At the 2010 SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, my brother and I placed 6th out of 45 competitors in the nation.

This past week, my family and I traveled to Glacier National Park, in Montana, for a vacation. While there, I found plenty of prime opportunities to get great photos. Glacier is an amazing place to photograph, and despite the overcast weather the whole week, I got great photos.

The first photo, shown above, is of Avalanche Lake, which is north of Lake McDonald in West Glacier. It is a HDR composite of 15 RAW exposures. I processed the image using my trial of Photoshop CS5, and each time I use it, I grow more and more obsessed with it. I almost feel that it is compulsory to upgrade.

Anyway, the first image was taken at f/22, 1/2000^th sec, and 200ISO and took 15 more until I reached .8 seconds (with the same aperture).

I took a few others of the lake, but this one seemed to turn out the best.

While driving, we took a pit stop in Missoula, MT and my brother decided to go to the skate park, so I took some photos at the park there. It looked like a storm was coming in, so the clouds looked really cool, and everything was very green, so it made quite an interesting photo.

The next day, while driving into the park, we stopped at Lake McDonald, and we took some photos. I walked off the side of the road, and down to the lake and took some photos down near the lake. It was perfectly smooth, so it made a great photo to have the reflection of the mountains in the lake.

While driving on the “Going-to-the-Sun” road, we stopped and took some photos. It was a very rainy day, so as you can see in the photo, there were a lot of clouds. But this sums up nicely what the weather was like while we were there.

While we were there, we hiked to “Avalanche Lake,” as stated earlier at the first photo. There were plenty of waterfalls and streams just waiting to be photographed, so I got some great photos doing that. This is one of my favorites.

When hiking, we decided that it would be awesome if the lake was called “Salamanche Lake” instead of Avalanche. So we started calling it that. Below is a definition of what a “Salamanche” is. Quite interesting to say the least. I would be pretty stoked if one occurred.

Salamanche (SAL-AH-MAN-CHE)
Noun
A mass of salamanders rapidly falling down a mountainside.

• A large mass of salamanders moving rapidly downhill
• A sudden arrival or occurrence of salamanders in overwhelming quantities

Hyundai 2012 for US senator. Just kidding. We stopped at “Goat Lick” while driving around, and there happened to be this train stopped on the tracks near where we were, so I photographed it. I didn’t expect much, but the photo turned out pretty cool. I realized later, during processing, that it said “Senator Hyundai.” I realize that these are two separate containers, but it still looked funny.

Glacier has been getting a ton of snow at higher elevations recently, and that caused an Avalanche to go across the Sun road just before we got there (see Salamanche). After a few days, they managed to get the road mostly open, and we drove up as high as we were allowed. There was a roadblock in place, so we stopped and took some photos. There were a few squirrels that decided that it would be fun to be fed by my brother, so while they were doing so, I got a few photos of them eating. Above, you can see a squirrel eating with its paw, and his (her?) mouth slightly open.

When I was taking photos of the squirrels, we saw a Marmot come waking over. He got within a few feet of me, and I was able to get some great shots of him eating, and looking around. A crowd quickly gathered around, and everybody and their DSLR started taking photos. It’s interesting that everybody seems to be migrating to DSLRs nowadays vs. point-and-shoot’s.

While I was taking some of the photos, someone near me decided that the marmot was a bobcat, and stated this quite loudly. I don’t think he knew what a bob cat is.

“Is that like a bobcat or something?”

–Random tourist who doesn’t know what a bobcat looks like

Above is another photo of the marmot. In this one, his mouth is open, and he was starring directly at me. He (she?) was quite fascinated with my camera, and as I was just a few feet away, I got his attention. But alas, he soon scurried away into the bushes.

On our last day, we went on a hike just off the sun road. There were a lot of waterfalls. Everywhere you stepped, there was water running. On the side of the path, there was really cool rock textures, above is one of the rocks with water running over it.

The image above, is quite possibly my favorite from the trip. I got in the river, and shot looking up the river. The composition and exposure seems nearly perfect in this image, possibly why this is my favorite. I love the way the water seems stopped in it’s tracks near the camera.

Anyway, those were the photos from my trip. I hope you enjoyed viewing them, as I feel they turned out great. If you have any comments, please feel free to post them below.

Lastly, I just wanted to note the new copyright bar at the bottom. I changed it up a little to include my url, as well as the year in it. It seems like every week I change it up, but this seems to be one that I will keep for a while. Tell me what you think.

Promotional Bulletin Board

You thought that you could get through a post of mine and not hear about the Promotional Bulletin Board for SkillsUSA. Well, on my vacation, I couldn’t seem to avoid it. As there is only one week until nationals, I figured that it would be in my best interest to practice my speech, and make changes according to some of the contest updates posted by the organization.

Map

Salamanche Lake, Glacier

Oh, I forgot to add that I want a Vuvuzela.

–Scott

A while back, I was commissioned to create a GigaPan (wiki) of a machine shop/factory in Coeur d’Alene as a fund raiser for our trip to Kansas City, Missouri. I have attempted these in the past (2 to be exact), and they came out decent, however none have been great. On this one, I was able to use a Canon 70-200 f/2.8L borrowed from my teacher. This, for one thing, allowed the images to be sharper. Also, I had more ambient light this time, because the two past ones were shot in the evening while it was overcast. The factory had many artificial lights available, as well as bright sunlight coming through the garage doors (overexposed in the images).
This project has taken many hours, and each time I do one, I vow to myself that I will never again do it without a machine, but each time I forget how hard to are to edit. With a GigaPan Machine, it calculates the distance to move the tripod each time, so it can easily merge the images together in the computer. However, when doing it manually, I have to do it by eye, and guess how far to move it each time. As a result, there is one spot where there is no image. This was unfortunate as it was in a spot where I couldn’t easily clone in image from other areas.

The other reason it took so long is that once the image is done, Photoshop takes a century to save the image as a tiff — First there is “Generating Full Resolution Composite,” then it has to generate preview, then it has to prepare to save, and lastly it has to “Save Large Document Format.” LDF is a format like PSD, however it doesn’t have a 2GB cap on each file, so you can save enormous images to the file container. In this case, the document was 9.5GB.

After saving the document, the upload took a very long time as the final compressed Tiff file was 1.3 gb. I uploaded the panorama to GigaPan.org using their uploader while I was staying at a hotel, and as a result, it took quite a long time using their insanely fast 120kbps connection.

Anyway, the panorama turned out nice, and I am happy to have it finished as it took so long to complete.

–Scott

This is my first post to this blog, out of High School, without being graded, without any of that.

Yesterday, on my way downtown, as I was leaving my house, I spied, not 1, not 2, but 3 rainbows in the sky (you can only see two in this photo). I happened to have my camera handy, so of course I had to photograph it. I decided that since I had just finished my final on HDR, this would be a good chance to utilize it. I took three bracketed exposures on AEB (auto exposure bracketing) handheld – that was no easy feat.

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Throughout my years photo class, I have attempted to perfect the “art” of High Dynamic Range Photography. I have tried, slightly unsuccessfully, to master this, and eventually gave up. But recently, with the release of HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5, I decided to give it a final try, for my final project — it seemed like a “final” thing to do.

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