Glacier
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, 1/2000th 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.
© Connecticut News
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
Oh, I forgot to add that I want a Vuvuzela.
–Scott
