There were over fifteen of us there that morning, at the Snake River Overlook. All, and I mean all, the others were equipped with huge, expensive cameras. Mostly digital, from what I could see. And each and every one of those cameras was mounted on an expensive tripod, each professional or semi-professional photographer shifting their entire appartus from one spot to another along the stone wall that shields visitors from the steep canyon below. Sometimes moving just an inch or two, sometimes several meters along the wall.

I felt like such an amateur, there with my 4 megapixels, held in my hand. Like a grandmother with an Instamatic.

Eventually, as the sun rose and the fog filling the river bottom below us began to thin and roll, a few of us separated off to the less populated portion of the wall. Which is less favored by photographers because of the many trees that occlude the view.

One stout fellow kept shifting his camera and tripod to the left, and then again to the right. And back again. Never clicking the shutter.

I asked if he wanted to borrow a chain saw.

He was semi-serious as he responded in the affirmative. The man shifting alongside him, at a less fevered pace, agreed that "they" (the Park Service, I assume), ought to cut off all these trees.

"Especially that dead one."

As I stood beside the first photographer, and saw what he was trying to capture for eternity, I understood. While everyone else was taking the standard, postcard angle of the Grand Teton, complete with fog in the foreground, this fellow had spotted a better angle on the sunlight just touching the fog, with Mount Moran in the background.

Helpfully, I suggested he could probably get what he wanted if he stood up on the wall.

He took me seriously for a second, his eyes lighting up at the possibility. Then he leaned over and looked at the other side of the stones. A straight drop of only three to four meters, then a steep tumble down 50 to 60 meters of dense timber to the flat river plain below.

"Maybe in my next lifetime," he announced, defeated, as he grabbed his tripod and moved back to join the herd.

And so, for your pleasure, the image that another photographer spotted, but was too cautious to climb up and take: