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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025

@parkwaysprojects.bsky.social

🦉 I'm almost ready to apply for a few things over here at #TheParkwaysProjects Thanks Y'all! 🪔

✨And still writing up a storm. Here's a WIP entry with a couple of stories embedded. A choice of Fire or Rain.

#EastCoastKin #ArtYear #BlueRidgeParkway #NationalParks
#Photography #Landscape #Mountains

Ravens Roost through Photoshop Time

Short Takes » WIP » Experimenting with emulating Mid Century Photos

theparkwaysprojects.substack.com

October 26, 2025 at 10:54 PM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 28

"Covered Footbridge," 1938. #EastCoastKin #Duotone
Photo Restoration, from NPS/OPN archives #blackandwhite
#MonochromeMonday #monochromephotography #SkyArt #photography #blackandwhitephotography #monotone
#Bridges #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway
#BlueSkyPhotography #NationalParks

Photo restoration of an old 1938 photo of a small covered foot bridge across a branch in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Sepia toned look. Hand-split shingles on the top lean-to roof. The planks below are actually split slate stone.

“The Parkways Project” began as an idea to tell a family story which was always occurred between two to three weeks per year, belonging to a family from Kershaw, a small town in South Carolina between the years of 1966 to 1972. The key years were the camping vacations, from 1968 to 1971, until a small business was opened in that same small town.

But in 2019, 50 years since 1969 (the year the hippies populated our vacations—again, inaugurating changes for one of us) I had gone into ghost picnic grounds, where spirits lived amid a new and thickly rooted understory. One by one, like dominos the size of dolmens, falling without a sound on thickly matted forest floors of fir needles, another strange but wonderful revelation emerged, for the forests themselves had altered. Eerily beautiful portions of memories had become each a wavering mirage of a bridge to Brigadoon in the mists shrouding the tree trunks and retreating grassy arenas.

"The Smokies have averaged nearly 12 million visits per year over the past decade. The highest record was set in 2021 when over 14 million visitors headed to the park in search of outdoor activities amid the COVID pandemic." ≈ Knoxville News Sentinel, Feb 27, 2024

February 17, 2025 at 5:27 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Bluesky🦋

#TheParkwaysProjects ≈Before Autumn's fall
#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn #Scape
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March 29, 2025 at 11:05 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
≈ #TheodoreRoosevelt

One of the 1st photos I posted on #Bluesky🦋 to start
#TheParkwaysProjects ≈ "In the gloaming, a trail of mists"

#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 11

"In the gloaming, a trail of Mists" a digital photo from The Parkways Projects. I've been going round & round—how to start this in here...🦋 For it's a multi-tiered sequence of art. Since it began really in 1964, as a 9 year old with a Kodak Instamatic—this shot from 2021, Mount Mitchell trailhead 🦉

A cold and thoroughly rain-soaked trailhead leading down to the Appalachian Trail from Mount Michell State Park in North Carolina. A stand of high-country alpine black spruce.

From the Parkways project, a reclamation of sorts to come. I walked down it for a ways, became very cognizant of Time winnowing away, took a number of other images, and then decided to push on up the Parkway, as it had become very real to me that the remaining 12 days were going to be very fleet.

By this time, I'd found passages which had been turned, the corners folded back so many times that the bookmarks crumbled and fell on the touch.

I was waylaid on the way back up the trail though, and burned the last remaining daylight because, in walking back one sees things that weren't there from the first perspective, or angle of view, depending on the way you see things. By the end of that relatively short and very wet hike, I offloaded over 400 images into a folder set aside for this one little episode that night, once back at my fog-enshrouded campground.

Does that make it a chapter, I wonder?

Digital photography will be the largest component of what I hope will be a photo-essay within a few years. I'll be launching a site soon which will include much older photos from 1964 through 1972. They are family shots made over five camping vacations through the headiest part of the 1960's. There's a patina of age, a soft depth to them. Then the archival National Park Service images. A sequence on the small bridges & structures now long gone. A series on the people. Two abstract sequences of works, both digital composite builds. A study on the Civilian Conservation Corps efforts to reclaim the old forests & build some of the most beautiful rustic structures in America.

March 27, 2025 at 12:15 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Bluesky🦋

#TheParkwaysProjects ≈ Atalaya Garden
#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn #FineArt

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 12

"Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away..."

1965 #DigitalPhotograph from #TheParkwaysProject, a labor of love & faith in something intangible, something that is viewed from the peripherals. #BlueSkyArtShow #EastCoastKin #Layers

"Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away..."

"Gimme Shelter, constructed 1955," digital photograph from "The Parkways Project,' a labor of love and faith in something intangible, something that is there if viewed from the peripherals. Image Copyright 2023 Tom Ogburn.

"Mmm, a flood is threatening
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away..."

≈ Jagger/Richards

It was in picnic shelter such as this one where I learned, meeting them first hand, Hippies were of all of all constructions, side by side with those who just as well seen them banned from the parks, parkways & small town Mom & Pop stores just off the Parkway.

Day by day, step by step, inch by inch, the mill town enclosures winnowed away, replaced by views alien, beyond the pale of even Marvl comics. Which was saying something.

March 29, 2025 at 12:45 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Bluesky🦋

#TheParkwaysProjects ≈Not the beginning nor an end
#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn #Scape #BlueSkyArtShow
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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Mar 28

"Not the beginning nor an end." It's scattered, a fragment in Time projecting through the many ways we have of seeing in this Now that we've created for ourselves. I wonder why we work so hard at challenging our own existence🦉

#TomOgburn #photography #yellowstone1934 #EastCoastKin #scape #ArtYear 🦋

Not the beginning nor an end

August 26th 1934: Four men in a punt on Yellowstone Lake. Photographer was Miller.

open.substack.com

March 29, 2025 at 8:23 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Feb 10

“Oklahoma 66 poured” #TomOgburn #Photography
#Stunday 🦋 #EastCoastKin #Landscape #DigitalPhoto
#BlueskyPhotography #Skyart #BlueskyArt #DigitalArt #Route66 #TheMotherRoad #Oklahoma #RoadTrip

An old section of about nine miles of the original Route 66 roadbed in the western third of Oklahoma has already baked dry after a sudden heavy downpour. Across America, you can ride along a few miles at a time. It's rather like hopscotch in a vehicle, and becomes tiring fast.

Best to plan your route to Williams, Arizona and then take a turn northwest to embark on the longest continual section of the Mother Road, all the way to California. It's an incredible ride. 158 miles of such.

February 17, 2025 at 5:17 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Feb 16

“Entropic Alley to Rutledge” #TomOgburn #Photography
#Stunday 🦋 #Landscapes #BlueskyPhotography
#Skyart #BlueskyArt #Art #CharlestonSC #RutledgeStreet
#StateParks #ColonialLake #CharlestonAlleys #Beaufain
#Nature #TheParkwaysProjects #SouthCarolina

My name for my alleyway from where I parked off Beaufain to get to Rutledge Avenue (were I heading that way) was "Entropic Alley." It IS a Charleston micro alley, about 30 yards long. But it hadn't been given a name until I came along. I have a penchant for naming things which need a name. Like titling artworks. Usually bathed in sunlight, as you can tell from the brilliance of the background at Noon. Rutledge and the buildings on the other side of the avenue are completely washed out.

These palmetto fronds are the old, long and narrow kind. Sharp and slightly serrated and often twisting in the current of wind that would at times whip into and out of this alley. What I never learned, was why there was old red tile hollow conduit that often carried water within it, and here, where it was broken away on the outer face, one could see that water was running in it. These terra cotta tiles were almost a foot tall and five inches wide. My guess is that this was a feature for watering the garden that was on the other side of this wall. Which makes perfect sense to me, as the Romans and the Spanish did such things long before Charleston was ever on a map.

This will become one of the "America: Lost & Found" works soon. It's just craving that entry into it's new arena of being.

