Dan Kitchens
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Kitty at Mt. Rainier
🕑 Added 2020-10-31 01:43:22 +0000 UTCThis set of 25 hi-res images is now a part of the massive Archive folder for $25 patrons and above. Consider upgrading now to access thousands of images and videos.
This month's monthly Kitty Malone shoot from our road trip up the West Coast last summer is from our quick afternoon stop at busy Mt. Rainier National Park. Neither of us had ever been there, and I didn't get to do a ton of research beforehand to hunt for good locations to shoot at. Really we were just there to see the place along with the other hordes of tourists (its a busy place in late summer since the wildflowers are blooming then and its quite a short drive from a big city compared to many national parks in the US).
In a "big mountain" type of National Park like this, there is often just one main road that goes to a main visitor center that is a launching point to trails to see the big attraction. The mountain itself is omnipresent, and it harder to wander further afield to get away from the crowds, plus we really just wanted to see Mt. Rainier - its a gorgeous volcanic mountain, don't you think? So we followed the herd along the paved trails wandering around Paradise Valley. Still, we were both itching to make some pictures - how could we fail to get some shots with this landscape - the park was at its peak (no pun intended) a crystal clear sky, wildflowers popping everywhere, little clouds swirling around the mountain itself. It was really quite stunning.
So we start to just take quickie pics when no one was looking, or just stood off trail a few feet and Kitty would strip quickly before a family of Chinese tourists would come around the bend... but it wasn't quite cutting it. We decided to wandering back down and check some of the other paved trails to see the mountain from a slightly different angle. At some point I noticed a little dirt trail leading off down a hill... the call of the wild (ie getting the fuck off a paved path) was strong, so I checked the park map and indeed this was a maintained and named official trail, but none of the tourists seemed to be ditching the safety of the paved paths for this tiny dirt one. That was where I knew we had to go.
It paid off as there was no one on it and when we stopped no one came behind us. We got to work quickly - shooting for 15 minutes here, then walking further, and shooting for another 15 minutes and wandering further... all in we did this for about an hour and a half and never really saw another person until we were headed back up the trail to the main network of paved paths and we were so grateful for it!
I will have a bunch of images and video for the higher tiers. Maybe the view will be repetitive for some folks? I just couldn't get enough of this iconic mountain on a perfect day (not to mention the beautiful nude figure - it really put me back in my original intent with shooting nudes in nature in the first place - to show how fragile and dwarfed we humans are be the intense and IMMENSE grandeur of what nature has created. I have shot a lot of images of Kat that are about her, her sensuality, her power - her intensity as a model kind of drives the focus of many shoots with her, but the scale of Mt. Rainier made me stop back, and shoot wide so I could feel in the images how vulnerable Kat looked in that landscape...
