Rob Sinclair: Midnight Eruption

Fall 2009, Shot In The Back — By Richard on October 26, 2009 at 12:11 am

By Randy Woods

Rob Sinclair’s nighttime image of Castle Geyser in Yellowstone National Park is proof that if a hydrothermal eruption happens and there are no tourists there to gawk at it, it’s still beautiful.

Shot in October 2006, the image is part of Sinclair’s ongoing, self-directed project to photograph the wonders of the national park system at night. “I’ve only done three parks, so I’ve got a long way to go,” says the Sammamish, Wash.-based nature photographer.

Geysers in Yellowstone, which have been captured easily in countless tourist snapshots since the park opened in 1872, become particularly difficult subjects to photograph once the sun goes down and the mercury drops. Unlike its punctual cousin, Old Faithful, just a short hike away, Castle Geyser is an elusive spectacle. Normally, it erupts for about 20 minutes every 11 to 13 hours, with a rush of water followed by a roar of steam shooting 70 to 90 feet high, but sometimes it can go for many days without a peep. Such was the case when Sinclair visited in 2006.

“I had planned a couple of months earlier to shoot it on a clear night with strobes to freeze the steam and have star trails behind it,” he says. “But when I got there, I found out it hadn’t erupted in two weeks. Also, the weather was cloudy most of the time.”

After many fruitless nights, the sky finally cleared. Sinclair set up his Canon EOS-1D Mark II, lined up the distinctive castle-shaped cone with the glow of the hotels around Old Faithful (seen over the trees at lower right) and the constellation of Orion – and waited. Around midnight, with the temperature dipping to 15 °F and clouds of obscuring steam billowing in all directions, Sinclair’s lucky moment happened and the earth began to rumble and spew.

With no way to practice with his three synched strobes or experiment with exposure settings in the darkness, Sinclair said he was lucky to coax just enough reflectivity from the briefly existing steam column to capture this time exposure of about 45 to 50 seconds. To illuminate the copper-colored algal mats in the foreground, he “light-painted” the area with a handheld Maglite.

Afterward, Sinclair was puzzled to see a fine scrim of what looked like snow on some of his equipment despite the cloud-free sky. He soon realized that the geyser water, which emerged at a temperature of more than 200 °F, had flash-frozen in the frigid air and fallen back as tiny snowflakes.

“Midnight Eruption” was published in the January 2009 issue of National Geographic Young Explorer magazine and as the cover of the United Kingdom’s New View winter 2007/2008 issue. The image also was a runner-up in the Wild Places category of the 2007 BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

When he’s not working on his nighttime images, Sinclair spends most of his daylight hours helping environmental groups, such as Conservation Northwest, raise awareness about protecting natural habitat and preserving wildlife corridors.

Rob Sinclair’s nighttime image of Castle Geyser in Yellowstone National Park is proof that if a hydrothermal eruption happens and there are no tourists there to gawk at it, it’s still beautiful.

To see more of Rob Sinclair’s work, visit sinclairimages.com.