Living close to Yellowstone National Park has advantages, one of them being able to photograph the park when it's showing the best side of her bubbling personality.  My father taught me that the best month to visit the park is October; the huge crowds have dwindled and the wildlife is active and getting ready for a winter that sets in too quickly.  It's fall and all the wonderful things about this season are shown in abundance in Yellowstone, and wildly changing weather can make for some very memorable moments, but even this part of Yellowstone National Park's personality has changed.  Over the decades others have found the wonders of the park in the fall, so it's not as empty as I remember it when the nights turn cold.  Also, there are little of the services that summer visitors expect from a National Park, so you need to be more prepared.

    The weather in Yellowstone in October will be crazy different from day to day; you may get a blizzard or it could rain, it could be seventy degrees, and you'll need sunscreen for that nose.  So I always advise to bring warm clothing; even in summer the nights in the park can be brutal for those that only packed shorts, as snow in June in Yellowstone is not that unusual.  In October everything is magnified by the season of fall, so pack up that winter jacket and head to Yellowstone National Park in October.

     We headed to the park for a day of shooting photographs of the Lower Falls; at 308 feet it's an impressive sight when you feel that you've found this place in the forest.   I've been to Niagara Falls, and the feeling is completely different when you find the "roar in the forest" at Artist Point, which is my favorite spot in Yellowstone National Park.   And wouldn't you know, it was cold and raining on and off when this week's picture was taken, but for digital darkroom work nothing is as useful as a cloudy day.  So, between drizzles I took my handheld shots of the Lower Falls at Artist Point, and muggled my way through the mostly European crowd to the other side of the viewing platform.  It was there while waiting for the crowd to dwindle, and the rain to lighten up a little, I saw a little pine tree that stopped my heartbeat.  It wasn't just perched on the mountainside, it was hanging on for dear life.  Hollering, "look at that," made my wife Deb, and the only other folks on that end of the viewing deck, a young couple from Germany, look at me like there was something I'd witnessed that they'd missed.  That poor little tree was right there in front of millions of visitors, yet I saw something in him others missed; he needed his picture took.  

    I was proud of that little pine and the shot that came out of the insight, and as it turns out others loved it as much as we did.  Pinnacle Bank of Wyoming, thirteen locations, one near you, made it the cover shot for their calender, and I felt almost famous.  When I started looking at the map of Yellowstone National Park, it was enlightening to know that the far "Seventh Ridge" was the northeast rim of the Caldera!  so that eternal struggle for life  we all face, even this wonderful little pine tree can never really win.

     This Yellowstone National Park photograph of the tree was taken with my Canon 40D and the kit lens in the rain.  Shot RAW and white balance adjusted, as is color and sharpness, because this is digital not film, so don't be afraid of the medium.  I've printed them small and I've printed them big, and everyone loves  them all, but it was really a magical moment of inspiration and a little pine tree that makes this week's shot so beautiful.