Day four saw the Sommers once again waking in the pre dawn hours. I wanted first light shots of the Tetons. Leslie agreed to get up and wait with me for the sun to cast her rays across the jagged peaks. Now if you know my wife, you would know how much this act speaks for her love, fealty and character. She is by no means a morning person. Just like I am not a late night person, most evenings I can be found sprawled out snoring on the couch after nine o'clock. But for the second morning in a row my wife soldiered on and we found ourself at the Taggart Lake turnoff, sitting in the cold, rented Toyota, waiting for the sun to rise.
Now I should also add that I had not bothered to consult my ipad or any other means to ascertain the actual time of said sunrise, assuming that it would occur a little after six, the proper and decent time for such events. Unfortunately I had failed to calculate for latitude and the sun was not to breach the eastern horizon until about twenty after seven.
So while I am waiting in the chilly darkness, I would like to tell you a bit about my camera rig and camera philosophy in general. The cup holders in the front console held my 70/300mm Nikon 3.5 vr zoom and my Sigma 10/20mm wide angle lenses. The Nikon D40x usually had the 18/135mm in default position. Leslie was adept at lens switching when we sighted an animal or had to grab a wide panoramic shot, a process that entailed a counterintuitive turn of the bottom lens cover and a freeing of the lens cap and a slight twist of the bayonet mount.
My camera, the D40x, is considered a mere child's toy in photographic circles. It was eclipsed so long ago by the big megapixel jobbers that I am a bit embarrassed to pull it out in front of my photographic cohorts. I have two of these cameras. Why do I use them? A couple reasons. Number one, it is fabulously light, and two it is cheap and three, it is all I need. This camera still has far more functions, features and capabilities than I could ever hope to scratch. I like a light camera because I am always shooting and it never becomes a burden.
My father was an army photographer who transmitted the first atom bomb picture during the big war with his top security clearance. My first camera was my step father's twin lens Rollie. When I was 13 my dad gave me his army issue Zeiss Ikon Voightlander, later stolen from me in New York. My father always had a darkroom in his home and we developed our own black and white film, mostly pan-x and tri-x if I remember correctly. I loved printing but I hated winding spools, always afraid that I would kill a roll in my clumsiness.
When I went off to boarding school at Desert Sun in Idyllwild I took photography classes from a guy named Norwood Hazard, if my memory serves me correctly. We shot medium format Mamiyas and I got a little more comfortable. I developed a lifelong love for black and white photography, and an artistic aesthetic that even liked a bit of grain and could accept a flaw now and then.
In adulthood I somehow landed on another inexpensive camera, the Konica F2, an electronic camera. I had several and a huge flotilla of lenses, now completely useless. I brought this camera to Africa, when I had the money for travel and safaris, that lifetime ago. My father shot his trusted Hasseblad, I shot the cheap but light japanese camera. And please accept my lack of humility when I tell you that I shot rings round most of the people on the trip, including my pop, the professional photographer. I shot mostly slides to cibachrome or type R and need to digitize those slides one of these days because a few were epic.
Anyway in my opinion the most important thing in photography is knowing how to
compose a picture. Forget expensive glass, forget expensive gear, technical perfection and perfect exposure, make a little square with your hands and learn how to frame. (By the way, the Konica met an unfortunate death. It was in a backpack with a half gallon of water, at a Grateful Dead concert in Sacramento, when the lid somehow popped off the water and fried its electronic innards.) Maybe it my own personal choice but even in my career as an art salesman and broker, in my evaluations I always rate what an image "says" over any apparent imperfections it might have.
I still have a problem calling myself a photographer, more like an ersatz artist masquerading as a photographer, because I don't really adhere to the popular shibboleths of the trade. Tough to admit, and I have had five or six solo shows of my work, but it is what it is. Unless I need a radical depth of field, I shoot a lot on automatic, sans flash. Occasionally I will switch to aperture priority or a program setting. If I am feeling religious or guilt ridden about being a mere point and shootist I will sometimes get my automatic exposure setting and then put the camera in manual mode and bracket a little bit. The problem is that the cameras do such a remarkable job of automatically exposing these days that I find that when I act like a luddite, I sometimes completely miss shots futzing around with the gear. The important thing is the finished image and I can do a lot in post production to deliver my vision of the photographic event. I print my own pictures because I don't want to let someone else make my artistic judgements for me and there are always a million of them.
Now many of my camera brethren are on the manual setting all the time and I maybe would like to be like them when or if, I ever grow up. I was hunting around for a medium format Mamiya or Fuji to take on the trio but couldn't afford it. Because the reality is that film is still where it is at. Pixels suck. Film is rich and lush and in the final analysis there is no comparison. Look at Thomas Sauerwein's work in the upcoming show. Breathtaking. It is sort of like the vinyl, digital debate in music. Vinyl wins hands down. Zeros and ones to the nth power, something vital and organic still slips through the cracks. Having said that, there is an ego trip about film that is also sort of laughable. I was on an eight hour trip up a mountain and back at the Wave in Utah and saw germans lugging heavy 8 x 10 large formats up the arduous trail. I will take a thousand pictures for every ten of theirs and I think that I will be able to match or exceed their "win rate" every time. Saw some 8 x 10 guys at the Snow Lodge this trip as well, god bless them. Would love to play around with them but they are just not practical if you shoot as much as I do.
