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Tracking The Human Footprint in Yosemite National Park

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By Kurt Repanshek - December 17th, 2009

Yosemite National Park is an incredibly beautiful and stunning place. It also attracts a lot of people, as this video shows.

Shot and produced by Steven M. Baumgardner, the video captures the beauty of Yosemite and, through time-lapse photography, the hustle and bustle of its visitors. Here's how Steven describes the video:

Yosemite is bigger than Rhode Island at almost 800,000 acres, but it receives about 3.5 million visitors each year, and most of them spend time in Yosemite Valley. This project was shot back in 2005 after purchasing a Sony Z1U. This was my first HD project (ok, fine, HDV) and I spent about a week in Yosemite during the busy month of July. The footage was all shot in real time, and then sped up in post. I chose busy places during busy days to show the effects of this mass of humanity. I could have just as easily pointed my camera in another direction and shown nothing but plants, animals and wilderness. Yosemite is popular, but it's also still a relatively wild place.

I’ve lived and worked in National Parks for almost 20 years, and as much as I love landscape photography, I also like looking at the human footprint and the human experience in our national parks. Some of this footage helped me get my current job in 2006, as a videoographer for the National Park Service and the photographer/editor/producer of the web video series "Yosemite Nature Notes" nps.gov/yose/naturenotes. The music is from Peter Gabriel’s “Passion” (a.k.a. the soundtrack from Martin Scorcese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”)

People in Yosemite: A TimeLapse Study from Steven M. Bumgardner on Vimeo.

Comments

Submitted by admin on December 19, 2009 - 6:46pm.

Many people love Yosemite, but hate the valley (myself included). After a fantastic solo backpacking trip in May of 2007 I went from not seeing a sole for eight days to the Disneyland atmosphere of the valley where I stayed overnight before driving home. Crowds everywhere, loud motorcycles and run down lodging are reason enough to go anywhere in Yosemite except the valley.


Submitted by admin on December 23, 2009 - 7:19pm.

Although it is hard to see so much overcrowdedness at such a beutiful place, it is nice to see so many people using the national parks.


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