Although I’m more of a landscape guy, I photograph wildlife whenever I get a chance, especially if I am in an area teeming with critters. Yellowstone National Park certainly fits the bill! Every winter, I travel to Yellowstone with my lovely wife, who is kind enough to let me do some photography, even though we are technically on “vacation.” Now that I am a full-time professional photographer, the concept of [...]
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Sometimes conditions just aren’t all that spectacular. You’ve paid lots of money to travel to a distant location, and you need to come back with some great images. What to do? Well—as the old saying goes—sometimes you have to turn lemons into lemonade. On a recent summer trip to Yellowstone National Park, I got lots of lemons. I either had cloudy skies or clear skies, with not much in between. I was [...]
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While I usually take photos during the so-called “magic hours” of sunrise, sunset, and twilight, a place like Yellowstone National Park seems to scream for middle-of-the-day shooting. For most nature subjects, middle-of-the-day light is too harsh and unflattering, but the colors of some of Yellowstone’s thermal features really come alive under bright sun and blue skies. Even when photographing features with less colors, such as Fountain Geyser in this image, middle-of-the-day [...]
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The West Thumb Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park contains many interesting geothermal features. Below Black Pool (which actually has strikingly blue waters), one can find vast orange bacterial mats stretching out toward Yellowstone Lake. As I discuss in my eBook Five Landscape Challenges, many of Yellowstone’s geothermal features come alive during the middle of the day—photogenically speaking, that is. The rich colors of thermal pools and bacteria mats are only fully revealed [...]
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Here’s a view of the Firehole River at sunset, taken in Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone is famous world-round for its stunning geothermal features, including geysers, steam vents, and thermal pools. For this image, I wandered around the Upper Geyser Basin, looking for opportunities to capture rising steam back-lit by the setting sun. Back-lit subjects are always tricky to work with. Exposure can often be difficult, as there is typically excessive contrast [...]
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I recently spent two weeks photographing in Wyoming, including Yellowstone, the Wind River mountains, and the Grand Tetons (yep, it’s true—the Tetons were named by French trappers who thought the peaks looked like massive, pointy breasts—don’t blame me, I didn’t name them). Summer shooting is always the most difficult, and typically the least productive. One has to successfully negotiate long days with little sleep, hordes of tourists, and even larger hordes of biting [...]
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