November 2020

The Thick of It
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
2020

Mammoth Terrace #2
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
2020

This section of the terrace was live (flowing) but still largely monochrome in colors.

Mammoth Terrace
Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming
2020

A dormant section of the Mammoth Terrace. A perfect choice for a monochrome image as it was largely various shades of white and off-white deposits.

King of the Hill
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
2020

The hot water and mineral deposits emitting from Mammoth Hot Springs are very good at killing trees as they flow over the landscape but can eventually become fertile ground for new growth once the flow goes dormant.

Little Things Add Up
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
2020

Like stalactites and stalagmites in caves, the features at Mammoth Hot Springs show how little things add up over time. This little bit of water bubbling up at the top of Orange Mound is responsible for much of it’s height of 20 feet or so. It serves as a very obvious metaphor for certain actions of humans, from climate change to “What’s the harm of indulging him as he adapts to his loss?”

Orange Mound
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
2020

We went back down to Yellowstone for a few days the first of this month. Since they closed almost all the roads in Yellowstone for the winter while we were there, the record crowds from even just a couple of weeks earlier were reduced to almost nothing (comparatively). There were only four or five campsites taken in Mammoth campground where we stayed compared to the near capacity 60 sites or so that were occupied when we were there two weeks previous. We spent a bit of time walking the loop at Mammoth Terrace where Orange Mound is located, one of my favorite features to photograph in Yellowstone. It’s not very orange from this angle but quite colorful for sure. It’s interesting how standard camera photos (i.e. little adjustment in Photoshop) accentuate the colors in these formations. I would say the real colors are not quite as intense as in this photo, but they’re close.

Balanced Rock #4
Makoshika State Park, Montana
2020

Spent Beauty #46
Makoshika State Park, Montana
2020

Bare Tree #65
Makoshika State Park, Montana
2020

Back in 2007 when I took early retirement and started seriously pursuing fine art photographer I remember setting my sights on a goal for the future–to “someday” be published in LensWork magazine, the holy grail for a very large number of black and white photographers myself included. (If you are not familiar with it, LensWork is a book-quality, paper-based, anthology-style periodical publication that features portfolios of images by five or six photographers every other month.) Anyway, to my surprise and good fortune, that “someday” occurred the very next year.

After that early success, I figured the next thing to hope for was to be featured on it’s cover in a future issue. Well, after 12 years I’ve had my eighth portfolio accepted in LensWork and finally made it to the cover. Makes me feel a bit like Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, who as they wished for in the song, did get their wish and made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1973.