This image was taken on the first day of a 2017 trip to Arches and Canyonlands national parks in Utah. It had rained the night before, and the sky was still quite cloudy when my group arrived at our first location. But the sun soon began to peek through the clouds, lighting up the red rocks with its soft, early-morning light.
I shot this picture at Yellowstone National Park's Fountain Paint Pot, a mud pot in the Lower Geyser Basin. A mud pot is a kind of acidic hot spring with limited water. These mud pots are pools of bubbling mud. The acid and microorganisms decompose the surrounding rock into clay and mud.
The mud in the area is red, yellow and brown in various places. The colors are created by the various stages of oxidation of iron in the mud.
I like this image because of the placement of part of a dead tree in the mud, and the swirl of yellow behind it. When I visited this area last week, the yellow swirl was no longer there, evidence of the ever-changing nature of the area's geology.
I asked our guide/driver to stop the vehicle so I could get out and photograph this dramatic storm that was headed our way.
April's photo safari to Tanzania saw us rained on every day of the 2-week trip. Fortunately, once in a while the rains came at night, but there were a couple of major daytime downpours that forced us to cut our outings short. Even with 4-wheel-drive, the massive amounts of rain made driving difficult. There were no roads, just paths worn in the grasslands by other vehicles.
The Serengeti is located primarily in northern Tanzania, although a small part extends into southwestern Kenya. The Serengeti covers about 12,000 square miles (30,000 square kilometers). The name derives from a Maasai word meaning "endless plains."
Prints of this dramatic landscape are available at www.annsullivan.zenfolio.com
This adult male lion appears to be smiling. Maybe it's because he had a good dream. He and his two brothers had just awakened from an afternoon nap to be well rested for a night of hunting.
My group found the brothers early the following morning, several miles awy, finishing off the carcass of a wildebeest they had killed during the night.
The action happened in Tanzania.
Prints of this amazing image are available at www.annsullivan.zenfolio.com