So I will continue to lug around a kid's camera, knowing in my heart that with a good eye and a decent lens, everything will be just fine. Everything on the market is so good in the digital world nowadays that there is little need for techno envy, for justifying the newest and extremely expensive outfit, especially when the new camera weighs around five lbs. and has so many possible adjustments that you need a masters degree to get through the manual.
The other conceit is that everything must be shot in raw format. I shot a portion of the trip in a raw/jpeg combination, took up an enormous amount of disk space. I am going to develop the stuff soon and see if there is much of a difference in total picture quality. I still have a hell of a lot to learn and will hopefully keep learning until the end of my days.
So here I am, back in the red Toyota, the one whose color just screams rent a car. We snap our pictures of the peaks and then go back up towards Oxbow Bend, driving by the Church of Perpetual Indignation, or something like that, a little church stuck in the woods. We had shared our flight with a great couple from Dallas whose daughter was getting married in the chapel that morning.
A ranger is at Oxbow Bend and tells us that it is the finest morning he has ever seen for reflections in the river. A V of geese flies across our path, right to left. An Idaho man, about 20 years younger than I, is in a wheelchair on the bank, taking pictures with his girlfriend. He has apparently recently lost his feet and they are bundled and bandaged. I loaned him my wide angle and enjoyed our brief conversation.
We swung down to Colter Bay, a little cove that Terry S. and Jan said that we had to check out. We walked down to the water and felt the presence of bears at the deserted stop. We pretty much stopped at every possible stop in the two parks the entire trip, trying to leave no road uncovered. No turn unstoned?
I wish.
We continued back into Yellowstone, the 75 mile commute from Jackson now becoming familiar and old hat. And always magnificent. We would drive the northern upper loop today, to Mammoth Hot Springs and east into the Lamar Valley. The Canyon to Tower road is now closed for the year on account of excessive snow at the Dunraven Pass so we will take the longer route and see where it leads us.
We were ambling north in the morning, I think somewhere near Big Thumb Creek when we spotted a car or two parked off the road. We slowed and saw what our fellow visitors were admiring, a huge adult male grizzly to our left, on the side of the road, digging for grubs and insects, his huge claws easily cultivating the earth. I imagine that we were about 60 yards from the bear. A young ranger showed up and made us retreat to a bit more sensible position. We watched the bear, who seemed quite unconcerned with us, for over forty five minutes. I showed his picture to an experienced guide who said that he was a huge bear and probably weighed in at eight to nine hundred pounds. Leslie and I had watched a video of a man who had survived a bear attack and watched a grizzly cover 90 yards in the blink of an eye. They can chase down an elk. I am glad that we were not the objects of his ire. He sort of reminded me of an oversized gorilla. Huge arms and legs, the size of a tree trunk and a beautiful silver back.
We continued on to Biscuit Basin and walked around the geysers, fumaroles and steaming ponds. Leslie loves this topography so much. We got to the trailhead for Mystic Falls but decided not to make the trek, not wanting to make the trek without bear spray. Plus, my feet ached. I had thrown my hiking boots in my suitcase without ever actually trying them on and had forgotten how much they hurt my right heel.
We made our way up to the northern regions of the park, Mammoth Hot Springs had a fair amount of tourists hanging around checking out the large elk roaming around the buildings. I wanted to get away from humans so after a quick trip to the john and the store we made our way east to Roosevelt and the Lamar Valley.
The topography of the park changes completely in the northeast area. Huge valleys and plateaus. We saw many large herds of bison, a few pronghorn and elk. We turned down the road for Slough Creek, an are where my friend Kerry thought I might see wolves. No wolves, one emaciated coyote. It was great to be out on the plains. We drove south on the Tower Road until we were blocked. Another reason to come back and visit the park again. There was some very interesting rock formation and geology in this area, and the yellow colored dirt and rock that gave the place its name.
We drove around Yellowstone Lake once more and stopped at the Excelsior and Grand Prismatic pools, the largest thermal features in the whole park they were once known as Colter's "Hell's half acre." This pool and geyser group was amazing because the whole area shrouded in mist and completely obscured people right in front of your eyes.
The pools themselves are a plethora of color and texture. The colors are produced by microbes that can thrive in the up to 200 degree water. They are called biological mats and are being carefully harvested now for science and medicine.
We went back to Jackson. We had been thinking about the elk chops at the Gun Barrel all week and had to go back and have them again. I had a mixed game platter with elk, buffalo prime rib and the venison wurst. Les had the elk chops. Even the vegetables were great this time and we met a nice couple from Chicago at the next table. We found our way back to the lovely house on the hill and snuggled under the warm and toasty blankets, waiting with glee to arise the next morning for another chapter in our grand getaway.
