I stepped out of my cabin into 4″ of fresh snow with more still falling and said a quick prayer of thanks to the photo gods. It’s been a warm dry winter here in Yellowstone so far and any fresh snow is a welcome sight for both photographers and the drought. I would happily give up some great light for fresh snow in the hopes that the light would come. We headed to the lodge to have a hearty breakfast before heading out into the Upper Geyser Basin to photograph for the morning. As we headed down the trail to Castle Geyser the snow let up and the clouds began to break up…icing on the cake for our morning shoot. Photographing Caslte Geyser from the boardwalk gave us some excellent backlighting to show off the steam…
Having been to Yellowstone for the last six winters, I was looking for a different perspective. I found a small geyser bubbling away and immediately knew I was going to make a B&W of the image…
Just a few steps beyond, I found a cool pattern in the bacterial mat that when photographed with a wide angle took on an otherworldly look. The vivid color was brought out using a polarizer to reduce the reflection of the grey sky…
As if we hadn’t already had a great morning, as we came upon Old Faithful, the clouds broke to the north so we quickly positioned ourselves to get the blue sky behind her when she blew and within minutes of our arrival, she erupted…
Satisfied with a successful morning we headed in to lunch and a quick break. The afternoon began to cloud up again but, we saddled up with our gear and headed out once more to see what photographic treats we could find. Just as we left the boardwalk to head down the trail, a coyote trotted across our path into the fresh snow just off the trail where he began mousing. We quickly grabbed our cameras and as I turned mine on, I zoomed in to 200mm (with my TC-17E already mounted) and spun the aperture dial to wide open to get a fast enough shutter speed to capture the action. We watched as he buried his head in the snow and seconds later came up with a snack as we clicked madly…
While we were photographing the coyote, the snow began to fall in earnest and the light dropped so, with smiles on our faces we headed back to the lodge to download our images and review our day.
Images captured with Nikon D3X, AF-S 14-24mm, AF-S 24-70mm, D3S, AF-S 70-200mm VR II, TC-17E II on Lexar Digital Media
