In a year that brought many new books crammed with national park photography, Celebrating America's National Parks, Preserves, Monuments, and Recreation Areas by Clyde Butcher is something of a throwback. Its imagery is all black-and-white.

A hardcover book running nearly 200 pages, Celebrating America's National Parks touches on 26 "national parks" and a small handful of national recreation areas and national monuments. With a technique that resembles, and at times mirrors, Ansel Adams' approach to capturing the majestic landscapes of the National Park System, Mr. Butcher has assembled a portfolio that dazzles the eye in black-and-white by the way he captures the light and plays with the angle of his lens.

Indeed, one of his shots from Grand Teton National Park seems to have been taken from almost the exact spot that Adams used for his iconic photograph of the Tetons with the Oxbow Bend of the Snake River in the foreground. Butcher captured his shot on a similarly moody day, with low hanging clouds skimming the top of Grand Teton as Adams did.

There's something about black-and-white techniques that really speak to landscape photography in the parks. The textures in the images have to be very dramatic to make up for the loss of color, and it helps to have varied clouds scudding overhead. Adding to the moodiness of some of Mr. Butcher's photos are mists of fog; a good example is his shot from Redwood National and State Parks in California. His panoramic shot of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park stretches the book, with the Point's geologic fingers reaching towards the foreground and gripping the valley floor. In Yellowstone National Park, he captured an image of a small herd of bison backed by a steaming landscape. Though there are white wisps of clouds, the sky in the background seems more ominous and threatening, but the dozen or so bison in the foreground are grazing peacefully.

Each of the parks that Butcher captured are contained in a chapter with text that provides a little background on the specific park, and a sidebar in which Mr. Butcher talks about his photographic experiences in that park.

The extensive breadth of open space in Denali is emotionally overwhelming. With no sign of humanity, I felt the weight of expectations being lifted off my chest and the sense of freedom was exhilarating. It just felt good to be alive to see such beauty.

Appropriately in this, the centennial year of the National Park Service, Mr. Butcher dedicates this book to Park Service employees.

"Our national parks are the crowning beauties of our country. As we celebrate their 100th year, let's remember those who came before us and worked so hard to save these treasures so that we may enjoy the wild beauty of our country," he writes. "Today, national park employees and volunteers cotinue to carry the torch forward so that future generations will be able to sit at Glacier Point in Yosemite, after their own 50 years of marriage, and still be amazed at what is before them."

A fixture in South Florida, Mr. Butcher will have an open house during Halloween weekend to show off some of the national park images he has captured during more than three decades of traipsing across the National Park System. His Big Cypress Gallery is a squat little building along Tamiami Trail about 47 miles east of Naples, Florida.