The past few years at work have been productive but stressful and the last year in particular left me worn down and burned out. I hadn’t taken much vacation time but we either use-it-or-lose-it at the end of the year, so I was trying to decide if I should take most of the month of December off, or if I should take my normal fall hiking trip and then take a few weeks off at the end of the year. While the idea of a month away from work was very appealing, I decided to split up the vacation and take the hiking trip instead.

I realized that as a reaction to the stress I had settled into a funk and wasn’t getting things done that needed to be done. Needing either carrot or stick to get back on track, I settled on carrots with Yellowstone & the Tetons as Carrot Number One. Planning for the weeklong trip of hiking and photography forced me into action.

My contacts had long since run out and while I had been wearing my glasses instead, I prefer to photograph in contacts so I finally scheduled my overdue eye exam and got new contacts. And since it often rains during my fall hiking trips, I picked up some waterproof hiking shoes to replace my worn out pair, a small army of hiking socks to replace my threadbare contingent, and a couple pairs of waterproof gloves. All of which guaranteed a week of unusually hot and sunny weather during my week in Wyoming, but the wet weather gear has been put to good use ever since with the return of the rainy season to the Northwest.

Since I would be taking our much loved but aging Subaru Outback, I took her in for everything from routine maintenance to replacing a broken sensor and leaking head gasket and especially the broken cargo cover that left all my gear exposed to prying eyes. I also fired up iTunes to create some new CD mixes of recent music purchases to keep me entertained on the long drive.

Then there was an extra memory card and battery for my Canon 7D, which I’ve been meaning to order for a year or two, plus a portable hard drive for storage on the road. The hard drive was a much improved solution compared to the DVD’s I used to burn, the backups of the day’s pictures went much faster meaning I could get to sleep sooner. And while I didn’t need the new memory card for most of the trip, oh was I thankful to have it when I met this black bear eating pine cones on my way down from Mount Washburn. Yellowstone put on a show on my last day and I had taken a ton of pictures, and if not for the new card I would not have been able to photograph this wonderful creature during my last hours before heading for home. The extra card was also put to good use during my Christmas visits to Ridgefield.

There were other things too, like the car mount for the iPhone so that the little genius woman in the TomTom GPS app could guide me safely there and back again despite my notoriously poor sense of direction. Both the mount (from RAM Mounts) and the little woman worked wonderfully and the pair have kept me on the straight and narrow navigating Portland ever since.

All of which is a long way of saying that the hiking trip was not only great stress relief but also great motivation for getting things done large and small that have made life better ever since.

But I wasn’t quite finished with my carrots …

While visiting family this summer, my return flight got canceled and when the airline rebooked me for the next day, I ended up with three legs instead of two. At first disappointed but just happy to be going home, I was rather delighted when I discovered they put me in first class for the longest leg of the flight. At the point where the flight attendant brings out the hot towels, the woman beside me leaned over and said, “To be honest, this is my favorite part of flying first class.”

I wanted to say that my favorite part was when they let you go back and kick the people in coach, but I just nodded my head. I understood what she meant, sometimes in life it’s the little things that make such a difference.

The Columbia River Gorge is home to a variety of beautiful and majestic waterfalls, including the famous Multnomah Falls, but sometimes I think tiny little Fairy Falls is my favorite of the bunch. It isn’t, Ponytail Falls (the upper part of Horsetail Falls) is probably my favorite, but I love hiking the trail and coming upon this little jewel where the water tumbles down beside you and runs underneath your feet.

What I love most is photographing the little falls within the little fall.

amateur |ˈamətər, -ˌtər, -ˌCHo͝or, -CHər|

noun
a person who engages in a pursuit, esp. a sport, on an unpaid basis.
• a person considered contemptibly inept at a particular activity: that bunch of stumbling amateurs.

adjective
engaging or engaged in without payment; nonprofessional: an amateur archaeologist | amateur athletics.
• inept or unskillful: it’s all so amateur!

