Wyoming
Now somewhere in the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota there
lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon…. Oh, sorry this happens when I am listening
to music while writing. What I meant is not too far from the Black Mountains of
South Dakota is Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming. After Peelee Clark
and I enjoyed a morning parade and an early afternoon rodeo in Deadwood, we
headed to Wyoming. When we decided to walk completely around Devil’s Tower on
Tower Trail, a mostly paved 1.3 mile trail that circles the Monument, I decided
that it was a perfect opportunity to do a full photo study.
Photographers often do studies of a single subject. This
helps to teach the eye what to look for and stretches one’s perspective. This great
exercise means that you learn to see the world in a different way. The process
involves shooting a subject from various angles, whether from walking around the
subject, or getting higher or lower than the subject. There are also other manipulations
that you can invoke, such as composition, changes in lighting, and advanced techniques like Tilt-Shift,
exposure changes, and HDR (high dynamic range).
Ideally, a viewer of the images later can tell that the
images were all shot of the same subject. However, a good study will ideally result
in images that all have something very different about them. Occasionally
the subject might not even be obvious in an image because the photographer zooms in on
a small feature of the subject, hides it in a wider angle, or features an aspect
tangential to the subject.
I am quite thrilled with the diverse images I captured at Devil’s
Tower. I will also say that it is super convenient to bring your own Park
Ranger with you on your visits to National Parks and Monuments. I know a great
one if any of you are interested (wink, wink).
Peelee explained that the prayer flags tied to the trees around
the monument were placed there by Lakotas who consider the land sacred. You are
not supposed to photograph them, so hopefully I edited out any that accidently were
in these images.
He also shared the Native American folklore that tells how the
striations came to be on the rock. The story is that two young girls were
playing in the area when a large bear began chasing them. The girls climbed to
the top of a large rock, but the bear climbed toward them. The Great Spirit,
seeing the bear was about to catch the girls, caused the rock to grow up out of
the ground. The bear kept trying to get at them, but could not climb as the
rock grew and just scratched the rock with his claws but fell down to the
ground. The claw marks are visible on the rock and according to the legend, the
two girls are still on top of the rock.
Bottom line, this beautiful place should go on everyone’s bucket
list. Oh, and thanks Peelee!
If you came to this first through the blog, know
that there are more photos on the related Facebook post.
Google Album of these photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/6TwL3QZZ1Ms8eE1o9
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