It's a rainy day, Friday, June 26th, and I'm finally finding the time to write about this past Tuesday. Days are blurring together here and we're getting down to the final hours. To tell you the truth, I had to look back through my pictures to remind myself what we did on Tuesday. We were in the studio until after 11 pm last night and woke up this morning at 4:30 am for a sunrise shoot that unfortunately didn't amount to much. My mind is mush, but here it goes...

On Tuesday, we had a much needed studio session in the morning. Everyone had lots of images and film to process from the big day in Yellowstone. After lunch, we met at the Oswald Gallery in downtown Jackson for a private tour and print viewing with co-owner and director, Leya Oswald. The Oswald gallery is something of an anomaly in this town. With all the wildlife and landscape photography, it's really refreshing to see some different approaches and subject matter. The gallery is full of some of the most famous photographers and photographs anywhere in the world, along with a number of emerging contemporary artists, and it just happens to be here in tiny Jackson, Wyoming. Student's were able to get right up close to the most famous Ansel Adams prints, some of which were worth several hundred thousand dollars each.

After the gallery viewing, we had a nice chunk of free time to make a run to the grocery store, do some laundry, rest...whatever. At 7:00 pm we had a guest lecture by Darren Clark, a Professor of Photography at BYU, Idaho. He did a presentation on several different bodies of work and then shared a whole bunch of prints. Darren photogarphs mostly near his home in rural Idaho. It's a simple, some might call boring landscape, but he feels a need to engage with it. The work was straightforward, but seemed genuine and honest. There was something about his style and subject matter that the student's really responded to. The prints he shared illustrated a wide array of talent and knowlege of different photographic processes, not to mention the fact that they were absolutely stunning! I hope to get Darren to come back again for future workshops.

To cap the day off, we decided to do an evening shoot at Schwabacher's Landing in Grand Teton National Park. We left town at 9:15 pm and the light was still lingering in shades of blue and orange. When we arrived at our destination it was close to dark, but you could still make out a silhouette of the Teton range. We wandered along the banks of the Snake River paying close attention to any sound or movements nearby. It was a very clear night with no moon, and within an hour the sky came alive with stars. We photographed and star gazed until well after midnight, reluctant to head back to the lights of town.