Grand Prismatic Hot Spring Yellowstone National Park

The rainbow of colors around Grand Prismatic hot spring is one of the most attractive landscapes in in Yellowstone National park. From the boardwalk that encircles the spring, I knelt as close to the ground as possible with my 12-24 DX lens on my Nikon D200. I used a polarizer to help preserve the rich colors of the bacteria that live in mats surrounding the spring. No digital negative, no matter how well captured, can fully represent the richness of color and texture of a scene like this without development in software, and development is where the art in photography happens. For that I use the Nik Collection, an incredible collection of tools that bring out amazing qualities in correctly captured negatives. Nik Color Efex Pro 4 is particularly a dream come true for images like this. The colors, shapes and textures border on surreal but are actually reasonably faithful as an artistic interpretation goes without becoming a special effect.