Yellowstone in Winter: Castle Geyser at Night (Ian Plant)

As always, I’m on the lookout for opportunities to photograph images as night. I find that at night I can show familiar subjects in an unfamiliar way, and I strive to reveal something unique about the subject that cannot be seen during the day. I spent four days in the Yellowstone interior at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, which put me right in the heart of the Upper Geyser Basin. Each night, I stumbled around in the dark hoping to find something interesting to photograph. Night work is challenging to begin with, but further complicating my efforts was the almost unrelenting snowfall (complicating the use of flash) and the erratic erruption schedule of many of the geysers. Being at the right place at the right time proved to be rather difficult.

On my last morning at the Snow Lodge, I got up two hours before sunrise and tromped over to Castle Geyser, one of the more dramatic geyser cones in the park. I had been keeping an eye on Castle since I arrived, hoping it would errupt at a good time for photography. I got lucky that morning. Literally the moment I arrived at Castle it began to errupt. Knowing that the erruption would last for almost an hour, I knew I had enough time to set up my shots, but I had to move quickly as dawn would soon approach; too much light in the sky, even a completely cloudy sky like I had that morning, could ruin my planned night shots. As it turned out, I had about 20 minuted of shooting before the sky brightened enough to start messing with my shots. When using colored flash gels in the dark, your choosen colors stay the way they should, but during twilight a fair amount of ambient blue light mixes with your flash colors, turning yellow to green, red to purple, and so forth.  

This first image was made in complete darkness. I alternated between red and yellow gels as the geyser errupted to create this almost volcanic image:

I made this second image during twilight. Notice the blue color in the sky (recorded during several minutes of exposure) and the purple tinge to areas lit by the red flash bursts. Also, it began to snow during this image, so the flash lights up some snowflakes in the sky — not a bad effect for this image, but if the snow had been heavier it might have ruined the photograph.

I’m curious to know which image people prefer.  I have included a poll below: please let me know what you think!

 

~ by mountaintrailphoto on January 2, 2009.