Yellowstone National Park 2008

I am still sorting through my images from this past July of our trip to Yellowstone and Montana. I should be able to put up some good ones later on this fall.

I bought Lightroom v2.0 and am working on getting my whole digital catalog referenced.

Here is an image my wife shot with her Nikon 8800 of me shooting a young black bear outside of Yellowstone.



And an image I captured with the D200. This fellow as feeding on all the wonderful wildflowers and other browse from the very wet spring and early summer.

We had a great 2 week vacation. I was able to take my wife on a walk in the Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness area that has been one of my favorite trails from childhood.

This along the Lake Fork of Rock Creek, near Red Lodge Montana, north and east of Yellowstone National Park.



Following this fast ice cold creek is a joy. The music of the water your right, the sparse woods on the left, good footing with only the occasional horse apple, and views too stunning to record.



(Both of these G9 shots)

One of the great joys of leaving Yellowstone is the trip back into Montana on US 212, the Beartooth Highway. A modern marvel of road building. Cresting the beartooth plateau at over 10,000’ with switchbacks up and switchbacks down to Red Lodge (at 5,555’). A magnificent drive.



It took us over 12 hours to drive the 160 miles from Canyon in Yellowstone to Fromberg Montana where our family reunion was taking place.

Spectacular views, lush meadows, barren granite outcroppings, and snow….wildflowers in profusion. The best road in all of the Americas.




I am not 100% certain what this flower is, but the book I bought in the Park IS's it as a "Sticky Geranium." I shot this in the meadow of the bear in the above post. While it was cavorting around in the shade of the tree, I shot of few images of the flowers it was chowing down upon.

Hi Schwert

Thanks for telling and showing your interesting pictures.....were not scared with that bear being so close

I hope you were ready to run. Seem you guys are having great fun together doing photography. Looking at your pictures I can't help to think, they will make a great calendar, especially with small notes next to the pictures.

I tried Lightroom 2 again anf just seem to battle to get the hang of it...maybe I am a little slow. I decided to go with Elements 7 again and to continue using its organiser. I found if you take out the RAW pictures then things speed up a lot....

I am looking forward reading your next post.

Siegfried

Hi schwert –

I can’t help, but I must say – your wilderness adventures and reports of them are some of the most fascinating things I like from this site. You truly live in a wonderful and spectacular piece of world and you present it well to us. It’s one of my dreams to visit these places one day again. Thanks for sharing.

BTW: Siegfried is right with his tip to do a schwert-calendar!

Best Regards
Pius

Hey thanks guys. I think I am lucky to live where I do. Growing up in Montana I knew I was in the middle of some amazing country, but only after getting older and moving to Seattle, did I fully appreciate what I had as a kid.

There are some magnificant places all over this earth and I think Yellowstone and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is definately one of those places.

I should have a better Yellowstone series of images later on this fall when I get everything sorted and worked up.

I am still on the fence with Lightroom. I downloaded the trial 30 day version this summer and was quite impressed with the catalog aspects. I was so impressed with that singular aspect that I knew I would buy it once it was released. I had no catalog system at all and relied on memory. I have loaded 300GB of images into the library now and still have 50GB or so to go.

The catalog system of Lightroom really is what I needed. I can now sort via the camera metadata which helps enormously and once I start tagging images with other identifiers it should make my workflow much easier.

I have not yet used any aspect of Lightroom for image manipulation....so far I still take them to PaintShop Pro, but I would like to use the built in tools and possibly avoid PaintShop or PhotoShop entirely.

I am going to likely have to split my images up into multiple libraries as I think I have too many images loaded for it to run efficiently.

Loads of learning needed on this one I must say.

This bear was well over 200 yards away and down in a shallow valley, so I was not concerned for my safety. Running is not a good option with bears as it triggers their predator/prey response and they can very easily outrun a human. I shot that bear with my 80-200 with 2x doubler. Essentially a 600mm lens with the multiplication factor of the Nikon. Plus I cropped that image by about half.

