China's Yellowstone

(June 3rd) Yellowstone is a very special place in the US. It was the first of the National Parks and is immensely popular. It has a mix of wildlife, beautiful scenery and amazing geological wonders. Zhang Jia Jie is China's equivalent. It was their first national park and has biological, geological, and scenis wonders, but in a very different nature from what we have in the United States. I woke up early in the morning and hurried into the National Park before breakfast to try and get some shots of the mountains in the morning mist near dawn.

I have a thing for mist and fog. I find it very dramatic most times. Every time I see it, I try and capture it with the camera. As you can see by that last shot, I always fail to capture the mood. Some day though, I am gonna figure it out... The fog broke very quickly and cleared up to a cloudless day. Still near the entrance I ran into a wonderful surprise. My ears are always tuned into wildlife, and this time they picked up something that you just don't hear in America.

There was a whole group of monkeys! Some of them were in the trees, some on the ground. They seemed to be having all sorts of fun. The Rhesus Monkeys make some noise, but not like South American monkeys. I had great fun taking a few pictures, like of this female amongst the flowers. It was so early though, I wanted to get into the mountains while the light was still soft. Besides, if there were monkeys near the entrance, they must be all over the park. How wrong I was... For the next two days I would constantly be on the lookout for monkeys with no sign.

Then it was onto the trails and into the park proper. The first part of our day was mostly at low elevation. The trails led through the forest and as the sun grew higher, more and more things would pop into the light. Being so low it meant that the mountains were looking down as they penned us in on all sides. These mountains usually had cliff-like faces to make you feel even smaller.

There many gorgeous little streams at the low elevation. Supposedly these streams are the home to the Giant Salamander. I stood smack in the middle of the stream to take many shots, but never saw any salamanders - go figure. The water was awfully cold though. The streams were the perfect scenario for a new photographic technique I wanted to try. When the light is beyond what the camera can capture in a single image, normally you will either get blown highlights or lose shadow detail. This means you can't really get a good image. But if you take multiple images at different exposures and then combine the images and compress the light range... voila you can make it work. This technique is called HDR and with varied light and gorgeous scenery that I wouldn't be able to come back to, I had to give it a try.