Tomorrow, off to Idaho.
Off today to the Jackson Hole Aerial Tram, then lunch in the Teton Valley ("Doesn't that all sound soo cool!?" ~ Tracy). Boarding the tram for the ride up the mountain. Rendezvous Mountain. 6,300 ft up to 10,450 ft. It was a beautiful mountain top day! Lunch at the bottom of the mountain. Finished up the day with a lab workshop, dinner on the front lawn grill, and a late night glow stick shoot near Slide Lake. Cabin 183 made dinner! Thanks girls! (Pooyan helped by playing in the raw hamburger).
Tomorrow, off to Idaho.
0 Comments
Up for an AM shoot in the Lamar Valley, then headed home by way of the Grand Prismatic. And a stop at Old Faithful. A final stop for a look at the Tetons: Snake River Overlook. Up for Yoga tomorrow at 8 am!
Up at 7 for yoga at 8. Don't know why I set the clock so early... I was awake when it went off, anyway. Now off to the National Wildlife Museum of Art! Great museum, one of the best I've visited. An afternoon in the lab and now back to the brewpub for dinner. Rodeo shoot this evening! My classmates were less than impressed with the backstage poking of the bulls to make them mad. They were pretty upset about the treatment of the animals. Interesting cultural aspects to the rodeo.
Packing up the truck at 7:30, departure 8:00. Yellowstone bound. Wow! What a trip. No Internet as predicted. Drove through Teton Park to Yellowstone, making a counterclockwise loop. Of course, stopped for lunch, a hike and photos! On to Roosevelt Lodge. Roosevelt Lodge - Got checked in little cabin #50 and started a fire, then went to dinner. Great place! Next up were shots in the pm in the Lamar Valley (no pics for the blog - sorry).
A Supermoon sunset and sunrise shoot. Up at 4:10 this morn. Traveled to Mormon Row and got some great shots. Had a nap and now off to Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve and Visitor’s Center, GTNP Great place. A must see. Phelps Lake. Back to the lab to process more photos this afternoon. Final presentation requires 20 photos, so I am paring several hundred shots down to the best of each day. Had about 10 yesterday. Packing up for Yellowstone Tomorrow! Morning shoots, warm springs and geological wonders await. Thinking of a presentation theme around entropy, one of my favorite topics. Entropy and Conflict seems fitting for this region.
Early morning shoot! This was a very exciting morning. We were up at 4:25 am am pulled out at 4:45. Temp was about 38f, so layers were in order. Coffee, gloves and toboggans, off to shoot the Tetons. Had trouble finding the location, and it turned out the road had been closed so we had to improvise. Good fortune was with us. We stopped at a nearby location, got out of the car and walked about 50 yards and we were standing 50 yards above a Moose family. Everyone started shooting the Moose, getting closer and closer, until the Moose decided we were too close. He climbed the hill toward us, so all 13 of us were hearded along the ridge by the bull. He surprised us and some of the party were VERY close (Pooyan)! Running was in order at that point. After the Moose encounter, my classmate Jessie and I circled above the Moose, away from mom and calf, and worked our way to the Snake river flood plain. We crossed a creek through a swamp to get some great reflective shots of the mountains. Next, we travel to Mormon Lane and Antelope Flatts where we had a surprise close encounter with Bison. He was in a ravine and we drove by pretty fast, about 20 feet from him. Didn't get a good phone pic, but we will be back in that area again. Came back and walked downtown for some breakfast. Had Salmon Eggs Benedict per Professor John Holmgren's recommendation (The Bunnery). Yum! Lecture and lab work this afternoon, then sunset shoot tonight. Sunset shot turned to Supermoon Rise. Up in the morning for Supermoon set!
Late night and early start. Off to find breakfast downtown before community grocery shopping at 9. A good bit more chaos than I am used to, but I'm sure well have it all figured out by the time we leave;) Lunch on the lawn. Went to Lake Jenny. Great shoot day.
My local paper's horoscope for me said not to let anything bring me down or knock me off track! It was very appropriate for the trip ahead. I left the house about 7:25 headed to town to catch the Grey Line to the Pittsburgh Airport. I decided to use the bus, even though the times didn't match exactly. I figured a few extra hours would let me eat and I could save to gas and $80 parking fee by riding the bus. Besides, if I have issues with my carry-on camera gear at security, it gives me extra time to work it out. Discovered fairly quickly my carry-on needs wheels. It was too heavy to really want to carry around. Another Lesson learned the hard way. I never carry this much gear or "stuff" when I travel, but I didn't want to check all my glass, batteries, etc. Maybe ext time I ship it ahead! Lunch at PIT was good. New place is open. And now I sit in Dallas FW waiting for my next ride. Had a hummus an veggie snack from TGI Fridays. Surprisingly good!
