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, 1/2000th 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.
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.
Oh, I forgot to add that I want a Vuvuzela.
–Scott
The past week, I have been preparing the bulletin board for nationals. We decided that since we were going to travel half way across the country to present the board, we may as well make it better (and bigger). We decided to go from 20x30in to 24x36in. We are allowed up to 48in on each side, however to acquire foamcore board that large is extremely expensive, as well as getting the necessary prints. So we went to the maximum width that our printer allows.
I went to Michaels, and was disappointed to find out that the next size up of foam core was extremely large, and I had to get multiple sheets of it, so I ended up spending quite a bit of money on the the boards.
Nothing actually changed in the images, we just decided to make it larger, and do a better job of cutting out and gluing the pieces together. It took me two days to cut out, glue, and package the board up. Friday night, I glued the images to the board (I found that if you spray both surfaces and allow them to dry, they stick better). This took quite a bit of time, as we had to be careful to not ruin any of the images.
The next step was to cut out the individual pieces. I actually tried a bandsaw, but ended up not using it, as a surgical scalpel allowed me to be more precise.
Finally, we packaged up the board in multiple protective layers, to prevent it from being crushed in transit to Missouri. I used two bed sheets, and tons of corrugated cardboard to create the box.
Anyway, the promotional bulletin board is most likely in Lewiston, Idaho right now, getting ready to be shipped off in a few weeks.
–Scott
Last year, I was conned by Mike Mattson into helping present a speech regarding a Promotional Bulletin Board at SkillsUSA State. Our team happened to get second place. We were slightly disappointed that we were unable to go to Nationals. But when we got back to school we had an email telling us that first had dropped out and we were being allowed to go to Nationals in their place to represent Idaho. We didn’t so so well, but I decided that the next year, we would do great… so this year, my brother, Stephen Sturges, and I were on a team to design a new one, and with the knowledge of last year, we created a masterpiece bulletin board and wrote a great speech that gave us First place at state, and qualified us to go to Nationals in Kansas City, Missouri.
As we approach Spring Break, and SkillsUSA for Idaho State, I have been working on my speech for the Promotional Bulletin Board, redoing a few minor things on my board, choosing 11×14′s for the photo competition, and creating my portfolio.
I also have been working on a few projects that I will hopefully get posted during Spring Break, or soon afterward.
