One of the few "grand landscape" type shots I actually liked from my trip to Glacier National Park in July.  The peak in the center is Mt. Oberlin.  The waterfall to its right is called Bird Woman Falls.  And that’s McDonald Creek running through the bottom of the image.  I was on Going-to-the-Sun road.

When I first got to Logan Pass, I fully intended on hiking back to the overlook at Hidden Lake.  But when I started hiking back, I almost immediately came across a herd of bighorn sheep near the visitor center.  Since this was only the second time I had ever seen bighorns in the wild, I was pretty excited and ended up just following them as they moved across the alpine meadow.  The first time I saw a bighorn in the wild, it was just a little one like the ram on the far right in the picture above.  This was the first time I had the chance to see some mature rams with some massive horns.  Several had full curls.  It was sweet!

I was so excited, in fact, that I did a terrible job of monitoring my exposure while shooting on manual.  Many of the images were horribly overexposed.  Luckily, since I was shooting in RAW, I was able to recover some of them for web use.  They probably wouldn’t hold up in print, but they look okay on the screen.

Bring wireless Internet to everyone, everywhere.

I don’t usually make posts like this, but I think this is extremely important.

On November 4th, while you’re voting for the next president, the FCC will be voting on whether to open up the unused radio spectrum, or “white spaces”, between TV channels for wireless use.  These unused channels could be used to bring Internet connectivity to rural areas that currently don’t have any broadband access available to them and provide cheaper, universal Internet access to everyone whether you’re at home, work, or on the road.  This could be extremely beneficial to rural and small town schools where Internet availability, speed, and bandwidth are limited or non-existent.

Don’t let the broadcasting lobby stifle this new innovative technology.  Please visit http://www.freetheairwaves.com/ to learn more and sign a petition to urge the FCC to vote in favor of opening up this important public resource.

This mountain goat kid was probably photographed quite a bit this summer.  Both times I went to Glacier, the baby and its mother were hanging around Logan Pass.  They are pretty accustom to having people around so I could get quite close without disturbing them.

I didn’t spend much time on Avalanche Lake Trail during my first trip to Glacier, but I did venture down the path for a little while before moving on to the rest of the park.  My favorite image from the brief time I spent on the trail is below.  I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from the instructors/mentors/critiquers who have seen this image this summer.  I think it works because I cropped it to the panoramic aspect ratio.  I was kind of disappointed with it before I cropped it.  It didn’t seem to really convey the feeling of the place for me.  After the crop, it just worked.  Lesson learned: Don’t be afraid to crop to non-traditional aspect ratios.

Get ready.  You’re about to inundated over the next couple of days with pictures from my first trip to Glacier National Park.  I headed up there for two days and two nights on a weekend in July.  My RMSP Summer Intensive group didn’t have classes scheduled for Monday morning, so I head up Saturday morning and came back Monday.  I stayed in the Avalanche Creek Campground in the park both nights.  After setting up camp, I checked out the Avalanche Creek waterfalls for a couple of hours.  Here’s a couple of shots I liked.

An abstract look at the street behind my apartment at sunset. It’s a little unclear…much like my immediate future.  School is done.  Many of my new friends are leaving.  For now, I’m staying in Missoula.  I don’t know what I am going to do yet.  That will come in time.  Until then, I’m going to enjoy having nothing in particular to do…and catching up on sleep.

It snowed this morning…SNOWED!  And I thought winter came early in Wisconsin!  There was no accumulation in town, but I’m sure there was in the mountains.  I don’t know for sure though since I’ve been stuck inside working on final projects and assignments.  I’d rather be hiking. 

Yesterday, I spent some time in the print lab printing images for my portfolio review later this week.  The image in my last post is one that I printed.  There were a couple from my Maui trip almost two years ago, but most were from this summer.  In fact, I took a couple of them last weekend.  Eventually, they will all end up on my photography web site.

In case you haven’t noticed, I have been starting to play catch up with posting images from the summer.   It’s going to take a while.  I have around 150 images waiting in the queue with more being added weekly.

These two were taken the same night as the cloud picture from my last post (it was a pretty good night photographically).  Both were taken in the North Hills just outside of town.

With just one week of school left, you can bet I’ve been a little busy working on final projects…not to mention figuring out what I’m going to do when it’s all over.  Decisions, decisions, decisions…

Here’s another image from July.  It was taken on one of the rare days when there were actually clouds in the sky around sunset.  It’s one of my favorites from the summer.

From the top of Mt Sentinel just a few minutes ago.