The last time I was in Jackson Hole Wyoming this great storm swept across the Grand Tetons. I shot some photos of the storm but never really liked any of the images. For me, these images just didn’t pop. At first, I felt they were all too monochromatic. The colors were all too muted for my taste. If anything is obvious about me from looking at my images, it’s no real secret that I like chroma. I think it is because it’s the way I see the world. It was a grey stormy day, but my images just didn’t reflect the scene the way I remembered it. Also it was before I shot virtually everything in brackets from a tripod in case I wanted HDR post processing as an option for the images. So, the images just sorta sat on my hard drive waiting to be rediscovered. When I ran across this image today I had a bit of an epiphany; Since the image is somewhat monochromatic, make it truly monochromatic. And so, by pulling out all the color and with a bit of dodging, burning & contrast enhancement, I was finally able to have the photograph more closely match the image in my memory.

I only had one morning in Jackson Hole Wyoming to take some photos, so the previous afternoon my wife & I drove around looking for some great locations. We woke up before the sunrise & drove to what was to be our first location. The original concept was to get the sunrise hitting the tips of the Grand Tetons reflected in this creek. As it turned out the fog was so thick you could hardly see the creek, and the mountains were totally hidden. I waited, hoping the fog would lift, but by the time it started to slowly dissipate my original shot was gone. I took a few shots & we left for my other locations before the sun got too high. Although it was not at all what I originally envisioned, with a bit of post processing to help pull the mountains out of the fog I really like the way this image turned out. You can see a couple of other images from that morning here.

Jackson Hole Wyoming is one of America’s truly beautiful places. The morning I took this photo I got up at o-dark thirty in hopes of catching the Grand Tetons bathed in the golden light of sunrise. Unfortunately, it was foggy, really really foggy. You just never know though so I went to the bank of a small stream & shot some interesting photos in the foggy mist. (I’ll post those another time.) After the fog started to lift I drove out to Mormon Row in Grand Teton National Park and captured this image of this century old Mormon cabin.