Tag Archives: National Park

Yellowstone Park

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Growing up as a kid, one of my favorite cartoon characters was Yogi Bear and his picnic basket stealing escapades at Jellystone Park. It wasn’t until much later that I found out that Jellystone is an actual take-off on Yellowstone National Park, a park that spans almost 9,000 sq Km in the state of Wyoming. After researching what this place was all about, I was quickly convinced that it had to be added to my bucket list. It was therefore no coincidence that when we started planning for our road trip, no matter how we planned to cross the continental US, all routes led us through Yellowstone.

One cannot fathom how large this park is until you start driving through it. It took us about 2 hours to cross it the first day we got there, and subsequently 2 full days of driving just to visit some of the major sights. What you bear witness to however is truly remarkable, as the park has a plethora of lakes, canyons and rivers, home to hundreds of species of mammals, fish and reptiles, some of which are considered endangered. The park also sits on an active volcano, so there is an abundance of hot springs and geysers. I’ve managed to take a few pictures of the landscape, animals and other sights and will dedicate the next few blog posts to share these with everyone.

Starting off though, this is the picture of the Lower Yellowstone Falls, one of the highlight features of the park, standing at 94m tall – nearly twice the height of the Niagara Falls.

Yellowstone Falls2 - 1920c

Taken with my tripod-mounted Canon 60D and Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens, at ISO 100, F8.0 and 15 sec exposure (using my B+W ND 3.0 solid filter).

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Silhouette Trees

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Any nature photographer will attest that the “golden hour” is the best time to go out and photograph. Also known as the “magic hour”, this is roughly the first hour after sunrise and the last hour of light before sunset. The reason for that is because during that time of day the sun is fairly low on the horizon, producing more diffuse and flattering light, as opposed to the hard shadows cast during midday.

Travelling however with company, gives you little flexibility to being in a particular spot during those times. That was the case when we visited the Arches National Park, home of 2000 or so sandstone arches in eastern Utah near the small town of Moab. A simple image search, will bring up hundreds of images, some depicting the sun casting a beautiful orange glow on the rock formations, others showing the sun rising or setting while being framed within the sandstone arches.

Unfortunately we arrived there just before lunch time, when the hot scorching sun was already high up in the sky. I felt disappointed because there was no way for me to take the particular picture that I had in mind. Just as I was about to give up, I noticed a bunch of dried up trees that had a very compelling shape. I veered away from my friends and started working the scene, trying to take a snapshot that would tie together the deep blue sky, the sun and the shape of the trees. After trying out multiple exposures from different angles and varying backgrounds, I ended up with the following picture, which surprisingly didn’t turn out that bad!

Tree Silluette - 1920c

Shot with my Canon 60D and my Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 DC HSM lens, at ISO 100, F18, at 1/80th of a second.