Landscapes

Happy Centennial Birthday

Happy 100th Birthday National Park Service. Thank you so much for providing such amazing opportunities to connect with nature and for preserving the wild beauty of this vast country in your many forms and facets.

I still remember my very first National Park visit - a camping trip undertaken in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. I remember gathering firewood, lighting a warm campfire and discussing stories, and spending a night with the stars as my roof. It was also my very first foray into the activity of hiking, and served as an inspiration to take up photography in order to capture the epic beauty of the National Parks

As a commemoration, here is a wild primeval scene from the nation's first National Park, Yellowstone. Gushing geysers, steaming nozzles and aquamarine thermal pools all play host to a dynamic and active sunset scene at Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone.

I have visited many, but I have many more to go, and I am looking forward to visiting each and every one of the 59 parks.

Yellowstone National Park
WY USA

Capturing the spotlight

Sometimes capturing the spotlight is just about capturing the attention of everybody. But at other times, capturing the spotlight means literally that - capturing the spotlight created by point light sources.

As I was wandering through the maze of tufa towers at Mono Lake in California, I noticed that at one location, the crevice was sufficiently small to reduce the sun to a point source of light. With the correct positioning of the camera, I was able to get that spot of light to create a starburst effect, which, with the right exposure, enabled this image of the tufa towers glowing the warm morning light.

The tufa towers at Mono lake are a very enigmatic, yet sad, fixture. While learning about the creation of these tall limestone towers over hundreds of years takes one by surprise, to see these towers trampled over and abused by visitors not paying heed to the signs, is quite troubling indeed. I wish visitors to this unique environment are aware that they are in a very special place and have a little bit of conscience to preserve this beautiful locale for posterity.

Mono Lake Tufa State Natural Reserve
CA USA

Ode to the Tetons

The august days of August is the time of the year when I normally set forth on mountain adventures, heaving up and down winding trails through granite monoliths and grassy meadows while carrying enough weight to make my body complain for the rest of the year. This summer has been a bit different, and hence I have resorted to going through my archives and reliving memories of past summers spent in thin air.

One such undertaking was a grand backpack through the Teton Crest trail in Grand Teton National Park, a 32 mile gem that winds above, through and around the craggy mountainscapes of the Teton Range. Hiking it in August meant that I could catch the best of the short wildflower season filled with daisies, Indian Paintbrush, lupines and tidytips, while also getting the best of the summer weather. The sheer diversity and beauty of mountainscapes I witnessed in that hike was bar none.

Here is one such wildflower-filled scene in the Alaska Basin, a section of the trail outside the park boundaries.

Grand Teton National Park
WY USA

Sunrise draws photographers for a reason. The calm pre-dawn landscape slowly taken over by beams of red, orange, and yellow is a magical sight to behold. But it is in the mountainous landscapes that sunrises become really special.

Perhaps it is the mesmerizing movements of clouds kissing the snow-capped peaks as they slowly take on a coat of the morning colors, or perhaps it is the soothing sway of mist rising up from the mirror-life reflections of a lake, or perhaps it is just the sense of being connected with nature as you smell the fresh moist earth, hear the chirp of the morning birds, or witness the raw beauty of the landscape all around you.

Sure, I had suffered plenty of hardships in making this scene - a severe lack of sleep, a drive up windy mountain roads in pitch-black darkness, freezing conditions that I was not prepared for, and more. Yet, once I set my camera on the trip and started composing, I got into the zone of photography, forgetting the pain and the hardships, and focusing purely on the beauty of the scene around me.

Mt Rainier National Park
WA USA