Shooting the Shooter - Yellowstone National Park - Moon Rock

I’m not even going to try and act like I’ve been blogging over the past several months.  The fact is that Ann and I went on our Yellowstone trip and, like all such trips, it was fantastic and full of surprises, some good, some not so good.  Since we’ve been back we’ve been busy.  Very busy.  How busy might you ask, well, neither Ann nor I have finished culling and tagging all of our images from Yellowstone.  Ann’s on her last day, I still have 6 days of images to work through.

We’ve only managed to make it out photographing once since we got back in October, because life seems to get in the way of our trips (3 planned trips down the tubes and counting).  But we keep planning (like plans to skip Christmas with family and to head out on our own) and trying to get out, and doing things “photographic” as much as possible.  So, for example, Ann is on Instagram and has gotten 10+ “likes” from QT Luong, a photographer who has photographed the National Parks for decades and Ann has followed for years.  It’s motivation to keep working on images.  We’re also trying to clean things up for the year to start the new year right, and to get the photo website caught up.  And, we’re preparing to start printing our photographs, which is a whole new endeavor in and of itself.  Call it our Christmas present to ourselves (and maybe all of you in the future),

That said, it’s time to start working on images from the trip, despite the fact we haven’t finished culling them.  Thus this post.  

Well into our second week into the Lamar Valley portion of our stay (yes, we bugged out a few days early), we went to photograph at a site on the way to Mammoth Hot Springs we scouted out previously that I thought would make for a great morning of photographing.  Things hadn’t quite turned out as well as I’d hoped, but on the way back to the Lamar Valley, we noticed that the road into the Blacktail Deer Plateau was open (it had been closed the few times we’d passed by it earlier in the trip), so we hung a right and went off-road.  

After a few miles we came to a wide bowl that opened up towards some mountains to the north and we pulled over to make photographs of the tall grasses, a grouping of trees on the hillside and the mountains in the distance.  After photographing for awhile and deciding I had done what I could with the subject, I turned around and started walking uphill back to Beast on the road above us.  

Tromping back I started scanning around and realized that the best photograph was actually in the other direction.  I saw a rock isolated in an open field with the moon rising behind it.  So I scampered up to the road and kept on walking until I was out in the filed, close enough to isolate the rock, remove any background trees from beyond the edge of the hill, and still get the moon in the frame.

Ann at some point  finished up as well, made her way back to Beast and decided to take one of her too many photographs of me. 

The rock I was photographing is the one you can see off to the right.  

Now, you might think that the moon just sits still in the sky looking beautiful as can be, but as I’ve mentioned before, both the moon and the sun move across the sky at a brisk pace.  Sometimes too brisk a pace.

I made a couple of images before I realized that I could use a polarizing filter to darken the sky a bit, and that the blue sky would complement the yellow grasses even better.  So I grabbed my polarizer and put it on my lens.  By that point I realized that the moon had moved directly above the rock, which was a compositional disaster, so I had to grab the tripod, and move over a few feet to get the main components in the right place in the image.  

I’m still not sure if I moved over far enough.

Culling through my images from the trip, the ones I’ve been attracted to the most (so far) are the ones where I tried to create a very clean, well designed image that is elegant in its simplicity.   This one pretty much makes up for the rest of a photographically frustrating day.

Given the backlog of photographs I still need to cull through and our hopes to start learning printing over the Christmas holidays (is it ok to ask Santa to give me a slow week for work between Christmas and New Years?), I probably won’t be doing a long series of posts on our Yellowstone trip.  However, in my mind I’m hoping to get blogging again, be a bit better about it, and to do a recap of our trip because the Lamar Valley is simply an incredible place.  

Please bear with us.