Looking for Details in Yellowstone National Park

A quick note! Join me and Beth Buelow tomorrow evening (Wednesday, September 2 at 5:00 pm MT) for a new webinar: “How important is location to your photography? Two perspectives.” My answer: very important! Our goal with this session is to help viewers work through some of the same questions we have considered ourselves and encourage a more intentional approach to deciding where to spend your creative time. Can’t make the live session? If you register, you will receive the recording for later viewing. I hope to see you there.

With two exceptions (Death Valley and the Great Smoky Mountains), I am nearly caught up with processing my photos from 2026—a first! I usually let my photos linger for years and this bad habit has accumulated into an overwhelming situation, which I am actively and diligently trying to address. This hasn’t been an issue of motivation or time but rather one of confidence. Over the last few years, I have come to care quite a bit less about what others think of my work, have started to like it quite a bit more, and have come to understand my motivations more clearly. So, instead of it feeling like a burden, I have been enjoying the process of culling, processing, and curating much more. I will likely leave the Death Valley and Smokies photos untouched for a bit because I hope to eventually fold both sets into larger projects. In the meantime, I will be sharing a few smaller collections of these new photos over the next few weeks.

This spring, Ron and I ended up in Grand Teton National Park on a whim, which meant that we also needed to end up in Yellowstone National Park on a whim, too. We can’t seem to visit one without going to see the other. Additionally, once winter has transitioned to spring, I find it challenging to go in reverse when it comes to the weather so when we ended up with snowy, windy, and frigid days in Grand Teton National Park, our motivation to be out hiking all day waned a bit and a window opened up to head north to see Yellowstone National Park instead.

When adding the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway (from back when very wealthy people cared about the responsible stewardship and preservation our public lands) into the geographic mix, Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park help form a contiguous band of land that is the heart of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. This landscape is one of the “largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on earth," which makes it the perfect place for an expanded four-lane interstate (proposed by sycophantic United States Senators as the future I-47, which would run from Texas to Montana through both National Parks, bisecting this critical wildlife habit and dramatically changing the character of this landscape in myriad negative ways). Even the places that are considered the crown jewels of the US National Parks system can't get a break these days. 

When driving from the south to the north through this landscape, on the slow, two-lane road that currently connects the parks, it is a little jarring to think that it all exists in such close proximity. In Grand Teton National Park, expansive sagebrush flats extend to the base of the saw-toothed Teton Range, which then abruptly rises into rugged mountainous terrain. The transition from these conspicuous granite pinnacles to the much more geologically and visually complex terrain of Yellowstone National Park happens quickly, and helps visitors know that they have arrived in a very different place even if they have not traveled far. The two places might be part of the same ecosystem but they feel and look like two separate worlds.

With only a few hours to spend in Yellowstone, we headed to one of the main geyser basins for a hike and lucked out in terms of timing. Over the course of a few hours, we saw Old Faithful, Riverside, and Daisy geysers erupt with jetting water showering the surrounding terrain and creating impressive plumes of steam. Although the geysers are always fun to watch, I focused my photographic efforts on looking for and then isolating interesting details, patterns, textures, and rhythms with my long telephoto lens (the Canon RF 100-500mm lens, if you are curious).

We lucked out with mostly overcast and stormy weather, which worked well for extended midday photography. I am typically drawn to cooler color palettes so these photos are not neat additions to my overall portfolio but I still enjoy them as representative examples of the little visual oddities found in the transition zones around the geysers, fumaroles, and hot springs that dot Yellowstone’s landscape. The wild colors, in part, come from the fascinating thermophilic (heat-loving) microbes that form mats, strands, filaments, and structures around the geothermal features. The more permanent structures are mineral deposits that have slowly formed over many years. Together, these details tell a story that is much quieter compared to the “look at me!” geysers but I find them equally interesting and worthy of my photographic attention with each visit to the park.

You can see more of my work from Yellowstone National Park here (ebook), here (portfolio one), and here (portfolio two).