Woke up at an ungodly hour this morning… 4:45am I believe in order to get to Jenny Lake to shoot the sunrise. I barely made it, guess I should have planned a bit better and paid more attention to how long it took me to go in. After sunrise there, I hit my secondary location, an old barn along Mormon Row, the area that a group of Mormon settlers established homesteads on. Unfortunately for me, there was a group of about 15 photographers there doing some sort of organized group shoot and they went in close to the barn for portraits just as I was setting up to use the entire barn as a photo element.

Oh well, I switched gears and got to work, by the time my new concept was executed, they’d moved on down the road to the next building and I shot my first idea. Time will tell which will come out better. I did a bit of tooling around, looking for moose, but finding only bison. Dropped by the Visitor’s Center again and watched their movie, dumped photos onto my external hard drive and finished the book I was reading. Nothing terribly exciting this morning.

This afternoon, I met another photographer (from Colorado) named Eric at a turnout down a side road. He’d been shooting the carcass of what I believe was a mule deer with the Tetons as a backdrop with his medium format camera (think big, heavy and the image you see is upside down and reversed). He was a pretty cool guy, and we parted ways only to run into each other at the next stop up the road. We ended up going on a bit of a hike to pass some time as the 2pm sun was too harsh for any really good photos here. He pointed out a good place for a morning photo and we’ll probably run into each other at sunrise.

By this point it was early evening, so I headed north to get a campsite for the night (I’ve been getting sore from sleeping in the Jeep) and set up camp, cooked some dinner and repacked the Jeep a bit more efficiently. I tooled around until sunset and then headed south, timing my morning drive and now I’m sitting in a parking lot waiting for the stars to come out so I can do some star trails with the Tetons as a background and hopefully have it pretty well reflected in the small lake I’ll be on the shore of. [Scratch that, the shoot is canceled for tonight due to some cloud cover that rolled in.]

Oh, and another lovely tidbit, I got some text messaging spam earlier tonight. Guess I get to call Alltel and complain so they won’t bill for receiving it. Talk about the stupidest thing ever – being billed to receive messages. It’s not like I can say, “I only want to be able to receive them from these people; those are the ones I’m willing to pay for.”

Travel Distance: 75 miles