February 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Feb 8

“Four Holes off Five Chops” #TomOgburn #digitalphoto
#EastCoastKin🦋#BlueSkyArtShow Theme is #Reflections
#landscape #photography #art #photograph #digital
#landscapephotography #photographersofbluesky
#blueskyphotography #skyart #blueskyart #digitalart

"After seeing nothing but swamp, more swamps, and then some swamps the entire time I've been down here along Edisto and Santee Cooper way, the sheer miasma of them has taken hold. The cool thing is—now I know where they all are, and where some of the most beautiful lay hidden." ≈ me, as an opening to a blog in January 2019

A lowcountry swamp like this one is often driven past so quickly people have stopped seeing them. They are Nature's victims of ghosting; they're canceled. I decided in 2018 I would start eyeballing them as I drove by, then, next step: find a road into them. This is harder to do in the South than one might imagine. Cables with locks, chains with locks, elaborate steel swinging gates with locks. Locks with locks.

But I found ways.

Here you have a trio of trees forming the closest middle ground. Behind them, another small patch of land above standing blackwater to facilitate three more larger trees. Then you reach the marsh grass behind these primary actor trees. It may look solid from here; it is not so. This photo was made in March. Some of the smaller understory trees have already produced new leaves, but many are an anemic pale yellow. The larger trees haven't quite begun to sprout leaves but many had buds visible from below. The blackwater is reflecting a deep rich cobalt version of the sky above which is just your random azure blue that you may see on any given day. The swamp grass is also just turning into a pale green, some patches on the right, in better sun, already beginning to darken into their summer emerald green form.

February 17, 2025 at 5:20 AM

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025

@parkwaysprojects.bsky.social

‪
🌙 The Tables of Craggy Gardens & Advent of Cumberland Knob 1966.

#TheParkwaysProjects #Change #Landscape #Photography
#NationalParks #Nature #ArtYear #BlueRidgeParkway #NorthCarolina #SouthCarolina #GreatSmokyMountains

"Ninety-nine percent of Wisdom is Being Wise in Time"🦉 #TheodoreRoosevelt

The Tables of Craggy Garden, and the Advent of Cumberland Knob

1966. My father took us all up to Cumberland Knob to see where the Blue Ridge Parkway began in 1936.

theparkwaysprojects.substack.com

July 19, 2025 at 11:23 PM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#photography #landscapes #TomOgburn #RockinTuesday #TheParkwaysProjects #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #PhotographersOfBlueSky #mobilephotography

🦉"Before Autumn's fall" A return to the Kodak Square, a post-modern series within 'The Parkways Projects' & an exhibit teamed with my classic Instamatics ⬇️🧵

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Mar 17

Before Autumn's fall #TheParkwaysProjects A multi-tiered photo essay in 3 arenas:—a Substack-Patreon-Bluesky trio on #Stunday !

Return to the Kodak Square #TomOgburn #photography #Skyart #landscape #PhotographersOfBlueSky #BlueskyArt
#ShotoniPhone #mobilephotography
#EastCoastKin #NationalParks

There's to be a separate tier of "Post Modern Square" format photos inside the Parkways Projects. They'll be accompanied by many of the archival Kodak Instamatic squares. Many of those have faded over time. In some cases the emulsion has gone rogue, aging into colors never really planned in the annals of photo-processing.

I'm planning The Parkways Projects to be stacked tiers of smaller exhibits. The Post-Modern beside the 50+ aged original Kodak prints.

The photographs made by the CCC trained photographer squads sent out to record nearly everything they could find as documentary evidence. No, as Proof of Life. I'll be showing these alongside the restoration and larger full composite builds I've made from the older archival images from the Clemson University OPN Archives.

So far, I have 11 tiers planned for Patreon.

7-9 Tiers of exhibits made to travel, just like the original family traveled so long ago. Like the original settlers moved from their Appalachian homes to enable these National Parks to be born. Those stories are also tiers; as well they are tears.

