• Yellowstone sunrise by Jay Goodrich

    The sun is hidden behind layers of fog in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

I Have to Do It – Four Zero

I am not one to toot my own horn. I try to stay as modest as possible. I know as a small business owner I need to be a better marketer and since I am the only full-time employee I need to toot the horn more. So today, I am tooting on a personal level. Today is my birthday and it is not just any birthday, I am now 40, a milestone only in numbers, not life.

The cool thing is that the photo I am highlighting in today’s post was taken in Yellowstone last year on my birthday with my now 5 year old daughter. After which we sat down to a huge breakfast of pancakes, sausage, and eggs. It’s funny how you remember some things in your life so vividly and others you couldn’t pull out of the memory banks with the best recovery software. I guess the ones you remember the most are the ones that are the most important. I wonder what memories I will be creating while you are reading this? You might have to wait until next year to find out.

And since I am tooting, I am also proud to tell you that a different composition of this scene made into the finals of this year’s Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition. And, seven others made it through the semi-final round. Hopefully next year I will have even more to announce.

  • Wildfire Burn Yellowstone byJay Goodrich

    Sunset over a wildfire burn area in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

Yellowstone Image Makes Honors

Jay has just received a Bronze award in the 2009 International Aperture Awards Competition for this image that highlights the foliage re-growth in Yellowstone National Park since the 1988 wildfires. Jay took the photo from above the Lewis River, near the south entrance of the park, this past summer as a thunderstorm was clearing at sunset. This image is part of an ongoing project that we will be providing more details to in early 2010.

  • Sunset Mammoth Hotsprings Yellowstone by Jay Goodrich

    Dead trees highlight sunset over the Mammoth Hot Springs area of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

Yellowstone to Seattle

Last week I was in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks working on an upcoming project. I shot this image at Mammoth Hot Springs. Faster than I knew, I arrived in Seattle, and began searching for images in Olympic and Mount Rainier National Parks. Stay tuned, for more posts, I will be here until the 22nd.

  • Antelope Rut Autumn Yellowstone by Jay Goodrich

    An antelope rustles its antlers on some rabbit brush in early autumn in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park.

October 2007 Photo of the Month

This month’s photo was taken on a recent trip to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. As the sun was still low in the sky one morning Jay managed to catch up with this pronghorn antelope. This time of year the antelope, like deer and elk, are getting ready to mate. In preparation for the season this animal was rubbing its antelers against every sage plant that it walked by. Jay used the diagonal lines of the rolling landscape to layer his depth of field and give the image a greater sense of place. This composition also allowed those lines to translate right into the angle of the antelope’s back. The image was taken with a Canon 5D, 600mm f/4 AF IS lens with a 1.4x teleconverter balanced on a thick-pile fleece jacket out of a rental car window. (The rental car can be the ultimate moving photo blind). The image was imported into Adobe Lightroom where basic color corrections were done, it was then exported to Adobe Photoshop CS3 where it was cleaned up and addtional corrections made before uploading to the web with Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.