Last week I had the pleasure of visiting Yosemite National Park. It was the second time I visited the park and it was awesome to see it in Winter with less people around (but more photographers it seemed) under a nice blanket of snow - such a pretty place!
Ok, of course there is always a story behind the picture: after long and adventurous drive to Kirkjufell along the slippery looking gravel road 54 in continuous rain, my wife and I arrived in our campervan on location some time past sunset at 1am in the morning. Kirkjufell was covered in grey skies, the occasional rain shower and no sign of a beautiful reflection as you see so on so many images of this location. My wife decided to sleep, so I took my gear, switched to BW mode and tried to photographic this iconic location from as many angles as I possibly could using a variety of lenses . That took me around 2-2.5hrs hours and tired I started to slowly walk back to the campervan when I saw a slight color in the sky in the corner of my eyes - oh no!! Do it all again now? So here I repeated most of my earlier comps, but this time with a bit of color in the sky. I still love the very misty mood of the image. This composition is of course nothing unique, but for me it is still a composition that shows so much of this iconic location. Captured ultrawide at 12mm on a Sony A7Rii with Canon 11-24mm.
Ever since I saw images of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness for the first time I wanted to visit the area and see these interesting rock formations for myself. A road-trip this fall via Arizona to Albuquerque gave me finally this opportunity. Unfortunately for me, my planning for this area was thrown out of the window when my GPS stopped showing my previously researched locations and my only choice was just to go out there and find them. It is so easy to get lost at Bisti, you just go over one Badlands and from there it looks all the same in any direction. After hiking for 45 minutes, I arrived at this location and was trying to figure out some compositions in this mess of a landscape - there were just too many hoodoos to get organized into a frame. At the same time thunderstorms started to brew in the East and South and then bang suddenly this super beautiful light arrived out of nowhere and I had to even more panic about finding a decent composition and get my tripod in place just in time. This is what I got! Due to the bad weather, my wife and I decided to stay overnight at a different place, so in total I had about 1.5 hours at Bisti!! Certainly a reason to go back there and be more organized!