April 29, 2025 at 4:14 PM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Bluesky🦋

#TheParkwaysProjects ≈The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025
#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn #BlueSkyArtShow
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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Mar 28

Hey Everybody, I broke out my sleeping Substack stasis site today. After all the years ago of making it I decided it's damned high time to put it to use! 🧙‍♂️Here's where it's sleeping. It's just a wee scribble for now

#TomOgburn #photography #yellowstone1934 #scape #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #landscape ⬇️

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Mar 28

"Not the beginning nor an end." It's scattered, a fragment in Time projecting through the many ways we have of seeing in this Now that we've created for ourselves. I wonder why we work so hard at challenging our own existence🦉

#TomOgburn #photography #yellowstone1934 #EastCoastKin #scape #ArtYear 🦋

March 29, 2025 at 9:49 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Bluesky🦋

#TheParkwaysProjects ≈Before Autumn's fall
#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn #Scape #BlueSkyArtShow
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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Mar 17

Before Autumn's fall #TheParkwaysProjects A multi-tiered photo essay in 3 arenas:—a Substack-Patreon-Bluesky trio on #Stunday !

Return to the Kodak Square #TomOgburn #photography #Skyart #landscape #PhotographersOfBlueSky #BlueskyArt
#ShotoniPhone #mobilephotography
#EastCoastKin #NationalParks

March 29, 2025 at 4:16 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
≈ #TheodoreRoosevelt #Bluesky🦋

#TheParkwaysProjects ≈"The wizened emerald path"
#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Feb 10

"Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path."
#JosephCampbell

“The wizened emerald path” #TomOgburn #Photography #Stunday 🦋 #EastCoastKin #TheBlueridgeParkway
#Landscape #DigitalPhoto #BlueskyPhotography #Skyart #BlueskyArt #DigitalArt #BlueRidgeParkwayNP #Art #SkylineDriveParkwayNP

A steep mountain knoll holds a narrow path, in places becoming grown over from lack of use. The grasses and groundcover foliage are all brilliant emerald to chartreuse greens, wet with fog and cloud mists. Trees in the distance recede into these mists.

In August, in these mountains, all things are bathed in mists.

"The wizened emerald path," from the Parkways Projects. A remembrance of place and time—and being. In that year, August 2019, especially the memories of the year 1969, when I first hiked this trail while my family enjoyed their picnic lunch.

March 27, 2025 at 3:56 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Feb 11

“17 Chalmers Street ” #TomOgburn #photography #charlestonsc #pinkhousetavern #building #art
#EastCoastKin #landscapes #digitalphoto #pirates
#blueskyphotography #skyart #blueskyart #digitalart

Sep 1996, trying out a new Canon A5 digital camera.

An odd view from the back side of the Pink Tavern on Chalmers allows for a good view of the encrusted black clay tiles (originally red clay tiles) and one of the back dormer windows. A soft but rich blue sky frames the pink surface of the home, the tiles in perspective to one's point of view, looking up from the back yard.

On my return from New Orleans in August 1996, with a new $1600 Canon A5 Digital Camera in hand, I wandered around Charleston for a weekend. One of the very first shots I made to try out the little camera's chops on real subject matter was this photo. There were three actually, one being a shot of the front of the Pink House Tavern, as it was called back then (and still is) one from an oblique end angle and this one from the back. Over the years I began to appreciate this view more, and included it in the very first exhibit of images made with the A5 from all over the American Southeast and Southwest.

WhileI have never had the honor to meet Madame Mesny/Mincey, there is always tomorrow.

"The tiled gambrel roof dates to the eighteenth century. The building was a tavern in the 1710s and onward, owned by renowned Madame and distiller Madame Mincey, a French Huguenot. James Gordon was the owner of the house by the 1780s. The artist Alice R. Huger Smith used the house as a studio in the early twentieth century." ≈ Wikipedia

February 17, 2025 at 5:16 AM

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025

@parkwaysprojects.bsky.social

🦉"The Seven Vacations (of nine tales) #TheParkwaysProjects
#TomOgburn #TheBlueRidgeParkway #Appalachians 🪔

An introduction of a place, a family, and a once turbulent Time called "The 1960's." #Photograph by me at age 12, 2nd #Photo by my father. #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #BlueSky🦋

The Seven Vacations (of nine tales)

Short takes » Instamatics » A glimpse into the summer of 1968 and glancing losses

theparkwaysprojects.substack.com

October 9, 2025 at 11:54 PM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
#TheodoreRoosevelt #Bluesky🦋

#TheParkwaysProjects ≈Until The Morning Comes
#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn #Scape #BlueSkyArtShow
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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Mar 17

