Photographer Kevin Adams Online photo gallery North Carolina photographers, Nature photography, Editorial photos and images

Like many photographers, serendipity played the biggest role in my photography inauguration. I had never before owned a camera when I received one as a birthday present in the mid 1980s. It was the typical setup that you’d find at every K-Mart in the country: a Pentax K1000 with a basic zoom lens and a couple of worthless accessories. Since I give something everything I have or nothing at all, that camera was going to sit on a shelf and collect dust, or it was going to change my life. You can guess which one happened.

Just another day at the “office”
for Kevin Adams

I've always loved nature and the outdoors. As a kid, family vacations were always to the mountains in search of waterfalls and my mother and older brothers would often talk about writing a waterfall book one day. Well, it didn’t take very many mountain trips with my new camera to decide that I was going to write that book. But first, I had to learn how to take pictures. Early on, I signed up for a camera course at a local community college but after a few classes realized that the best way to learn nature photography was to get out in nature and photograph it.

I started teaching photography seminars in the early 1990s, and soon thereafter began leading photo tours to the North Carolina mountains to photograph waterfalls. One of my greatest satisfactions is producing books. In 1994 I wrote North Carolina Waterfalls and followed it up in 1996 with Wildflowers of the Southern Appalachians. Then I took a break from books for a few years and concentrated on building up stock files and leading a few photo tours. Now I'm heavily back into the book world, having produced Waterfalls of Virginia and West Virginia in 2002, Hiking Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2003, and North Carolina’s Best Wildflower Hikes in spring of 2004, and Our North Carolina in 2005. I'm presently working on two large-format books that will be released in 2007.

Aspiring photographers often ask how to break into the business. The best advice I can offer is to concentrate on one region and shoot what you love. If you travel all over the world and shoot everything along the way, you’ll have a tremendous amount of competition from other photographers who probably will have deeper files. From a marketing standpoint, I think it’s much better to have quality, in-depth coverage of a small region, than it is to have mediocre coverage of a large area. As for shooting what you love, why get into photography in the first place if you’re not going to enjoy what you shoot?

Taking a dose of my own medicine, I decided long ago to concentrate on my home state of North Carolina and shoot what I love. Of course, to remain in business, I often take on assignments and projects from a purely economical standpoint (“prostituting” as I call it). But more often than not in any project that I do, you’re likely to find me following my passion through the swamps, sand flats, old-growth forests, and mountain trails of the Tarheel State.

Selected photo credits: Falcon Press, Chanticleer Press, Blair Publishing, Simon & Schuster, Northword Press, Menasha Ridge Press, Globe Pequot, Scholastic, Donihe Graphics, Silver Burdett Ginn, The Nature Conservancy, Nature’s Best, National Geographic Adventure, Outdoor Photographer, Nature Photographer, Backpacker, Blue Ridge Country, SINRA, Birder’s World, Outdoor Traveler, Natural History, Outdoor & Nature Photography, Tarheel Banker, The Tennessee Conservationist, Our State, Western North Carolina Travel Guide, The Living Bird Quarterly, Family Fun, Wildlife In North Carolina, Wonderful West Virginia, numerous commercial credits.

Selected writing credits (Magazines): Outdoor Photographer, Nature’s Best, Nature Photographer, Carolina Style, Our State, Blue Ridge Country, SINRA, Outdoor & Nature Photography, Waterfront Lifestyles.

Books produced (Author/photographer): North Carolina Waterfalls (Blair Publishing), Wildflowers of the Southern Appalachians (Blair Publishing), Waterfalls of Virginia and West Virginia (Menasha Ridge Press), Hiking Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Globe Pequot Press), North Carolina’s Best Wildflower Hikes (Westcliffe Publishers), Our North Carolina (Voyageur Press).

Miscellaneous credits: Chosen as photographer of the year (1998) for the North Carolina Zoological Park, featured photographer in Daybreak 2000; winner of the 1994 Year of the Coast Award and the 1995 Year of the Mountains Award, with the winning entries presented to Governor Jim Hunt; one of two photographers for the book Carolina Prayer, which was presented to Governor Mike Easley in 2003, writes regular “Natural Heritage” feature for Our State magazine.