So today continues my final preparations for adventure. I've secured a toboggan and packed my gloves (it is supposed to get down in the 30's and some of our photo shoots are sunrise or sunset). I have a roll of duct tape and a multi-tool packed in my checked luggage, and I'm weatherproofing my hat. I noticed my CPL lens filter was a little scratched, so I'll pick up a new one today, along with a water bottle of some kind for the day trips. I still have a couple cords to pack, but just about everything else is ready to go. Oh, have to mow the grass this evening, too. I've decided I'll use my Foursquare account to Tweet out my locations as I move along on adventure. Exceptions will be anywhere there isn't cell service I suppose. Chances are if anyone is serious enough to stalk me through FourSquare, they are already on the trip with me :) I'll try to remember to keep up with locations and occasional phone picture links of the area. Anyone that's made the trip or wants to do so, please chime in! A late dinner and off I go. Until tomorrow! Hope I remember my camera bag in the morning... Alarm clock.... I'm gonna forget something important, obviously.
Apologies in advance, but this Blog series will have a lot of "I's" and "me's" in it. It is going to be a sort of travelog of an 11-day trip I am taking to Wyoming and Yellowstone Park. I saw an ad for this photo trip through West Virginia University's Extended Learning Program. The program (JHPW) has been going on for a few years. The link takes you to the course description and some photos from past visits. Yes, this is an actual class, I'll get a grade and three credit hours! I am calling it a Romantic Adventure for the adventurous, remote, mysterious, and probably mostly idealized imagining of the trip. I've never been to Yellowstone or Jackson Hole, or Wyoming for that matter. I've avoided bracing myself for disappointment of a touristy trap and hold out hope the area is large enough we haven't quite ruined it just yet, even with all the help of conservationists. I want to believe it will be an adventure, so much so I have taken a horse riding lesson in preparation for the trip, bought waterproof matches AND got fresh batteries for my GPS unit. In honesty, I've been preparing for the trip for a few months - the perfect equation for a letdown I know, but as I've said, I'm avoiding those possibilities - positive thinking or positive mental attitude. (I really did take riding lessons, get matches and put in fresh batteries). As some of you may know, I have lived my entire life in West Virginia. WV has some of the most remote and peacefully beautiful landscapes, especially on the east coast of the US. My camp in the mountains of Randolph County affords me almost immediate access to two State Parks and thousands of acres of unpopulated forests (funny, spell check doesn't think unpopulated is a word). I still go for day-long 4-wheeler rides and see territory I've never covered. Many of my web site photos are from these mountains, and that's also why I have a GPS unit (not the kind you have in your car, but the topographical map, Hansel and Gretel kind). I'm looking forward to different terrain that doesn't require cutting out telephone lines and crowds with Photoshop, although I know some of the park sites we will visit will be full of people this time of year. I've been to Nevada and was recently in New Mexico, but that's as close as it gets to this type trip. Those visits were in cities and I didn't have much chance to photograph the natural beauty of the geographic region, another reason I am so looking forward to this trip. My trip begins in two days, on Thursday. I plan to pack most of my clothes and gear this evening (done), allowing an extra day to get whatever I discover last minute I've forgotten. I make it sound like I'm going on a backpack trip for 10-days when we are actually staying in downtown Jackson, Wyoming at Cowboy Village Resort. I will have to do laundry, so I guess that will be "roughing" it for me~ of course, they probably have a dry cleaners, too! Part of my preparations involved figuring out how I am going to store all the pictures I take. On an average day when I am shooting 6-8 hours, I will take 400-800 pictures, each at roughly 22 megabytes each. Some of these photo days will be longer and I planned for 1000 shots a day, or roughly 22 gigs a day. I gave up on the guess math and got a terabyte drive, just to be safe. I may be spending the next year cleaning up and going through photos from this trip. One of the hardest parts of the trip will be the final presentation for class. First of all, I will likely be working on a Mac, and I'm a PC guy (made that decision in 1985.11.04:). I'm not taking a PC, so I will be limited to time I have in the photo lab selecting and processing photos for my final presentation. My presentation is limited to as many as twenty pictures, presented in digital format. I will be looking for my best 2 daily pictures out of the 1000 I will take each day. If the 0.2% factor isn't enough, I also have to think about my story, theme and culminating presentation as I go. It would be easiest had I chosen a topic for presentation in advance, then planned shots to fit my effort. Fortunately (or not), I am not under contract to National Geographic, so the romantic part of the trip will be shooting what I see and deciding how presentation will unfold as it does (called, "freelance" or "broke photographer"). I have a couple general themes in mind, but we'll see how it goes... So, this is the setup for my trip. I originally intended to wait for this diatribe until the night before I left, but I decided to give myself a little extra time for the Blog as well. Also, I'm really just too excited for this thing to get underway! I know I should know better than to build this much anticipation, especially at my age, but hey it is what it is~ its my Romantic Cowboy Adventure and now I can even saddle and ride a horse if I have to! Hope you enjoy the photos to come. Love to have some feedback to look at later!
|
Archives
May 2015
|