In 1871, the great landscape painter Thomas Moran accompanied an expedition to Yellowstone and brought back a painting of this scene which you can see at: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/moran/moran_grand_canyon.jpg.html . His painting, along with the first photos made of the site by William Henry Jackson, ( http://www.eastman.org/ne/str090/htmlsrc3/m198160160002_ful.html#topofimage ) inspired the US government to protect thirty five hundred acres of the Yellowstone area forever. It would be the first American landscape painting by an American artist ever brought by the American government. I stood with my camera where Moran himself stood, on Artist Point, and made this image of the canyon leading to the mighty Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River. I’ve made my own “painting” of this iconic landscape vista, a blend of light, shadow, color, and scale achieved in both the camera, and later in Photoshop. It was not an easy vista to shoot. The sun was under cloud cover for most of the time we spent here. I was fortunate to see the sun for a few moments -- without sunlight falling on part of the canyon wall, there can no expression in this image. There was also positioning to consider. The scene changed as I moved along Artists Point, offering me a choice of how much river, canyon, and waterfall to include or exclude. There were also framing and composition decisions – where do I place the falls within the image, and how much of the canyon do I include or leave out? To answer such questions, I kept shooting until I found what I wanted. I had plenty of zoom range left to work with. In fact, twenty minutes after making this image, I would zoom out to a very long telephoto focal length (500mm) to abstract and stress the power of the waterfall itself (Click on the thumbnail at the bottom of this caption to see it.) However, for this longer view, I zoomed back to a short telephoto focal length (114mm) so I could put the falls into its breathtaking context. Yet even this view is far more abstract than Moran’s epic oil painting. He offers an atmospheric panorama, while I present a tighter view of a monumental scene. The scale of the huge waterfall seems small in comparison to the mighty canyon that surrounds it. There is no one right or wrong way to interpret an iconic vista such as this. Every photographer brings his or her own vision to bear on a vista. No two should be alike.