Which is your favorite National Park?

Thank you for visiting my blog.
I hope that you will also visit my website www.JerryGinsberg.com where a more complete collection of photographs is displayed.

As a veteran of 57 U.S. National Parks with only one left to go in American Samoa, my most frequently asked question is, “What is your favorite national park?”

This question is impossible to answer. So many are favorites because they are all different. Each of our national parks has its own personality. Taken on the whole, the parks offer so many unique sights and features. Individually, many parks possess a variety of widely differing things that appeal to visitors who arrive with varying interests and expectations. Some parks are completely wilderness with few, if any, facilities while others have resorts and family friendly play within their borders. Some are crowded in summer while others are best visited in spring, fall and winter.

Beginning below, I shall try to guide you through the parks as a means of both encouraging as many people as possible to get out and enjoy these national treasures
and helping to maximize your experience once you get there.

Let’s begin by dividing up the whole list of 58 national parks and many national monuments and other treasures as well. Trying to swallow the whole country in one gulp is too daunting a task for anyone and should not be attempted.

We can group the parks in several different ways. Geographically and by season are probably the best ways in which to begin. Both have their strong & weak points.
Let’s examine some of these in a general discussion. The Eastern sides of California’s Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks along the Eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada Mountains are easily visited from about Memorial Day through the end of October. These are both close to the Northern end of Death Valley National Park which is best avoided during the summer due to its status as the lowest point on Earth and the resulting extreme and often dangerously high temperatures prevalent there at that time of year. My favorite time to visit Death Valley is from Feb. through April when temperatures are more tolerable and we might be lucky enough to behold a lush bloom of spring wildflowers carpeting an otherwise bleak and barren landscape. But access to close-by Yosemite National Park can be difficult during that period because Tioga Pass, its Eastern entrance, typically does not become passable until Memorial Day or June 1 due to snow accumulation at its elevation of almost 10,000 feet. So you see that geographic convenience must often give way to the realities of weather and climate. Another criteria, more important to the photographer than the typical family, is seasonal color. Most folks will enjoy Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming all summer and well into the fall. It’s really beautiful during this long season. However, the photographer will wait until the very last week of Sept. when the quaking aspen trees turn to shimmering gold and throw their glorious reflections into the calm Snake River as it meanders all through this breathtaking park.

So you see, there is both an art and a science to maximizing one’s enjoyment of the various bounties that these very special places have to offer.

Stay tuned for our next post.

Twenty-five years ago, nature and more precisely landscape photography was still a pretty exotic pursuit. Not all that many people were turning out spectacular work and those who were were mostly leading fairly solitary lives out in the wilderness.  Today, however, that has changed in ways that could not have been imagined a mere generation ago. With the rise of the digital age, high quality technically advanced cameras and lenses are available to most everyone. These electronic marvels offer capabilities only dreamed of a scant few years ago.  This tidal wave of technology has drawn millions of people into photography and allowed them to produce images previously attainable only by photographers with much more skil and experience. This in turn has made for the creation of  tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of new images each year. In other words, due to fierce competition, it is now more difficult to produce special landscape photographs that really stand out from the crowd.

But the basics still apply. In order to create a winning and evocotive image, both the light and the composition must be special. A big part of having these two key ingrediants is knowing when to be where. While we cannot know for certain when a breathtaking rainbow will appear over Denali or just where to stand in order to capture just the right reflection, doing some research and using the blessing of experience will likely improve our chances significantly.                                                            Research has become far easier with just about everything that you might want to know being easily accessible online. If you poke around a bit, most all sites, whether well laid out or not, will likely provide some basic information as to the best scenic spots (at least those very popular ones with which to start) some idea of seasonality, road closings, etc. Experience, however, is quite another matter. That is something that you can only acquire after actually being there a few times. This includes scouting in daylight so that you’ll know just where to hike and set up your tripod in pitch darkness, being rained out and often just looking at a spectacular mountain under the worst lighting possible. As one fellow plaintively said to me one frosty autumn morning in Colorado, “I drove a thousand miles for this?” Yep!                      The lesson here is that it can and often does take several visits to the same spot to get that prize winning composition in good light. On the other hand, I have often been lucky and blessed to have nothing but wonderful light day after day, being able to get three or as many as five good shots on a single day. You just never know for sure.                                                                                                BUT – and now here comes the big BUT – the trick is to load the odds in your favor. It isn’t easy, but this is where I can help. Having been to all – and I mean every single one of America’s National Parks – and many of America’s scenic gems, grand and small, I have already paid the price. I’ve gone through the cold hands, wet feet and no shot to show for them so that you might not have to. Stay tuned to this blog for future posts designed to help you optimize your time in the field while cutting the disappointment level to the minimum. In the meanwhile, visit my site at www.JerryGinsberg.com for a look at what you can achieve with a little patience.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!