Don’t ever be afraid to fill your frame with what you see through the camera’s viewfinder. This is Canary Spring, at Mammoth Hot Spring Terraces in Yellowstone National Park. I’ve visited this in the summer (very early in the morning before any of the crowds arrive), and can tell you how different the colors look then as opposed to now (a post on that to come later).
Anyway, here is a series of three shots, each one closer to the terraces of this hot spring. The first one is a wide-angle view captured early in the morning of my next-to-last-day in the park. I had a snowcoach tour later in the day to Norris Basin and wanted to spend the morning at the travertine terraces.
The other two shots are close-ups, each one filling the frame with more of the yellow and ochre shades of the travertine terraces. And to think, I once thought of this particular area as one of the most boring of the geothermal formations in the park. I don’t think that, now, of course.
My usual routine is to capture a wide-angle shot first, then to either use a telephoto lens to get a closer view, or I crop a part of the original shot later during the editing stage to get an image filling the frame.
On this morning, it was a rather gray day. It snowed off and on, and the area around Canary Spring exhibited a soft, painterly quality to it. I was the only one there. By the time I left on the snowcoach at around 12:30 later that day, the place was packed and looked like a zoo. Mornings and late evenings really are the best time to visit an iconic location, and the lighting is much better for photography then, as well.
Copyright Rebecca L. Latson, all rights reserved.
Where The Trails Take You Photography 
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