later I passed a rickety old shop on the old highway full of flags and Confederate memorabilia. The camera stayed down. My gut said: don’t dignify it, don’t advertise it. 

But the moment raised a harder question – when does NOT documenting something help normalize it? Sometimes pointing the camera isn’t about glorifying, it’s about bearing witness. When is silence the stronger choice? 

The tension between documentation and creation – it’s about what we choose to see and what we want to show.

Technical Breakout: The Lens That Became My Eye

The Mitakon 65mm became my main companion on this trip. Here’s why that mattered: on a medium format chip, this lens wide open gives you that dreamy separation you can’t really fake in post. Subjects float against backgrounds and melt into beautiful bokeh. (And the lens is relatively cheap.)

I wanted that texture, that soft-yet-sharp vibe for almost everything – portraits of weathered signs, close-ups of stone carvings, even landscapes where I wanted a single tree to pop from the ridge behind it.

The manual focus slows you down in the best way. The top picture above is nice but I can tell the sign is could be sharper because the grass just behind is sharp. 

You have to think about what deserves to be sharp and what can drift away. I used the dial on the back of my camera to magnify the focus to where I had positioned the single point focus and then take the picture. It was great for pulling single subjects out of visual chaos.

Other gear that mattered:

• TTArtisan macro: Essential for magnifying the intricate patterns I found everywhere – gemstone details, wood grain, beads 
• 100 mm TTArtisans lens cap: Good news – it’s metal, so when it drops you’ll hear the clank and find it. Bad news – it slides off way too easily.
• 45-100mm: When I needed that wider perspective or sharper, more clinical look 
• 80mm: Stayed in the bag pretty much as planned 
• Variable ND filter: A lifesaver at the rivers for when I needed long shutter time in bright conditions

Foxfire and Friends

A sign pulled me into the Foxfire Museum – a place built to preserve Appalachian history. Hand-hewn cabins, stone paths, and quotes scattered around on trail markers. 

Here was a perfect place for the Mitakon 65mm – wide open, using its shallow depth of field to carve subjects from their surroundings. Weathered wood, farming tools, fading signs, and good old fashioned nostalgia.

Simple signs around the village carried some mountain wisdom:

“The most important thing is to be honest and truthful.” 

“To have a friend, be one.”

Those lines hung in my thoughts as I wandered around. Honesty in photography, perhaps, is this: showing what’s there, but with OUR additional choices that also reveal the moment about yourself. Saying that, the black and white vision I’d started with was already fracturing. Some of these moments demanded color.

The Flea Market Heat

Along the road, I came across huge tents outside – a flea market!  I did a quick “U-eee” and turned into the parking lot.

Not pictured: Out in that flea market parking lot sat a Jeep with bumper stickers on it that declared they were “Jeeping for Jesus” and that today was “Go Topless Day”. 

I hesitated but I thought my portraits would be better if I dressed like the locals, so I took off my shirt and went inside. 

Inside these huge tents were rows and rows of tables full of small trinkets, shark’s teeth, beads, stones, pottery, and more.  

I didn’t see ANYONE else topless so I put my shirt back on.

I had committed to the Mitakon 65mm and brought only that lens inside the flea market but the close focus on the Mitakon was just not going capture the experience I was seeing.  

I ran back outside and past the Jeep that was “Jeepin’ for Jesus” and back to the Odyssey Van for my TTArtisan macro lens, and I’m glad I did. 

The place was filled with patterns – gemstones, carvings, odd miniatures, the kind of intricate details that only reveal themselves when you lean in close. 

The macro opened up a hidden world – tiny carved faces in larger sculptures, the delicate engraving work on old jewelry.

I shot with around F5.6 and using a shutter of at least 1/500th of a second as I was handheld. I planned that I would work in the edit on noise reduction if there was any caused from the increased ISO.

The summer heat and humidity was brutal. It was an outdoor market and the temperature was a humid 95 degrees. The camera kept overheating – that dreaded thermometer temperature warning was on and forcing me to turn the camera off and then on for the exact moment to turn it on to take a picture.

Any thoughts of a cohesive series were completely out the window and now I was collecting ornate beads and shark’s teeth.

The Forest, the Rain, the Pop

Later I hiked up toward the falls, the rain came fast and heavy. At the falls, the most expressive things were the loads of wet tourists who came from all over the world. I decided to hike back early and make camp for the night. 

I stayed near the van. Partly for the weather, and partly because I didn’t want to leave my laptop unattended. Next time, I think I’ll leave the laptop at home so I won’t have to worry about it.