Finally found this one #Photography #Landscape
Until The Morning Comes #TomOgburn #HybridWorks #America:Lost&Found #BlueskyArt #BlueskyPhotography
#EastCoastKin🦋 #Skyart

There's a 3rd one, in between this heavily worked #DigitalCollage & the raw shot below. The 3 give a wider view of my builds 🧵⬇️

In the late summer of 2011, I walked for days through fields & along the roadway by my home, one of the remaining small sections of Route 66. I was collecting the tiny dried brown blossoms of the chamisa flower. I had in mind to use them in some handmade papers, made by my niece who is a wonderful hand-crafted book artist. It took almost three weeks with a Croghan folding camp saw, used as a thresher collecting the petals & some twigs to fall into large freezer bags.

Needless to say, there were a lot of people along old Route 66 craning their necks trying to figure out what I was doing as they sped by in Time.

This image was made November 2011 to accompany the actual suspended petals in an assemblage/collage.

I was working on a series of digital composite images at the time called “Vestiges.” It was the most fun in years for I could use most any imagery I wanted that was in the public domain. It was in the realm of photo-montage & in actuality was all digital. I began with a base idea of using film negatives from all eras of photographic and filmic history, welded into a mindstream, a nearly visible “current” which was streaming the small image past you.

As a paired series forms in my mind, I planned to use handmade paper as both a substrate & torn materials combined with many of the film images in the digitally produced “vestiges” works. The chamisa flowers were meant for that purpose. While I did ship some large bags to Birmingham to my niece & a few weeks later received about 40 sheets of incredibly intriguing chamisa paper back, I only now gone forward with the sandwiched collages. A move to Arizona detoured me for all things began to gravitate in that direction.

The “Vestiges” works gave birth to the Hybrid series, as did the “Chamisa Collage” works, which both are still on the idea planks of my mind for weaving together in a similar fashion in a year or so.

March 29, 2025 at 4:18 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Feb 5

“Palmetto, Moss & Snow,” #digitalphoto #TomOgburn #photography #landscapephotography #nature #winter
#blueskyphotography #blueskyart #skyart #snow
#EastCoastKin 🦋 #PhotographersUnited

A rare snowfall in the South Carolina lowcountry. A white field of soft snow about three inches deep carries the shadows of the early morning Sun all the way down to the shore of Lake Marion. The sky is a pale bluish white, the lake's water a medium slate blue. The small pine in the distance looks a dark green; the palmetto fronds an olive to chromium oxide green.

"A very cold and humid wintry morning, around 8:50am here, as the winter sun was casting its long shadows about the snow edging Lake Marion." ≈ from my notes

February 17, 2025 at 5:23 AM

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

🦉"Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time"🌙
≈ #TheodoreRoosevelt #Bluesky🦋

#TheParkwaysProjects ≈"Sentinel Lords"
#Photography #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Landscape
#TomOgburn

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Feb 27

"Sentinel Lords." “There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws that are constant. It has no rules.” ≈ T.H. White—The Once & Future King

Up on the Sandflats, 900 feet high above the already high-desert town of Moab, Utah, if you drive all the way back to its southernmost border and then follow the bend in the road out of the Sandflats and into Manti la-Sal, you will see these three small but impressive redrock pinnacles. Small means about 40-60 feet tall, a bit above you if you are standing there. They are so indicative of the area, their orange to sienna red hues, shrouded at the base by the deep grayish to dark indigo-bluish Lebanon cedars and juniper trees. Far in the background, on the right, through the atmosphere are the variegated earthtone walls of Castle Valley. All that is left for me to describe to you is that great intense blue sky so prevalent in and around all the Four Corners regions. Which I have taken the liberty of besmirching by grunging it up with the chemically induced patterns of a very old but never processed Daguerreotype metal plate, for this image is one of the 'America: Lost & Found' series of works. One in which I have dedicated myself to making so since 2010, fully finding a muse at rest within it by June of 2011 while living at Glorieta Pass, a 'burb of Santa Fe, unlikely as that may seem.

