Grand Prismatic Geyser © Brenda Tharp
I'm posting my blog early as I can't stay up past midnight tonight and tomorrow I travel home from Seattle. I just finished the First Annual Betterphoto Summit here in Seattle. It was fantastic! The camaraderie amongst the students and teachers was terrific - many ideas were shared and the presentations by the instructors were really informative and in several cases entertaining. You know you have something good going on when even the instructors were sitting in on every program being offered! All in all it was a great success and I'm looking forward to next year’s Summit which will be even better.
Last weekend I was in Montana, leading a photo trek, and for part of the trip we were in Yellowstone. In a place so popular as that, how can you possibly make pictures that are different from everyone else's’ photographs? By trying to look beyond the ordinary and see what’s extraordinary about the place. Sure, who can resist photographing the elk in all their majesty with huge antlers, and Old Faithful and other geysers are just so fascinating to watch at any time of day. But there’s a million good pictures of geysers and elk from that park. So for me, the gold mine was in abstract images. An abstract can be defined as a piece of the whole, an extraction of the larger object that, when viewed, might even leave the viewer with some question as to what it is they are viewing! Yet even if we do know what it is, the abstract photo can illuminate a particular part of an object or subject that we find beautiful, intriguing, mysterious.
Grand Prismatic Geyser Detail © Brenda Tharp
With that in mind, I began to look at all the wonderful colors in the runoff areas around the geysers, the multihued sedimentary layers of minerals and bacteria that spread from the geyser or thermal vent. Grand Prismatic, one of the most beautiful features in the park, has just those features, and I found that a view from above it really emphasized the colorful bands of mineral-rich dirt. Using my Canon 100-400mm IS with the 1.4 tele converter, I could isolate just a section of it, which brought out enough texture to also give it a painterly feeling. I used a small aperture to give me the most depth of field possible, and waited for the wind to blow the steam away just enough to bring out all the rich colors. I loved the scalloped edge on the pool, and that became the point of interest in the picture for me. From that vantage point, I found many different views possible, all of them abstracted from the big picture. By applying this same approach to many of the geological and geothermal features in the park, I came away with some really neat abstract images to add to my fine art collection.
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