I slept in the Odyssey, or as my son likes to call it “the Vincent Van-Go.” I decided to sleep in the van as staying the night in the hammock seemed risky. A storm “was a brewing” and I thought that branches could fall. 

I HAD a new air mattress. Notice the past tense. Laying down after the long hike felt wonderful.

POP! Then the air mattress slowly deflated with what sounded like a long-winded whoopee cushion. I laughed out loud even though no one was around to share in the moment.  

The thunder rolled over the mountains and hills. And the rolling thunder came and went. The rain stopped. I finished the night out in the hammock.

Morning, Bears, and Birds

The morning was gray, cool, and beautiful. My ears were full of singing birds. 

And somewhere, maybe, there were bears. I thought about the food in the van and stayed alert. Carolina is known for bears.

The river photos I took that morning might be my favorites – long exposures smoothed by the ND filter, soft gray light that made the greens sing. Here, finally, were those forest streams I’d imagined. The 45-100mm was the champion here. These might actually work in black and white, but it was hard to ignore the green that is summer in Carolina.  I’m not thrilled with the composition and probably should’ve found my way lower. 

The Motorcyclist Who Got Away

Later that day I set up for a panorama at a roadside mountain look out – using that 45-100mm to stitch something wider together.

Heavy tripod, Fuji GFX 100S mounted, it’s the kind of setup that screams: photographer at work.

I was tickled because across the overlook, a motorcyclist stood posing with his brand new “retro” bike, taking selfies of himself. He was cool or at least trying to be.   

We kept glancing at each other, that awkward dance of two people who see each other but not saying anything.

I thought about asking for his portrait. I hurried and changed lenses, to put on the 65mm Mitakon for the look I was going for.  

BUT – I hesitated too long, I had been caught between respecting his space and getting up the nerve to ask. Vroom – he rode down then road and the moment was gone. 

I’m adding that to the portfolio of what-ifs.

Happy Campers and the Fairy

Wandering around the campsite, I stumbled across a scene. A cute RV camper with a HUGE dog sitting proudly out front. The camper had a sign taped to it that read: Happy Camper.

I took the picture and liked it. I used the Mitakon 65mm and shot at a f2 in “Acros” Fuji film recipe mode.  It was a nice enough composition, good light, great dog. But when I looked at it later, something felt like it was missing.

That’s when I started wondering: who lives here? Who does this majestic dog belong to? 

Then I remembered that fairies lived in the woods. What if fairies were real and this was their home base in the woods? What if this dog was standing guard for them? 

So I added a fairy. 

A fairy perched at the camper like she’d just clocked out for the day after a busy day of flapping her wings. Not cut paper like the Cottingley sisters, but AI generated.

The Cottingley Fairies fooled adults, skeptics, even Arthur Conan Doyle for decades. When the deception was finally revealed, the photographs never lost their magic. 

I think the photographs have taken on a deeper meaning and gives evidence to our need to believe in magic.

For this picture, I imagined and prompted several different variants of fairies in Midjourney and Chatgpt.  I described the fairy and how she should look and should sit and be positioned. After several iterations, I then took the image into Photoshop Beta and cutout the fairy and copied her onto the camper image.  

Then – which was very intuitive – I clicked the new “harmonize” button in Photoshop Beta – selecting the fairy and my real photograph and it did a good job of creating soft shadows and helping with the quality of light.  I did some “dodging” and “burning” to finish off the image.  

The fairy is obviously fake, digitally added, completely invented. Great fun to imagine.  

For me, she transforms the image from simple documentation into a creation that asks questions: What’s real? What’s imagination? What is human about this picture – the choice? Does the “realness” or “fakeness” of it matter if the results makes you or someone else smile?

It’s showing what’s there and sometimes what could be. It’s a real fake picture.  

Technical Breakout: When Mistakes Become Style

• Long shutter with mechanical movement = blurry disaster, I didn’t shut off the mechanical shutter enough and could see later in post it wasn’t as sharp as I wanted
• Overheating camera = forced breaks but that led to better observation

What I Wished I’d Brought

• A chair (preferably a rocking one) 
• A spare mattress pad 
• Morning coffee 
• Maps downloaded before losing service

What Saved the Trip

• Rain gear (absolutely essential) 
• That lightweight tripod (even if fiddly to set up) 
• Lens cleaning supplies – important in rain and dense woods

The Real Lesson

By the end of the trip, here’s what became clear: you can plan all you want, but the road will give you what it wants to give you.  You can choose to see it or not. 

I started with dreams of a cohesive black and white series, all shot with the Mitakon through those lush forests. What I came back with was completely different – an eclectic mix of color and monochrome, moments captured and moments that got away. 

Photography for this trip was about being there, making choices of when to document and when to add magic.