I finished my last book and print signing in Yellowstone on August 25th. It was a wonderful time to meet visitors in Yellowstone and talk about the park. I did a total of 15 signings over the summer with the majority of them at the Old Faithful Inn. My day usually started with a sunrise walk around one of the park’s geyser basins. It is illegal to walk off the boardwalks so many geyser and hot spring photos tend to look the same. I decided I wanted to try to do something unique with my images while still staying safe and following park rules. The first choice was to obviously shoot in some unique and different light conditions. For this post I’ll share three different photos of Sawmill Geyser which is located in the Upper Geyser Basin, home of Old Faithful. The photo above is a pretty standard image of Sawmill in eruption. The early morning light creates some nice color and detail in both the eruption and foreground. One of the challenges of Sawmill, as with many of the thermal features, is that the boardwalk is visible from almost every angle. It’s to the left of the geyser in the above photo but isn’t too distracting.

I opted to try to get some angles where the boardwalk wouldn’t be visible. The second image was backlit, which means the sun is behind, or almost behind, the subject which again is Sawmill Geyser. I only had a 24-105mm lens with me, so I did crop the second and third images into the composition I was working towards. The boardwalk from this angle is actually coming up from a bridge over the Firehole River so it gives a unique low level perspective. But there are two large information signs directly behind the geyser. I needed to wait until the steam obscured the signs. It was a cool morning, so there was a lot of steam and it wasn’t hard. I worked for this image which is more abstract than the first one due to the low angle and backlighting but the sky and trees in the background provide perspective that prevent the scene from being total abstract, which was my next goal.

I moved up the boardwalk a little more but it was still below Sawmill Geyser at this point. I still needed a lot of steam to obscure the signs and the boardwalk does become visible again to the right of the image though it’s all dark so mostly unrecognizable. The foreground grass still provides a little perspective to the scene. But the backlighting here really creates a largely abstract interpretation of a Sawmill Geyser eruption that is quite different than the first image even though they were taken only three minutes apart.