Bad plan, lesson learned!

"bad timing"

Moulton Barn in Teton National Park

I’m back from dropping my prints off to the National Museum of Wildlife Art and I’m happy to report no broken frames..;)   As a reward for my delivery prowess, I decided to spend the weekend in Jackson Hole and check out the local art fair.  I must say there are some incredibly talented photographers that display their work at that Art Fair,  including:  Randy Napier, Scott Wheeler,  and Shane Knight .

Back in town, I had a chance to visit David Brookover’s gallery and  must say his landscape shots are inspirational.  I had a chance to speak to David, (briefly) and like many photographers I think he was much more comfortable behind the camera  than in person.  He did have some really interesting information about modern film processing techniques that I plan on learning more about.   After visiting David’s gallery, I got it in my head that I would go and photograph the famous Moulton Barn. It seemed as though everyone and their brother had a shot of this barn, so I decided I might as get one too.   I drove out to the late  John Moulton’s farm in the afternoon to assess the scene, and I quickly realized this was a morning photo since I was, at that point, shooting directly into the sun.  I  figured if I got to the location around 6 a.m. the next day I should be all set since the sun was due to rise at 6:28am.  The next morning came, I woke up around 5:30, grabbed some joe and headed to the barn.   Now, I didn’t bring my tripod along with me on this trip because I hadn’t really planned on taking any landscape shots (mistake), so I had to reconcile with myself that I would  make due with a hand-held shot. Plus,  I knew I could always come back at a later date to take it properly if I truly wanted to,  but right now it was just about getting that shot.

Here’s the funny part: while I was heading over there, it never crossed my mind that other photographers would have made similar plans, and to my suprise I was greeted by six well-positioned photographers (probably had been their for an hour prior to my arrival).   Apparently everybody and their brother has the shot, except for me and these 6 guys!  And due to the location of the barn, the dirt road is only about 30 yards in front of the barn, so there wasn’t a whole lot of room to maneuver and still get the shot.  Instead of saying forget it, I marked it up as  lesson learned, (get their much earlier next time, with tripod in tow), and decided to make due with available space.  Much like a fly-fisherman and his favorite hole in the river, when a photographer has a good spot, they don’t move!  I took a few photos, including the “down and dirty”  HDR version above, called it a morning, and moved on to check out the rest of the Tetons.  The lesson: don’t assume you’re the only one out their trying to get the shot, especially  for a photo that can only be taken at certain times of the day.  So learn from my mistake and make sure you’re there an hour or two ahead of schedule.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 6:00 am. It is filed under General, Landscape, National Parks and tagged with David Brookover, John Moulton Barn, Randy Napier, Scott Wheeler, Shane Knight, Teton Naltional Park, Tetons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.