DERIVATIVES
amateurism |-ˌrizəm|noun

ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator ‘lover,’ from amare ‘to love.’

Apple’s built-in dictionary

The term amateur has both positive and negative connotations. When it comes to photography I love being an amateur, and I love it precisely because of the origins of the term: I get to photograph what I love.

While on the way back to my hotel in Yellowstone, I came across a bunch of photographers pulled off to the side of the road to photograph a herd of elk. I took a variety of pictures (including the picture at the top of my tribute to Steve Jobs) and was about to wrap up when I noticed a young elk bull down a ways from where everyone else was. I walked down to him and realized why no one else was photographing him: his antlers were stunted.

I have a soft spot for animals who have more to overcome, so I settled in to spend the rest of the dying light photographing him.

Whether due to diet or disease or genetics, the poor thing wasn’t exactly photogenic compared not only to the dominant bull but even to the other young bulls in the herd. He was mostly grazing but occasionally raised his head and sniffed the air, so I positioned my tripod so that if he raised his head again, his face would be set against the strip of yellow plants behind him. And not only did he raise his head again, but as if on cue he even looked right at me.

You’re beautiful to me, little one.

The bull on the left seemed rather taken with this particular female. I couldn’t tell if he was in love with her or shaking her down for lunch money. There’s some nice mountains in the background too.

God bless the Tetons.

My plans for this fall’s trip to Wyoming were literally made at the last minute. I had planned to take the week off but wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. It had been a while since I had been to Yellowstone & the Tetons and I was itching to get back, but I was also worn out and not sure I was up to the drive. Then I checked the weather and it was supposed to be unusually sunny and hot, which if you’ve followed along here you know is not my favorite photography weather.

I decided to sleep on it and in the morning made my reservations for Wyoming, starting off in the Tetons and finishing up in Yellowstone, then headed out the door. And it was unusually sunny and hot during the day, despite being cold at night, so I had to deal with 40 or 50 degree temperature changes from when I started hiking in the morning to the heat of the day. While the sunny skies did provide good viewing of the Teton range at sunrise, the park staff had been doing controlled burns and a smoky haze hung around in the valley — not thick enough to be interesting, but enough to ruin the clarity of the pictures. The fall colors seemed to be late in arriving and while some of the aspens had turned, many were still green. And my chronic stomach problems flared up several times on the trip, though fortunately never on the trails despite one close call.

But the worst of it was, I wasn’t seeing much wildlife, and so while I was grateful for the chance to visit this wonderful part of the world, the trip wasn’t ranking very highly compared to some of my other visits. But then on my last night in the Tetons I discovered this male pronghorn in the evening light and things started looking up. The next morning I found the bison herd and my mood got even better.

Yellowstone was hit or miss the first few days too, but the last day turned out to be one of my favorite days in the park, ever.

A long way of saying, I’m glad I went.

Play gets a little more serious when calves grow into bulls. These two bulls were much more aggressive than the little calves I had watched at play, but it’s all relative — the old bull laying in the wallow in front of them paid them no heed. They’re all kids to him I suppose.

When you first enter the parks, rangers hand out flyers warning you to steer clear of bison, as they can turn from passive to aggressive rather quickly. I used to think that no one would really need to be told to steer clear of something this large and this horned, but sadly this is not the case. There was a small group of us watching the herd and one of the men got down into the river bed and walked right up to a calf to photograph it. He came back up onto the bank when his wife suggested it wasn’t a good idea to get between the calf and its mother. Fortunately for him it was just cows and calves in the river bed at that point, the herd got a little more testy when the bulls crossed over.

Bison calves frequently play together in ways that mimic the ways of adults, such as head-butting or one climbing onto the other. Not only was the calf on the left not as into playing as the one on the right, but it was substantially smaller to boot. Not to worry, they were playing under the watchful eye of one of the cows.