The trail up the Lake Fork of Rock Creek was one of the high points of this summer trip. My wife over the last 3 years has been walking with me more and more....sharing one of my favorite trails with her was just a joy. This trail leads up river to several high mountain lakes. Once higher up you can get above treeline and have sweeping views of the wilderness area. Five miles up this trail is a small lake...."Lost Lake" which is just a few hundred meters off the trail but well hidden....not truly lost, but lost enough to be a great picnic spot. We did not walk uptrail that far this time, but will likely do so next summer.

Here is a glimpse of Lost Lake from several summers ago...

Hi Schwert

Thanks for telling us about your experiences, you did it so well that I said to my wife if we ever go to the US, thats the place I want to visit

I am happy to hear that the bear was not that close, not like you, I will become an instant athlete.

Best

Siegfried

Hi Schwert,
I also started using LR because I wanted a way to catalog my photos. My family thought I was crazy doing it - over 130 GB (about 36,000 shots) - and I thought I had a large collection!!!

The shots of Yellowstone and Montana are beautiful. We never visited that part of the US but did have a chance to see some of the other National Parks (Bryce, Zion and Grand Canyons) a few years back. You really cannot appreciate the wonder and beauty of these areas without going there. (Though you shots make one almost feel like they are there.)

Steve

Bryce, Grand Canyon and Zion are still on my must see list. Every year we talk about going somewhere other than Yellowstone but so far for the past decade and a half we have ended up in Yellowstone for some reason.

I am still overwhelmed with Lightroom and just cataloging my images. I need to figure out some sort of library subsetting by topic that will work for me. I don't see how I could have gone on much longer without Lightroom (or some sort of cataloging program) though. My memory is pretty good, but finding something was getting very hard.

Now a metadata search by camera and lens gets me a reasonable subset that my memory of month or year can assist me in finding what I need very quickly. Once I tag my images with subject etc I will have an even better search routine I hope.

Yellowstone really is a unique place. In just a few square miles it has the greatest concentration of geysers of anywhere on earth. Most are quite easily approached and viewed. The upper geyser basin...something like 1.5 square miles contains over 200 known geysers. The hot pools and other thermal features just add to the experience. The thermal wonders alone make this Park a must see, but add in the super natural wonders of the Yellowstone River Canyon, the numerous water falls, the layers of volcanic rock, and all the variety of animals and you have....well Wonderland.


This is one from a couple of years ago.



Early morning light on the Firehole River. This is in the upper geyser basin, and just up river is "Castle" an old geyser that is making all that steam....not in an eruptive phase, just normal steam venting of it and its surrounding hot pools. The fires of 1988 burned that dead lodgepole pine on the streambank, but the river protected the trees on the other side.

I shot this with my D200 and totally preplanned this shot. I had determined the bearing of the sunrise from this meadow. I had prescouted this river bend out and was certain the sun would fall in line with it. The early morning in Yellowstone are usually very cool and I knew the abundant steam from Castle would likely obscure the sun. I was quite pleased with this result.

This is Castle. A very old geyser as evidenced from the tall geyserite mound. Same morning in 2006 of the above shot.



The area surrounding the vent of Castle has a number of hot pools that all flow into the Firehole river. On cool summer morning...or better yet cold fall or early spring mornings the whole Firehole valley can be enshrouded in steam from these thermal features.

I Love that first shot of the Firehole River. The fact that you pre-planned it does not detract from the beauty of the surroundings and the lighting that you were able to capture. While I have always felt that luck plays a pretty large part in photography - so does being in the right place at the right time and this shot shows that to perfection.
Steve

Well I am about as bogged down in image sorting as a fellow can be...but I am still working through them.

Here are a couple more shots from our July trip to Yellowstone.

First, sunrise in the Upper Geyser Basin (around Old Faithful). A small steaming hot pool reflecting the trees on the ridge.



And then a classic view of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone. Cloud cover shading the middle ground but leaving the foreground and falls in direct light. I really liked this one.



There is Osprey nest just almost at the crest of that yellow lit rock in the foreground, which cannot be seen in this image but we watched that pair work the river while the light kept changing from the rapidly moving clouds.

Wow what an environiment impressive pictures from the old geyser and
the falls. I would like to be there, could be a nice birthday present.
But it is not going to happen because it is in the middle of the winter!
Herman