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The story behind the photo: Loree took this photograph
that both of us were very anxious to take because of how obvious a shot
it was. As we were walking along geyser hill taking notes on every
spring and geyser in the area, we came upon one of our favorite springs
in the park, Heart Spring. It is the favorite of many people, including
my dad when he visited me in the park in 1993. The spring rests right
next to a group of geysers known as the Lion Group, which had just erupted
minutes before. While we were at the spring, Castle Geyser began
erupting in the distance. Castle Geyser has the largest cone of any
in the park, and while its eruptions only rise no more than about 80 feet,
the eruptions last for quite a long time and is nonetheless spectacular
coming from its giant cone (an attraction whether the geyser is erupting
or not). Well, we thought we had a real masterpiece with this photgraph
that we made sure that we took low to the ground so as to have the most
perpendicular shot of Castle Geyser and the forests beyond. As it
turns out, however, we had already been one-upped by famous Yellowstone
photographer William Henry Jackson. Later that summer, I was walking
through a park museum and saw nearly this identical photograph in black-and-white
by Jackson. Of course, we got a color shot, but it was still the
sense of getting a shot like this that we thought was special. Then,
I saw another photograph online that was similar (though ours was clearly
superior). So, to be sure, there are thousands of just this sort
of photograph. Nevertheless, I think our camera did a nice job of
capturing the whole seen without a lot of wasted space. Furthermore,
the key to me for photographing Yellowstone thermal features is to get
low to the ground. Sometimes, I even lie on the ground to take the
photograph. The lower to the ground you get, the less useless sky
you get and the closer to the true image is achieved. Yes, I cropped
this photograph, but the uncropped version was to be used in the Toledo
Museum of Art in a community art exhibit and an enlarged version is on
our wall. Thus, despite its not being a unique shot, it is still
quite special to us, on a day it seemed that every geyser erupted within
half an hour of each other. That was the kind of luck I tended to
have at Old Faithful, though I did not always have my camera to record
that luck.
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