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

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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Over Thanksgiving break, while at Fairmont Hot Springs, BC, CAN, I decided to try – once again – some High Dynamic Range. I have tried it in the past, and I really want to improve my ability, and work on not over editing them.

This photo to the right was shot looking up a stream/river (what ever it is called) handheld at 1/2 sec. to get the effect of moving water (the blurred ness of it).

I cheated and simply created three jpegs with different exposures of the RAW image instead of using three RAW images. This was simply because my tripod wasn’t handy and the motion would ultimately cause some trouble. These images were put through Photomatix, then into Photoshop for some tone correcting due to weirdness of Photomatix.

This image is also on flickr… Where it has received an average of 8.1/10 from the Score Me! group.

The image was shot with the following:

• Shutter: 1/2 sec.
• Aperture: f/22
• ISO: 100
• Camera: Canon 50D
• Lens: Canon 28-135mm

This second photo was actually bracketed, with separate images for each exposure (not cheating this time). I feel that this one turned out a little bit better on the editing side. I feel that this one has been edited less, so it looks more natural. I really is amazing how HDR really brings out the colors in an image, as you can see below in the originals, there was virtually no color in the original image, but it was brought out when combined.

This image had separate values for each exposure:

• Shutter: 1/40, 1/160, 1/10
• Aperture: f/8
• ISO: 100

Out of all of the photos that I took, there really weren’t too many that would work well with HDR, so I just left them out. Below are the originals, contact sheet, and a epic-failed-edit of another photo. I invested a lot of time editing these, from shooting them, going through the fails, and editing them, trying to make them not fake.

Oh and my Adobe Camera RAW really has been acting up recently, so I am unable to convert from RAW using anything except Photomatix.

For this first week’s project, my project was about Landscapes in HDR, High-Dynamic Range.

Above you can see a valley near Hayden Lake.

EXIF:

• Shutter Speed: Multiple
• Aperture: f/22
• ISO: 100

I shot this image on a tripod, using the Auto Exposure Bracketing feature on my camera. It was later processed in Photomatix to combine the images.

This next image was also shot at Hayden Lake. It is at the mini-dam/dike at the east end of the lake. There was also three exposures combined. It has less heavy editing done to it.

EXIF:

• Shutter Speed: Various
• Aperture: f/14
• ISO: 100

Above are some pictures I happened to take while I was there. They really don’t fit the topic of landscapes, but I thought they turned out cool, so I posted them.

Anyway, the images didn’t turn out as I had hoped… but they are ok. Furthermore, some of the inspiration for my post came from the flickr group for hdr landscapes.

Location on of Photos

Oh, and FedEx lost my stuff, 02901001152000161546