It stays underground and “cooks” for ninety minutes. If you were able to put an ear to the ground, you can hear the rumblings, gurgles and bangs as the pressure slowly builds. Then with a spurt and a spat it announces its coming. Then, explosion, water and steam as Old Faithful puts on the show it has been doing for centuries. It’s simply amazing, the explosive power!
Lower Yellowstone Falls is a gorgeous and peaceful sight even though it crashes 308 feet down the canyon floor. Don’t let the fact that at the height of runoff, 63,500 gal/sec rushes over the edge influence your impression. Or that that wall of ice beside and front of it yesterday was created by that flow and is nearly half the height of the falls. It’s a calming scene that brings you tranquility, one of many such in Yellowstone, the flowing power.
You heard a tea pot blowing its top, multiple train whistles, car horns, nearly every sound you can imagine as Porcelain Basin in Yellowstone put on one heck of a show. With magma just two miles below the surface, the heat has to have a place to escape on yesterday morning Porcelain was the place! We stood on the rim as time flew past photographing the every changing landscape below. I’ve been coming here since decades and this was the first time I’d ever seen this show. Wow, Mother Nature, it has some inner power!
Shortly after I built vs3.0 of our water feature at The Ranch, I planted the woodpecker perch. Many looking at it wonder why a ten-foot-tall, dead top of pine is planted in the ground four feet from the water feature basically in the middle of the property. If you’re not a backyard bird photographer, you would simply check it off as odd. But for you folks who follow my blog, it’s pretty much operation as normal for me. I’ve put up dead sticks for a long time for backyard bird photography. Well on New Year’s day with the nice light, I set up on the woodpecker perch to shoot for the first time.
Why did I wait so long? The woodpeckers, Red & Yellow-shafted Flickers, Hairy and Downy (along with magpies, nuthatches, and Clark Nutcrackers) have been coming to the perch regularly for about 45 days. Before that, it was pretty hit or miss. I really wanted the Downy, that was my target species. So I waited to set up on it once they became totally accustomed to the perch, me, and the activity at The Ranch. I didn’t want any negative responses. You might be asking what is making them land on the perch in the first place? On the other side of the perch is a suet cake, placed there as they will land as you see on the opposite side of the food. It was all planned for shooting in the afternoon light.
And the background so out of focus? I can shoot at f/22 and it will look just as out of focus because the background is over one hundred yards away. The placement of the woodpecker perch was first, close to living trees and shrubs and the water feature to make the birds feel safe. It was placed for the background I wanted. And most importantly, for the afternoon light. It was a really nice first time shooting the woodpecker perch the first day of the year!
That shot of trees covered with snow takes a couple of weather factors, the first is water. It’s the snow with a lot of moisture content that tends to cling onto trees limbs as it falls. The wetter the better but then the key is cold. But if you have cold when the snow is falling, it’s not wet. That’s why often you’ll see the snow cling and then your won’t as once warmth hits, it drops off from its weight (pine boughs are adapted just for this). The moral of the story, you want the photo of the snow covered tress, or this case, a rock in a creek, shoot it ASAP, don’t come back to get it later. It will be gone!
It’s that time of year when falling snow can be incorporated in your background to help tell your story. Capturing it is pretty straight forward if you think about it like you would shooting burred water or a blurred plane prop. It’s all a matter of how fast the snow is falling vs. shutter speed. The faster the snow fall, the faster the shutter speed. The slower the snow fall, the slower the shutter speed. In this case, the snow was blowing pretty hard so my shutter speed was 1/100. You might have tried this photo but didn’t have the results you desired, what to check?
The first thing I would check is the background, is it dark? You need a background that is darker than the snow in order to see the snow. Gray and green are naturals. Next, did you use flash as I did here to bring out the color in your subject? If you did, was the power of the flash could be such that it was freezing the snowfall? In many ways, it’s a balancing act but with digital, if only take a couple of clicks to dial it all in and have a ton of fun!