corwinprescott
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Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton for The Rising Lands
🕑 Added 2015-04-04 00:32:20 +0000 UTC After arriving in Minnesota in what felt like a scorching summer and leaving in a freezing winter with my buddy S. Clouse (thisnormallife.tumblr.com) I had a feeling that I was entirely unprepared for the trip we had planned out. A couple days in Grand Teton, a week in Yellowstone, and a week in Glacier.The wilderness of the national parks, especially the ones in the northern Rockies, is incredibly unpredictable. Our first four days in Wyoming were brutally cold. Deciding that the only way we could convince ourselves to get up and face the intense wind and 18 degree weather to photograph the sunrise, we had opted to car camp every night. We'd wake up at 5am slam on our boots and run down trails to catch the early foggy mornings, or little bits of sun dancing off the mountains, and then high tail it back to camp for cold cereal, a peanut butter sandwich, and a banana.For the most part the weather for Yellowstone was a photographic nightmare 15 minutes of shooting in the morning followed by blinding, cloudless sunlight for 12 hours until 15 minutes of shooting during sunset. We passed our days hopelessly hiking into canyons we thought would give us a respite from the sun, and maybe a few photos, and tracking down public showers. Since it was well past peak season these were hard to come by, but a few nice rangers hooked us up with free ones half way through our trip, which was amazing.Our last day there after being mostly shut out, we parked it for the night at Black Sand Basin. Some how neither of us had ever been to this very easily accessible pull off, which had a lot of good vantage points from the board walk. I think its possible I've only ever been there in the deep winter when most of this part of the park is completely inaccessible by vehicle. The next morning the fog seemed to stick around for much longer than the rest of the week, and the boardwalk had been covered by a beautiful layer of frost.I shot as much as I could catching tree's surrounded by fog and steam, the icy wooden path we walked on, and even a few shots of Steven as a geyser erupted steam while he shot standing precariously on the boardwalks edge.These were almost entirely shot with the 17-40mm F4L and a Circular Polarizing filter to reduce haze. For the trees completely surrounded in steam I did break out the 70-200mm F2.8L to help cut the field of view and shoot with less DOF than I normally would for a landscape.My landscapes are always shot on tripod, and always shot in live view mode with a wireless trigger. I'm a big F22 fan for landscapes, and an even bigger fan of long exposures, so this method yields the best results for me. I also like to do the auto-bracketing sequence when I shoot landscapes just in case, which means I put the camera on the short 2 second self timer mode, so that as it fires it automatically cycles through all three shots rather than me having to click for each one. I'll be doing some on the road videos of these techniques when I hit the South West in May.https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pzuwoj7bhifkitr/AAATOBvIWIhABQK-_zV9-SIya?dl=0
