The Lake George basin is huge. The lake itself is 32 miles long, up to 2.5 miles wide, occupying 45 square miles of glacier-scoured earth within a 233 square mile watershed. Few have been as able to reduce it to an intelligible, comprehensible scale as skillfully as the photographer Carl Heilman II, whose most recent book, his second to focus on Lake George, was published this month.
Heilman has been photographing the Adirondacks since the mid-1970s. Fifty years later, he shows no signs of slowing down.
“The coolest thing about what I do is the places it takes me,” he says.
Heilman moved to Brant Lake in 1973, where he built himself a pair of snowshoes that took him to the summits of Adirondack peaks and, serendipitously, to a career as a photographer.
“I fell in love with the wilderness and wanted to hold onto that feeling,” he says.
He began shooting the landscapes of Lake George in 1987 with his Nikon N2000, Nikon F100 and panoramic film cameras. He first used a digital camera professionally right here on Lake George in 2007, “photographing a wonderful sunrise over the lake from the swim dock at Diamond Point beach… I was amazed at the quality of the photographs.”
With a few exceptions, the images captured in the photographs for this book were created with digital cameras and in the years since he completed his first book about Lake George, which was in 2008.
“Digital technology has given me the opportunity to better capture and express the mood, details and nuances of what I’m seeing and feeling than when I’m working with a camera,” he says.
And it cannot be doubted that Heilman responds to Lake George with feeling.
“Spectacular, magnificent, incomparable Lake George: the beautiful lake and scenic mountains, bubbling streams and waterfalls, and quaint hamlets and byways,” he writes in his introduction to this book, adding, “In some ways, Lake George has changed very little…the mountains are as wild as they were centuries ago when Native Americans traveled and camped throughout this region for summer hunting and fishing.’
But precisely because “the beauty, charm and wildness of the lake draws visitors back to the area year after year… drawn to the magic of this special place just as they have for many generations…” Lake George faces multiple challenges.
“Development issues, storm water runoff, lawn chemicals, and nonnative invasive species are a few of the ecological issues facing Lake George today,” he writes.
Heilman’s awareness of and sensitivity to the threats facing Lake George are among the reasons why he places his skills in the service of environmental protection, working with groups such as the Lake George Land Conservancy and the Lake George Association to help “safeguard the watershed and protect the rich environmental and historical character of the Lake George basin.”
Heilman knows that Lake George is a peopled place, which is why, no doubt, he includes in this book photographs of scenes that would otherwise be out of place in the portfolio of a nature photographer as prominent as he is – but he also remains hopeful that “with a conscientious effort on the part of everyone who visits and lives around the lake, it will be possible to maintain the unique qualities of Lake George and its ‘blessed waters’ for many generations to come.”
By presenting Lake George at its pristine, varied and transcendent best, Carl Heilman is doing as much as anyone to keep it the lake that Thomas Jefferson saw in 1791: “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.”