An attempt to combine the tight portraits of the face from the previous pictures, but also show the varying shades of brown in this bull’s fur. It’s a touch too tight in my opinion but not only did I not have time to take the teleconverter off the big lens, but it was extremely dusty and not the best place to be exposing the innards of the camera.

This is why I think the built-in teleconverter in Canon’s announced 200-400mm lens is so brilliant. Oh what a joy it would be if my 500mm had one! It would solve one of the biggest and most frustrating challenges I face, regardless of whether I’m in the Tetons or Ridgefield.

I could photograph bison all day long but it’s not an addiction, of this I assure you.

My biggest fear about going to Wyoming wasn’t that I’d be eaten by a grizzly bear. Nor that I’d be caught flat-footed, sans hedgehog, by a pack of wolves. Nor even that my brains would be devoured by the famed zombie bison of Gros Ventre. No, my biggest fear was that my camera would die in the middle of nowhere and leave me on the horns of a dilemma: whether to soldier on without it or to try and find a replacement in one of the small towns at the edges of the parks.

I thought about this for several weeks leading up to the trip but couldn’t come up with a viable solution. On the one hand, my beloved Canon 7D isn’t that old (it turned two yesterday) and is better built than any of my previous cameras. On the other hand, I’ve probably worked it harder and taken more pictures during those two years than all the previous cameras combined. I’m not sure if that’s strictly true, but if it’s an exaggeration, it’s not much of one.

Fortunately the 7D survived with nary a hiccup. It did stop responding at one point and turning it off and on again had no effect. I ejected the battery to force a hard reset and when it booted up normally my heart rate gradually returned to normal levels.

I haven’t been too pleased with many of the design decisions Canon has made with their cameras the past handful of years, but I think they hit a home run with the 7D and it is hands down my favorite camera of all time.

One of my favorite bison pictures from my Wyoming trip, a bit of a whimsical portrait. Even though bison are one of the more dangerous animals in the park, as long as you give them their space they are mostly just dangerous to the grasses of the meadows.

I love photographing the colors of the buffalo, even though all the colors are brown.

Just a simple portrait of an extraordinarily common bird. We have a small flock of Canada geese that winters at work, with a few cackling geese sometimes present too, but since they make a mess of the sidewalks I think I’m the only one that is happy to see them. To me they are also a reminder that beauty lies not too far outside my cubicle walls.

This picture was taken not at work but at, well, you can probably guess.

My last day in Yellowstone was an amazing day, one I’ll remember for a long time. One of the highlights was a small herd of bighorn ewes and lambs alongside the southern trail to Mount Washburn.

If things get a little quiet around here for the next month, it’s because I signed up for NaNoWriMo again this year. I reached the 50,000 word goal the previous two times I participated in 2005 and 2009 but I think it’s unlikely I’ll get that far this year. Partly because in previous years I had a better idea of what I wanted to write and partly because there are other things I’d like to do this month, especially taking pictures, editing pictures, and updating my site. Goodness am I behind.

And partly because I haven’t been sleeping as well lately and am often tired at the end of the day, normally my favorite time to write. The other day I fell asleep as soon as I finished eating dinner, for a night owl like me that’s rather embarrassing so let’s just keep that between us, shall we.

In the meantime enjoy this lovely mountain stream flowing over moss-covered rocks, taken on the trail above Wahkeena Falls in the Columbia River Gorge. I went hiking a couple of times in the Gorge in the weeks before my Wyoming trip, trying to get myself back in hiking shape while lugging the camera gear around.

I’ve seen bitterns catch a wide variety of animals, but even so I was caught by surprise when this one struck into the grass and emerged with a large earthworm. I knew some songbirds like robins ate worms but bitterns join egrets and kestrels as birds I was surprised to see hunting the wiggly worm.

I love, love, love the tiny little horns of a bison calf and finally had the chance for a close-up in the Tetons.

A male ring-necked duck swims through duckweed in Bower Slough.