Our summer outing covered all that but seemed somehow constrained mostly due to the relentless, almost continues terrain known as badlands. They range in one way or another from Utah and Colorado through both the Dakotas. In an open battle now with time and geography I’m Consciously trying to “knock off” national parks I’ve not as yet had the honor to photograph. That list is now both increasingly shorter and harder to accomplish. I’ve done what I call the easy ones dozens of times, some much more, but now hunger for the rest which will take much more time, effort and logistical planning.
The discipline this time however was a park I had planned on visiting many times but just never seemed to get there for one reason or another. The shame is definitely on me! This time we added two national monuments and a park I had not experienced for almost thirty years as well. Thrown in for good measure was a area for me of legendary lore, one I had always heard about but never had the thrill personally.
The areas included Dinosaur national monument, Wind Cave national park, Mount Rushmore national memorial, Badlands National park and both units of Theodore Roosevelt national park.
I’ll be working images for some time to come. Well over two thousand frames we’re shot and I’m posting them in the New Images gallery as I work. I’ll be featuring some of them in coming posts.
The image above is from Dinosaur national monument as is special for me because it is the place where the Green and Yampa rivers converge above the Grand Canyon. While I have rafted the Grand Canyon numerous times and photographed up and down the two hundred seventy seven miles of river cutting through it, and have done the confluence in many ways of the Green and Colorado, I had yet to see the confluence of the two rivers mentioned above. Island Park is in a part of Dinosaur national monument where the now Green river flows down stream headed south until meeting the Colorado, where it twists west through Grand Canyon.
The passing afternoon thunderstorms began to filter direct light that engulfed this breathtaking bend in the river that created the islands that certainly had an impact in the decision that gave its name, Island Park. The metering was off the embankment to the right. The highlights in the background were six stops of light brighter and presented a distinct problem. When the focal point, which was the beautiful reflection in the river, is some distance into the image I know I need to keep the shadows from becoming prevalent. If I didn’t have information in the shadows a silhouette would have rendered the image unusable. I did consider re-framing the image with a different lens. The solution here was to overexpose by almost two stops, checking the meter reading of the reflection with that reading keeping them both where I thought the mid, or 18% gray should be, then cut the highlights with a 3 stop graduated neutral density filter. My thought is that I stared with a six stop differential then upped it to eight and then cut it back three with the filter keeping in mind that I never want to balance the exposure. In the end I ended up with the same balance between highlight and shadow but with an mid tone reading that was now almost two stops more thus giving great detail in the shadows.
