I normally don’t take black and white pictures. Aside from preferring bright, saturated color in my pictures, I don’t have a darkroom. A darkroom (along with lots of experience and patience) really is necessary for getting worthwhile results in black and white. But when I visited Yellowstone I decided to try loading my spare camera with black and white film as a creative way to deal with the inevitable overcast skies.
Rediscovering those negatives in my “digital darkroom,” I found that
the black and white images offered a very different perspective on
Yellowstone. They have a depth and tactile quality quite unlike color
images.
Click on any picture to see a larger version
Driving through Grand Teton National Park on the way to Yellowstone, I
saw an “in-holding” ranch with a gate and fence that nicely framed the
Tetons. An old truck heading toward the gate completed a picture that
could have been taken 50 years earlier. I haven’t been able to find out
what the “MH” stands for; the ranch may no longer exist.
In the summer of 1988 Yellowstone experienced a devastating fire that
burned over 35% of the park. When I visited three years later the damage
was very apparent in large expanses of charred and fallen trees. The
fire was more of a disaster for the Park Service than for the trees,
since it ignited a major controversy over fire management policies. For
the lodgepole pines that make up most of the forests in Yellowstone,
fire is an essential part of their life cycle. Seeds can’t germinate
until fire frees them from their pine cones and releases the nutrients
locked in trees that might be 250 years old.
Despite the fires there were plenty of trees in Yellowstone, including
ancient pines and numerous stands of aspens.
These two pictures of the Yellowstone River and its Grand Canyon are
similar to the color pictures I have on the
main Yellowstone page. In
fact, I took them right after the color versions, switching cameras on
the tripod. But they have quite a different feeling in black and white.
The wide view of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Lower Falls
becomes almost abstract in black and white.
Although I visited Yellowstone at the end of May, snow was still on the
ground. Had I arrived a week earlier, many of the park roads would
not yet have been plowed. The snow provided interesting contrast with
the trees and dark ground— and with the Yellowstone river.
Finally, here are two geothermal features. At left is a mud pot. As the
name implies, it’s a fumarole crater full of mud. There’s not quite
enough hot water to make it a liquid boiling pool, but just enough to
shroud it in a sulphurous fog. At right is the base of a geyser that
wasn’t erupting at the time. Its travertine formations still have
interesting textures.
Some notes on black and white photography
| Main Yellowstone page |
| Places page | Virtual Light Table Home |