Fall Colors Across North America
by Anthony E Cook

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Book Reviews of Fall Colors Across North America

Book Review: Enter All Parts of Nature's Fall-Decorated Cathedral!
Summary: 5 Stars

If you are like me, you've always wanted to take several months off and follow fall as it begins in the northern tundra and creeps gently downward to the southern coasts of the United States. Mr. Anthony E. Cook has lived that trip for us, not once, but more than four times as he traveled with fall through 28 states in the U.S. and 7 Canadian provinces.

When I opened this book, I expected mostly to see variations on the familiar scenes of New England (where I live now) and California (where I grew up). Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the ways that autumn touches the land, sky, and water covers an immense tapestry beyond my experience and imagination. The Louisiana bayous bring special perspectives that I had never considered. The stark rocks of the American southwest create fascinating interplays of light, shadow and rock.

Mr. Cook sometimes takes nature, and dresses her up. He has a talent for letting motion speak for itself, whether by taking a long exposure in a whirlpool or by doing the same with colorful aspens trembling in the wind. Some of the work becomes totally abstract in the process. Other work simply takes color and blurs it with motion to make the leaves, rocks, and water look like an early Monet painting of the shore.

With Zion, Mr. Cook becomes a surreal master, showing sides of nature that I would never have looked for in the fall season.

From another perspective, he also honors nature with formal portraiture. The book is filled with stunning panoramas that bespeak carefully planned compositions and being there for just the right moment. He climbed Mt. Jo ten times before he got what he was looking for. The patience of Ansel Adams comes to mind. The panoramas are double the usual width and require a necessary division by the binding, which seems to have been planned for in the composition so that little impact is lost.

Mr. Cook's talent for composition is best captured by his many simple still lifes with two or three contrasting elements. My favorite was a partially turned red maple leaf lying atop a variegated lily pad in the water.

A nice surprise for me, as well, was to find a number of dignified images of animals that I seldom see during the fall such as beaver, moose, and a coyote.

This work is also enhanced by a fine foreword by Mr. Art Wolfe, a wildlife photographer, who was trained as a painter, and by Ms. Ann Swinger who explains more about how the fall colors occur.

To view this book is to see beauty, to understand new aspects of nature (especially the way that summer and winter can tug on autumn in between), and to experience transcendence. The experience was so intense for me that I could smell, hear, and touch the scenes with my mind as I viewed many of the images.

After you have read this book several times, I suggest that you arrange to visit new places each year to enjoy the fall changes. You can get ideas from this book about places to go. For example, I had never thought about Denali in Alaska as an alternative but Fall Colors Across North America has captured my imagination in a way that no other photographs of that area have before.

Open your mind to all the possibilities!

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