Motorcycle Travel and Motorsports Photographer and Adventure Writer
Sometimes Mother Nature just blesses you with incredibly beautiful scenes, and those times seem much sweeter when experienced on a motorcycle road trip. Mother Nature can be the source of a motorcyclist’s greatest pleasure. When she is at her finest she can overwhelm you with sensations one never encounters in any other form of travel. Every input is a total sensory experience. A change of one or two degrees in temperature is felt on the surface of your skin. The fragrance of fresh grass clippings or blooming lilac can bring you to rapture. Motorcycling might be the ultimate collaboration between man and machine. It is the most intimate mode of travel in which to take in both the enormous beauty and the most subtle nuances of nature. One should savor it. And savor it I did on this crisp early spring April morning on The Foothills Parkway in Eastern Tennessee. I had ridden some 30 miles in the darkness to arrive at this scenic overlook for the first light of day just before dawn. Storms had been rolling across the region for a few days and on this morning the clouds were finally breaking up and pushing off to the east. The emerging sunlight below the horizon was reflected in the clouds above and the temperatures were perfect for the formation of the banks of fog that give The Great Smoky Mountains their name. Truth be told I had visited this exact spot, under nearly identical environmental circumstances, just two years prior. The photograph I captured on that visit featured the same BMW F800GT motorcycle that you see here. That earlier image (captured simply with an iPhone camera, and seen here on this web site) was featured in the BMW Owners News magazine and ultimately wound up on the cover of the BMW MOA (BMW Motorcycle Owners of America) anonymous book for 2020. On this trip I captured the image more "professionally" with a Nikon Z6II mirrorless camera fitted with a Nikon 28-300MM zoom lens, mounted on a Peak Design lightweight travel tripod…a piece of equipment that is probably the best suited appliance of that nature for carrying and deployment from a motorcycle. My near four decade long career as a commercial photographer has prepared me well for the pursuit of the types of photographs I choose to create these days: travel photographs of spectacular locations visited during my many motorcycle adventures around the United States and Canada. As a writer I have been called upon to document these travels, in text and imagery, for various publications in the motorcycle travel and motorsports world. I hope you enjoy viewing my images and reading about my journeys here on my web site. If you want more of the back stories behind these travels be sure to check out my book, "Road Work: Images and Insights of a Modern Day Explorer", available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions, as well as on Apple Books.