Lone Juniper

As marvelous as Grand Canyon is, it's very tough to shoot as a photographer.

When i visited the Canyon in 2008 i had a particular photography mindset that came from closely following peculiar styles of some photographers..

I've now realized that while that may not be a necessarily a bad idea in the beginning's of a photographer, it certainly hampers the progress as one is constrained to some notions. Gradually over the last year or two my perspective has changed quite a bit on what and how I shoot.

This has mostly to do with compositional choices and what goes in a photo or not. I was getting too constrained with the idea of having a great foreground elements to stack up my shots and it simply does not work in all the situations. Since then I have been trying to let go of everything i first learned about composition when i started shooting and 'go-with-the-flow'. Composition rules are good, but they only take you so far.

^Rant over^ So coming back, I found shooting the Canyon was tough because i was searching for good foreground elements and with the Canyon there really isn't much of that.. at least not from the rim. If you do trek down to the Canyon floor things might be different, but having 2 little kids and being short on time didn't afford me that luxury.

This is a shot from our first and only evening at the Canyon from the South Rim. The sky was totally overcast for the most part till the very end when the sun managed to peek through the clouds just for a couple of minutes to light up these trees. Since orange and blue tones are complimentary colors i think they did work to light up this scene quite nicely.

Cheers!
Daman

Firehole drive, Yellowstone

Yellowstone is a very curious place.. one of a kind for sure. Though i was enamored more by Grand Tetons, the beauty of Yellowstone is undeniable though hard to capture as it does not have the sweeping vista's of say Yosemite or Tetons for that matter.

This photograph was taken early morning as i was returning from shooting midway geyers(shot below in an earlier post). Firehole lake drive literally takes you through a steaming lake bubbling with sulphur springs. I saw a bunch of smaller trees outlined against the much larger one's behind and instantly wanted to take this kind of shot.

Since i had forgotten my whole camera kit at home i had to make do with the kit lens(70-300) that comes with the Canon Rebel package that i got from the local Costco. Hopefully stopping it over to f8 gave me the best sharpness i could have got.

This image was originally in color but since there was so little color info in the first place i decided to convert it to B&W and then ran an infrared filter in CS3 to bring out the steam/treeline contrast. I'm really hoping to get to visit some more parks this year.. let's see how it goes as the year progresses.