Old Faithful Colors

Canon EOS 5D Mark II | Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS | 70mm | F 8 | ISO 100 | HDR, 3 Exposure

I’m still going through the massive amounts of photos taken during my trip to Yellowstone. The very first image in my vacation library is this scene above. I’m pretty excited about today’s image!

Here is a 3 bracket HDR image of the Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. I almost didn’t get this shot! We flew into Jackson, WY and then drove about 2.5 hours (which felt like forever) to our cabin. After a long day of airport security, flight lay-overs and then driving – we were exhausted. We were actually staying at the Old Faithful site in a small cabin, about 300 yards from the Geyser. After sitting in the room relaxing, I decided to see what kind of colors the sky had to offer. When I looked outside, I saw what you see in this photo. I panicked! I had to get my gear unpacked and put together before it was too late. I didn’t want to lose any more time than I already had, so I stuffed essential gear into my brand new LowePro Flipside 300 backpack and ran to this spot.

When I got there, I knew an eruption was happening soon because of the large crowd of people that were waiting. I must have confused everyone around me because I show up out of breath, setup the tripod and camera, then just started firing off brackets! They must have thought I was crazy! So after getting a comfortable amount of HDR brackets, I waited along with everyone else for the geyser to erupt. Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as these colors faded away Old Faithful erupted. So while I wasn’t able to get a shot of the eruption, I think I still lucked out with these colors!

Don’t worry… since we were staying so close to the geyser, I did see it erupt 3 times after this. What an amazing show of power! It was really quite cool. I did get some cool shots of the eruption, which I will share soon!