I have over a thousand images from Yellowstone, and several hundred from Grand Teton.  I need to

– copy to 2 different external hard drives

– give each photo a preliminary rating in Lightroom

– edit the photo’s with a rating of 3 or higher, perhaps apply a plug in

– re-rate the photos

– create a gallery of the top 30 or so from each place

–  publish to Smugmug, get comments on the photos

– review and decide on the very best 10 or 15, and create a Flash gallery for my web site.

Well at least I’ve got the “To Do” list done.

One of the themes that I keep coming back to is what I call the “Chaos Theory”.  I believe that there is beauty in chaos, and I especially enjoy finding chaos in the midst of beauty.

I have 2 Canon bodies that share the same batteries and another Canon body (converted to IR) that uses a different battery.   Should have had plenty of battery power to handle the day.  But I didn’t count on 32 – 37 degree F temperatures.   From the first shoot of the day I started to get the battery dead message.  Luckily I knew that I needed to take the “dead” batteries and put them in a warm place (inside pocket).  So that by the time the next battery appeared to be dead, I could re-use the last one.  I was able to make it through the day but it involved a game of musical batteries, swapping them out every 30 minutes or so.

The weather has been beautiful with one exception.  Up until yesterday there have been crisp blue skies.   Me, I like some clouds to give texture to my photos.  Also it’s hard to get a good sunrise / sunset photo without a cloud.  It made me lazy and I wasn’t getting up in time to work the sunrise.  Well yesterday I woke up just as the sun was coming up.  I peeped out the window and realized that there were some clouds and a beautiful sunrise.  I rushed outside and took a few shots.   It really was a nice sunrise, and I found the “Whoa” sigh interesting (below).

The problem was that when I came back to my room, I brought the tripod into the room.  (I usually leave it in the car.)  Of course I ended up forgetting it when we went to Jenny Lake / Cascade Canyon.  I had to hand hold for the entire day.  There were times I did 3 shot AEB (automatic Exposure bracketing) leaning on a rock / tree / shoulder/ etc.  I’ll see how these turn out.  I also assume I can do some pseudo bracketing with the raw files in Lightroom.  (Develop normally, create a virtual copy and under expose, create another virtual copy and over expose.)  This some times works with about +/- 1 EV latitude in the raw files.  My AEB files are +/- 2 EV apart.

I thought that Mormon Row would be fun in IR.  The old barn done a zillion times by every photographer to ever visit Grand Teton.  I liked the results, but surprisingly there are a lot of cool buildings at Mormon Row then just the famous barn.