From my notes:

"The Sandflats above Moab, my surrogate Utah town. Actually, almost in Manti la-Sal. I painted them for three days, and wondered, what have they seen? What great human drama have they seen come and go in all its grand insignificance? Sometimes I grin from ear to ear when alone among the rocks and the trees."

I think it was June 2021 when the Pack Creek Fire broke out on Manti la-Sal. It charred a mammoth part of the landscape coal black, causing the waters to run deep grimy black with soot and ashes; recoveries always arrive. In the years to come, Aspen may take hold of the scarred over area, and a brilliant field of gold may emerge.

March 27, 2025 at 1:47 AM

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025

@parkwaysprojects.bsky.social

#Stunday #TheParkwaysProjects #Photography #TomOgburn "Dining out" Sadlers Creek South Carolina State Park, dating from 1966. #Landscape #Nature

One of he later state parks of South Carolina, being added through a lease with the Army Corps of Engineers. In a way an odd juxtaposition considering the role of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The building is. classically style picnic shelter. You're looking at the open grilling and dining area, with a massive red brick double fireplace, the difference being between most other shelter, the fireplaces don't face each other, and there are three cooking fireplaces. The third one is a the fa end of the building. The waters of Lake Hartwell are behind this shelter with the tall pines towering above.

February 23, 2025 at 8:39 AM

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025

@parkwaysprojects.bsky.social

2️⃣ It covers what I'm about to start doing, where I hope to go, some infrastructure of #TheParkwaysProjects 🌝

I hope a lot of y'all will pop over to read it. I now have 16 rough drafts, 16 works of art or clusters of the same, Words & perhaps this weekend to post a couple more.

⬇️

Many roads merged in Time

An introduction to both 'The Parkways Projects' and the CCC who crafted beautiful structures into being as The Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks were linked by two visionary parkways

open.substack.com

June 28, 2025 at 9:09 AM

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025

@parkwaysprojects.bsky.social

“Twin sisters of different mothers” #TomOgburn #Art
#Stunday 🦋 #Landscapes#Photography #DigitalArt
#BlueskyPhotography #Skyart #BlueskyArt #Nature
#LakeMarion #Santee #SouthCarolina #Waterscapes
#TheParkwaysProjects #DigitalCompositeImage

"You don't take a photograph, you make it." ≈ Ansel Adams

And he meant that, in a few more ways than one. Here, precariously stands a tree I photographed in 2018. "It" is "They" actually, for its two trees joined at the base, truly sharing osmosis between them. One was cypress, that I knew. The other was a very different kind of tree & also ... at the crowns of both, mistletoe had taken hold by some fluke loong, long ago. I was there again in 2024. I walked down to the shoreline, knowing it was likely gone. It was. I've learned now the old dock's being removed.

Everything in this scene then, subject-wise, is gone. The sky is gray, end of day, with a hint of hazed blue at top. The water's golden, long grass golden & fallen over at the trees bases. There's a large trunk which is bent underneath the remaining earthen bank, curving slightly upward then plunging back into the water, all earth which once surrounded it eroded away long ago. This scene is a study in entropy & for that reason is in my top five favorite works in "The America: Lost & Found" series.

From my notes: "One night, a few months back in the early fall when the waters were down on Lake Marion, I was walking by its north shore and saw a ghost. On viewing it, I began to hear whispers of old arguments told by one of the voices closest to me for so many years. A very old waterlogged and siltified tree trunk, smooth and very gelatinous, almost like a giant dead salamander having lain on the bank for too many days, was beating between the piers of an old dock stretched out into the waters of the lake. On either end of that log were deep grooves worn into its circumference, old and slick as well, from the chains or cables which evidently had held it in place for far too long."

That describes what are called "ghost trees"—those which, at the end of the land clearing project my grandfather was one of the supervisors for between 1936-1940, had to be staked down.They had crashed the timber market.

February 17, 2025 at 2:36 AM

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025

@parkwaysprojects.bsky.social

What's on deck as I get ready to post 4 photographs from #TheParkwaysProjects

Something for me to work by after scrabbling through miles of silicon corridors on FB the last few hours. One of these days, there'll be a hell of a story to tell about these last 3 years. Until that day comes—press on 🌙🦉