The Northeast Coast

  • Finding Light in Cuyahoga Valley National Park

    Bymichael

    Cuyahoga Valley is 33,000 acres of forested river valley between Cleveland and Akron — a landscape shaped by the Cuyahoga River, glacial geology, 19th-century canal history, and the kind of dense hardwood forest that the Midwest produces when it has been left largely alone for long enough. It is a park that rewards the visitor who slows down and looks carefully at a landscape that does not announce its beauty dramatically but reveals it in layers. I did not slow down. The return trip is about finding out what those layers are.

  • First Light at Acadia National Park

    Bymichael

    Acadia is the only national park in the northeastern United States, and it occupies a landscape unlike anything else in the park system — granite peaks rising directly from the Atlantic Ocean, pink granite shoreline meeting cold surf, spruce and fir forest covering the hillsides in a dense dark green that the western parks cannot match. The light here is an Atlantic light. Coastal, variable, frequently dramatic, capable of turning a gray morning into something extraordinary with almost no warning. For photographers trained on the warm reds of the desert Southwest or the granite gold of the Sierra Nevada, Acadia is a recalibration.