Yellowstone!

I went to Yellowstone this weekend. We left mid-day Saturday and spent most of that day setting up camp, eating food, and soaking in Boiling. Sunday was mostly spent breaking camp, eating, some hiking, and some soaking. Overall a pretty great time. But I'm super tired and only staying up to edit and post the blog so this might be a short one.

First the photo from Saturday:

My first star trails photo! This is about 270 images taken over two hours using an introvelometer. I had the exposure at 36 sec, f2.8, and ISO800. The camera would take the photo, then wait 5 seconds for it to process, then take another and so on. I did a bit of light painting at first withe my red headlamp and Maglite, but all the yellow trees are lit from the road and cars running just over the rise. They actually turned out pretty cool.

The application I used to composite this is called StarStax. It's a program specifically designed for this, so all you do it throw your images in and hit a button! You can mess around with some setting, but for the most part it's automated. I just exported the final image and in Lr tweaked the shadows, exposure and highlights up a bit. I also ran a graduated filter to increase the saturation of the stars. They are actually all those colors, which is awesome.

Bison! Today we did a hike but ended up losing the trail in snow and hiking out on a random prairie above Mammoth. We also ran into some bison. I pulled out my telephoto and got up behind this electrical box that was probably too close to this bison. He was pretty into eating grass, and ended up walking about 20 ft from me. When he looked up and saw us, we decided it was time to leave, but it was really cool seeing the bison up close. 

To take this I was shooting at ISO100, f9, and 1/200. I have a bunch of tighter croppings of this guy, but I really like this frame. Something about the bison's expression and posture...really like it. 

In Lr I did the following...highlights and shadows down a tad, whites up a bit and vibrance up a lot. That's it. I kept this one pretty natural. 

Here's some more photos from the trip. See you tomorrow!