Springtime in Yellowstone (Video)

Springtime in Yellowstone from Thayne Shaffer on Vimeo.

I’m still catching up on the summer’s photos. Last year (2011) my family and I visited Yellowstone during the first week of June. It was an amazing trip, and we saw a greater diversity of wildlife than in any other trip in memory. This year my daughter and I decided to go back this spring in hopes of seeing wolf pups.  It was rainy, snowy and cold, but equaled last year’s trip in wildlife spottings.  We learned that it was a little early to find wolf pups away from the den, but in spite of the weather, it cemented springtime as an amazing time to be in the park. 

I also did some experimenting with my camera shooting some time lapse sequences. They’re simple, but fun.  There’s a sequence of a sunset near Buffalo Ford just west of Lamar Canyon. I tried everything I could to remove the color banding.  I even went back and rendered it directly from 16-bit TIFFs.  However, somewhere between the rendering and the export Quicktime 7 Pro compresses the file and the color bands show up. A little research indicated that this is a weakness of the default codec used by iMovie and Quicktime, so I’ll have to keep working on it. But I guess that’s the point of experiments. Stay tuned.

The video is also a little long, so I had to down-sample the resolution in order to meet the 500 meg limit on Vimeo.  But, in spite of the less-than-perfect image quality, it’s a fun look at our trip. If you’ve never been to Yellowstone in the spring, put it on your list.