A scene from the day I arrived in Yellowstone in mid-October. The park had just endured a few days of heavy snowfall, which provided a nice contrast to some of the lingering autumn color. It’s a pity about the river bank cutting through the scene, but the line of bison and splash of autumn gold was too good to pass up.
Canon R6
Canon 100-500mm
ISO 800
1/1600th
f/7.1
Max
Max, this wonderful scene brought back an immediate recall of a trip to this area for me. As I’d set up to photograph a landscape scene in GTNP I was unconscious of a parade of bison bearing down on me. Thankfully my wife seeing things unfold yelled out a warning. Nothing like seeing up close and personal bison in freezing weather with fog snorting out of their nostrils… 
I really like the view from this vantage point and appreciate your thoughts on the riverbank too. However, it is not any deal breaker at all IMO… 
Rather than defend the river bank, might I ask why you did not clone it out? Too drastic an alteration of the reality? A beautiful scene.
A wonderful photograph. I see the problem with the river bank. Personally I would not clone out the rive bank altogether, but I would deemphasize it by lowering the contrast of the river itself drastically and give it a touch of blue to simulate ice. That would preserve the snow structure around it.
Mike, it would certainly be an option, but I do my best to avoid such manipulation. If someone requested a print and asked for it to be removed, I would create such an art piece for them. In the meantime I still think of my photography as much “documentation” as art, so I usually prefer to stay faithful to the scene presented.
Under normal circumstances, as something like this unfolds in front of me, I’d be trying to move around and change my perspective in order to reduce or eliminate distracting elements. However, this was just a small part of a larger herd that was spread out all over the place and getting quite close to the cars parked off the road. I had to stick close to the vehicle in order to be prepared to jump in once they got near.
Wow, Max! What an amazing site! It looks like something from hundreds of years ago. The Bison are so evenly spaced it almost looks like a painting. I love the background trees too. That would take my breath away to see such magnificent creatures wild and in person like that! Beautiful capture!
Max, the fall colors lingered very late in YNP this year. This is an excellent capture with the curving line of Bison in their winter coats. The river bank is an important part of the scene, since the animals “come down” to the valleys for the winter.
Really beautiful scene of one of my favorite places in the world. I really like the way that the bison lead you into the image and you did a nice job having the front group be a tad bright (at least it seems that way) than those at the back as that helps you start off with them and slowly wind your way into the image. The autumn colors further add a sense of time and place.
