Winter has many faces in a national park. It might be snowing, it might not. It might be freezing cold, it might be balmy t-shirt weather. My latest photo column has been published in the National Parks Traveler and it’s all about capturing the many faces of winter. If you are planning a winter trip to a national park unit, you should check out the article.
To read the article, click on any of the images above.
Copyright Rebecca L. Latson, all rights reserved.
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Filed under National Parks, National Parks Traveler, Photography, Photography In The National Parks, Seasons, winter
Ok, this post’s title is not very original , but it’s sort of a “two fer” post. The National Parks Traveler has published two of my articles. One of them is my monthly photo column – this month, it deals with photographing water. The other article is a Traveler Checklist with suggestions on things to do and see if you plan on visiting Olympic National Park.
To read the water photo column, click on the topmost image.
To read the Olympic National Park checklist, click on the waterfall image.
Copyright Rebecca L. Latson, all rights reserved.
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Filed under National Parks, National Parks Traveler, Olympic National Park, Photography, Photography In The National Parks, Washington State, Waterfall Wednesday, Waterfalls
There are a gazillion images of Yellowstone National Park’s Lower Falls, but I posted this one to talk about capturing snowfall in an image.
There’s this sort of Goldilocks and the Three Bears choice when capturing a decent snowfall image, imo: too slow of a shutter speed means you’ll get white streaks (unless that’s what you want), too fast of a shutter speed means you’ll barely see any snow at all, and just the right shutter speed means you’ll see little white dots or flakes of snow, like you probably originally wanted.
In this shot, I’d just hiked down a steep, zig zag trail to reach the brink of the Lower Falls. There was nobody else there because the snow was beginning to come down hard. It wasn’t a beautiful, feathery-flake kind of snow. It was more like almost-but-not-quite freezing rain, so the snow flakes were small but numerous, and were beginning to fog up the scene a little. I got this shot, cropped it to get rid of all the melted snow droplets on the lens filter front, then began the steep hike back up to the top of the trail. It was snowing so heavily by then that I could barely make out the waterfall.
The Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River is quite impressive, however you manage to see it. I didn’t realize at the time, that there were quite a few more trails to different viewpoints. The next time I visit this park, you can sure bet I’ll ferret out all those other viewpoints. One can never have too many shots of this waterfall, right? 😉
Copyright Rebecca L. Latson, all rights reserved.
Filed under autumn, National Parks, Photography, Seasons, waterfalls, Yellowstone National Park
A Kalaloch Beach sunset from the gazebo, Olympic National Park
Good morning, class. Today’s lesson will be in composition: as in, what to try and avoid when composing your image.
Now, the image above is lovely, or rather, is looking upon a lovely scene. At the time I captured it, I know I wanted to get the scene below framed by the gazebo structure. However, I must have suffered a bit of a brain fart, because the composition did not come out as I’d hoped. What I should have done (and don’t know why I didn’t), was include at least a portion of a third post into the left side of the photo. Right now, in this image, things look a little weighted and not quite right. There is part of a post on the far right side, and a post in the middle, but absolutely nothing on the left side.
So, the moral (lesson) of this story is to try and make certain that, when looking through the camera viewfinder, your images are evenly weighted with regard to natural frames (like the gazebo posts).
Copyright Rebecca L. Latson, all rights reserved.
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Filed under Canon, Composition, Lessons, National Parks, natural frames, Olympic National Park, Photography
Morning Views of Nugget Pond, The Alaska Range, and Denali Mountain
I write a monthly “Photography In The National Parks” column for the National Parks Traveler. I try to gear the column for any type of photography, from smartphone to point-and-shoot to SLR. I will own up that quite a few of my tips involve things for SLRs, like Neutral Density and Polarizing filters, but for the most part, the tips and techniques I include are for any sort of photographer. One of the tips I emphasize in many of my articles for this column is to visit (re-visit) a favorite spot during different seasons, weather conditions, and times of the day. The images above, taken during an August stay at Camp Denali in Denali National Park & Preserve, were captured during the morning hours, but on different days and under different weather conditions. As you can see, they all look a little different, don’t they?
Copyright Rebecca L. Latson, all rights reserved.
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Filed under Alaska, Canon, Canon Lens, Denali National Park, National Parks, National Parks Traveler, Photography, Photography In The National Parks, Seasons, summer, Travel, weather
The trail back up from Kalaloch Beach 4 in Olympic National Park, Washington
I’ve been a little more prolific than usual, with my writing, and the National Parks Traveler has published another Photography In The National Parks article for this month. This article deals with creating a theme from your national park photos. As you can see from the image above, a favorite theme of mine deals with leading lines made from trails I’ve hiked. To read the article, click on the image above.
Layers of sunset colors, patterns and textures at Sunset Point in Bryce National Park, Utah
Back in April, the National Parks Traveler published my latest photography article, which dealt with finding color, pattern and texture in your national park images. In the article, I described several techniques I always use when highlighting one or all three of these properties in my photos. If you want to know more about those techniques, click on the photo above to be taken to the article.
Note:Â The image above was captured with a Canon 5DSR and 24-70mm f2.8 lens at Sunset Point this past April, 2018
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Filed under Bryce Canyon National Park, Canon, National Parks Traveler, Parks, Photography, Travel
Hi everybody! This morning, I woke up to find that the website to which I contribute articles and photos published a compilation of all of the 2013 articles written by myself and the other contributing photographer. There are photos and links to our complete articles for various photo tips, if you want to add to your existing knowledge base of photographic know-how.
Just click on the photo and you will be taken to the article.
And stay tuned for my Year in Review post with photos that I will publish this weekend.
Filed under Acadia National Park, aerial photography, Alaska, Arches National Park, Big Bend, Colorado, Equipment, Glacier National Park MT, Grand Canyon National Park, Katmai National Park, Lake Clark National Park, Lessons, Maine, Mesa Verde National Park, Mt. Rainier National Park, National Parks, nature, Photography, Travel, Washington State
Where The Trails Take You Photography 
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