05/09/2026
Ken Smith is a retired Air Force meteorologist and Passageway Gallery member since 2015 — a landscape photographer whose lens finds beauty in wide open spaces, mountains, oceans, and, increasingly, the night sky.
His process is anything but accidental. Ken plans each Milky Way shoot from home — calculating moonless windows, tracking the galaxy's arc, and researching locations with minimal light pollution. He scouts by day so he's never stumbling in the dark, arrives an hour early to set up low-level lighting for his foreground, and finishes the work back home in Photoshop. The result: images that feel both vast and intimate.
His favorite photo came from that process — shot at the International Car Forest in Nevada's Mojave Desert, where 40+ painted and repainted vehicles jut from the earth beneath a blazing Milky Way. It's otherworldly, and entirely intentional.
His best-selling piece, titled "The Spirit Lives On", tells a different kind of story. In January 2016, a gas line rupture ignited a fire in the building directly across from our gallery — home to M's Pub and Nouvelle Eve. As an arctic front swept through Omaha, temperatures fell below zero for 40+ hours while crews battled the blaze. Ken photographed the ice-encrusted building glowing under the street lamps. Before M's Pub reopened in 2017, Ken donated a framed print that now hangs inside. Even today, visitors stop by the gallery asking: "What happened?"
Ken's hope is simple: that whoever views his photos can escape into the scene — and stand exactly where he was standing.
Ken Smith Photography
