Island Exposure In the book ‘First Light’, nature photographer gives intimate view of MDI

It’s hard to forget the first time you cross the bridge to Mount Desert Island. Almost immediately, the beauty of the place envelops you. At every turn, the landscape unfolds in a series of dramatic, picture-postcard scenes: sheer granite cliffs plunge into the deep, greenish-blue sea; a single loon breaks the stillness of a secluded, mirrorlike pond; from the top of a mountain, the houses almost disappear, and the hills roll down to the ocean, covered in a blanket of evergreens.

But these are the obvious views. Sand Beach. Jordan Pond. Cadillac Mountain. To see the island’s subtle beauty, you need to get to know the landscape. Over the course of three years, nature photographer Tom Blagden did just that, and the resulting book, “First Light: Acadia National Park and Maine’s Mount Desert Island,” gives an intimate glimpse of MDI that many casual visitors have never seen.

“Tom’s photography shows things you wouldn’t normally stop to take time to look at,” said Charles Tyson, a member of Friends of Acadia who wrote the accompanying text. “They are intimate views, which do provide insights that people may not see when they come here for the first time.”

Blagden’s observations come from experience. He started visiting Mount Desert Island as a boy, but it wasn’t until he met his wife, Lynn Scott Blagden, that he started visiting with any regularity. Lynn’s family owns a home in Northeast Harbor, and the couple have spent summers there since they were in their early 20s.

“Everything was always Mount Desert Island; I’ve hardly been anywhere else in Maine,” Blagden said by phone from his home in Charleston, S.C. “It was always vacation and family and friends. I photographed on the side because the area is so inspiring.”

Blagden is a New Englander by birth, but the Audubon Society lured him to Charleston nearly 30 years ago with a photography job. Though the South was unfamiliar territory, he could see the wilderness there, and that set his work apart. He has since established himself as a pre-eminent nature photographer – his work has appeared in calendars for National Geographic, Audubon, the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy, as well as magazines such as Smithsonian and Audubon.

He hasn’t lost his eye for wilderness. In fact, the pictures in “First Light” give little hint that MDI is home to one of the country’s busiest national parks. That is due, in part, to Blagden’s knowledge of the island’s hidden treasures. He chose to photograph the most heavily visited spots in winter, long after the tourists have gone home.

“The whole mood changes without the throngs of people,” Blagden said. “The photographs are all about connecting with the landscape and I don’t do that well when I’m in crowds of people. I loved winter because I could go to all the obvious areas that are bumper-to-bumper in the summer.”

People love Mount Desert Island. They flock there in droves when the weather warms up, stirred by the bold scenery, the contrast of tall mountains plunging into deep sea. It’s a place that people are passionate about. But this passion has its cost, as Tyson’s text warns. The noise of personal watercraft breaks the tranquility. The thousands of cars that wind through Acadia’s roads each summer contribute to the area’s air pollution. Hikers and bikers and climbers unknowingly trample delicate flora in the island’s forests.

It would seem people love the island a little too much. But rather than discourage people from coming, Tyson advocates responsible use of MDI’s trails, waterways, mountains and woods. It’s what he calls a “semi-spiritual message”: We’re all part of creation. We have a responsibility to care for ourselves. But we also have a responsibility to care for the land and the creatures that are part of that creation.

By nurturing that sense of responsibility, Tyson says, people will feel that they have a relationship with the island.

“Building this relationship will serve conservation well, because if people have a relationship with a place, they love it – they want to care for it,” Tyson said.

It’s a message Tyson didn’t always heed. As a boy, his parents made the island their summer home, and he grew up playing in the mud flats, fishing for flounder and trout, and hunting for squirrel. It was, he writes, “a time of freedom and formation in a place forever associated with pleasure.” As a teenager, though, he “used his intimate knowledge of the island and the park’s secret places to gain prestige among peers.” He and his cousins spent countless hours trying to break the glass bottles that kept local fishermen’s buoys afloat.

Though Tyson was a bit careless about it as a young man, the island branded itself on Tyson’s soul. When he was an adult, it kept luring him back, even if he could squeeze in only a few days of vacation from his advertising job in Philadelphia. In 1981, he sold his firm, and in 1985, he and his wife, Lynda, moved to Maine full-time and started an advertising firm on the island. Tyson, now 66, recently closed the business, and he splits his time between MDI and New Haven, Conn., where Lynda is studying ministry at Yale’s Berkeley Divinity School.

Though he had written plenty of copy in his advertising career, “First Light” is Tyson’s first book. When Blagden first started working on the project, he approached Ken Olson at Friends of Acadia for suggestions, and Olson suggested Tyson, who has written for the group’s journal. It was a good fit, as they both had similar views on the need for responsible conservation.

“The land shapes the values we have, but we also bring values that we impose on the land,” Blagden said. The island is facing “a value judgment on where we go from here: Do we want a park that’s crowded and congested or are we going to make decisions that strengthen the quality of the experience?”

It’s that sense of responsibility that sets “First Light” apart and makes it more than a pretty coffee table book. It is beautiful, for sure, but it is a deep, resonant beauty that takes readers to places on the island most of them have never seen.

“You have to allow time for the landscape to reveal itself,” Blagden said. “It’s a relationship, developing an intimacy with the land, and that takes time. Every week, every trip I was building a deeper relationship in what I saw. I felt like after every photography trip there was more I wanted to do instead of less. I felt like I could go on forever. There’s just so much there.”

Blagden and Tyson have scheduled a series of signings and slide shows at Port in a Storm Bookstore, Somesville, on Mount Desert Island, in the coming months: signing from 3 to 5 p.m July 6; signing and slide show 8 p.m. July 17; signing and slide show 8 p.m Aug. 3; signing from 3 to 5 p.m. Aug. 14.