Tim Reaves Photography

06/03/2026

🗞️📸 The Wall Street Journal featured my image (and a quote) for an article about firefly tourism!

For a few weeks every summer, the Smokies synchronous firefly produces dazzling coordinated displays that light up the night sky. Getting to see them is its own miracle.

06/01/2026

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver

This self-portrait reflects on the growing distance between our physical presence and our attention. It's less a criticism of technology than a meditation on distraction - the ways we can miss moments of beauty, connection, and presence. The fireflies become a metaphor for all the fleeting wonders that surround us each day.

How much of life passes unnoticed while we're looking elsewhere?

05/21/2026

"Firefly Party." Here's one of my favorite captures highlighting the transition between blue ghost season and synchronous season in the Smokies of North Carolina. Blue ghosts - the greenish trails - glow continuously and occupy the bottom couple feet of the forest, while synchronous fireflies fly anywhere from 3-10 feet and flash in sync with each other. Blue ghosts arrive earlier in the season and start to diminish as the synchronous fireflies ramp up.

Want it as a canvas print? Find it at https://fineartamerica.com/featured/firefly-party-tim-reaves.html?product=canvas-print

04/24/2026

The National Park Service just opened the lottery for Elkmont’s synchronous firefly event.

But this photo isn’t from Elkmont.

These fireflies aren’t confined to one place. They show up across the Appalachians in the right conditions. Find a dark, healthy forest, be patient, and you might witness it for yourself.

Just remember, the magic depends on the habitat. Respect it. Stay on the trails, and use only dim red flashlights or headlamps. They both preserve your night vision and create less disturbance for these wonderful insects whose unique mating display depends on darkness.

04/22/2026

Turn your wall into something unforgettable!

"Blue Ghosts" captures one of nature’s rarest nighttime phenomena- glowing fireflies painting the forest with light.

Available as canvas, metal, framed prints, and more.
Shop here:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/blue-ghosts-tim-reaves.html

03/05/2026

Decided to go black and white for this photo of Daffodil Flats.

02/24/2026

Contemplating the cosmos. Here's quick re-edit of a shot from 10 years ago. My brother and I explored some of our old stomping grounds in the Boone area at night.

02/17/2026

After four hours of imaging, the Rosette Nebula blooms in the sky.

I recently got a Dwarf Mini smart telescope, and it's been a blast to use! It solves most of the problems that normally keep me out of the field with my astrophotography rig - the size/weight, finicky polar alignment, and lack of go-to functionality. Basically, my normal setup is more powerful, but I have to do everything manually, including carefully aligning the equatorial mount to Polaris and actually finding the object I'm trying to photograph, which is usually invisible to the naked eye. So I spend a lot of time confirming alignment and taking test shots. The Dwarf Mini checks its own alignment and guides your adjustments to achieve better results. It then automatically finds and locks onto whatever target you give it. It also automatically takes dark frames (another thing I used to have to do manually).

The short version is, it automates most of the things that make deep sky astrophotography frustrating, but it comes at the expense of total power. It's a great sidekick for a big imaging session or the primary telescope for a night when I'd otherwise feel unmotivated.

02/09/2026

Human beings are the storytelling animal, and this star cluster is the subject of what might be humanity’s oldest surviving story.

The Pleiades, or seven sisters, are hot blue luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years- young on a cosmic timescale.

Throughout the world, humans have stories about the origin of these stars, usually involving seven maidens who get attacked or chased by a ferocious animal or an unwelcome suitor. Many stories involve the maidens asking a powerful god to save them, with that god sending them into the heavens to escape their pursuer.

Here’s the interesting part. Most people today can see only six stars with the naked eye, but stars move relative to each other on timescales far beyond human lifetimes. Astronomers have shown that tens of thousands of years ago, one of the stars now seen as part of a close pair would have appeared more clearly separated, making seven stars easier to distinguish.

Combined with the remarkably similar stories found across widely separated cultures, this has led some anthropologists and archaeoastronomers to suggest that the core of these stories may be extraordinarily old- possibly originating tens of thousands of years ago. While this idea remains debated, it offers a rare example of how human storytelling may preserve memories of the night sky from deep prehistory.

09/12/2025

I'll be in the Pinegate Renewables parking lot (130 Roberts St., Asheville) tomorrow from 10-5 with several metal prints and smaller items, including haunting photos of the aurora borealis over the River Arts District after Helene.