The top image is my favorite landscape photo from this summer.  I just wish I had thought to take multiple exposures so I could have stitched them together in a true panorama.  Then, I could print it huge.  But, I didn’t.  I just cropped a single frame to the panoramic aspect ratio you see above.  I can still print it pretty big, but not huge.

The other two images are shots that I took as I started my drive back down to my campsite.  They were the last images I took on my first trip to Glacier.

The first picture is Reynolds Creek as it runs down from Logan Pass. The second image is the waterfall that occurs just below the first picture as the creek runs down the mountain.  I shot these just before sunset, so this particular valley was completely in shadow.  This allowed me to do some long exposures for that silky water effect.

Tomorrow, you’ll see the last of the pictures from my first trip to Glacier National Park.  One of which, is my favorite landscape image from the entire summer. 

I took these on the hike back to Logan Pass from Hidden Lake in the early evening.  Both pictures have hikers in the frame.  You’ll have to look a little harder in the second one.  Like I said in a previous post, it was pretty weird walking across deep snow in the middle of July.  It was also very slippery.  I had to try very hard not to fall because I was carrying two cameras, my Canon 40D with the 70-200mm f2.8 + 1.4x teleconverter and my Canon 5D with the 24-105mm f4 lens.  That was about $6K worth of equipment around my neck…definitely not something I wanted to fall on.  Thankfully, I didn’t, but there were a few close calls.

Why carry so much equipment?  I carry the 40D combo for shooting wildlife and the 5D combo for shooting the landscapes.  I don’t like to constantly change lenses as I hike, so I carry both so I don’t have too.  Wildlife doesn’t usually hold still long enough to change lenses and still get the shot.  Even landscapes can change quickly (clouds/shadows moving across the scene, rainbows that appear suddenly and then disappear just as quickly, etc.) and you don’t want to miss a great shot because you were busy swapping lenses.  Besides, the more often you change lenses in the field, the greater your chances of getting a dirty sensor, exposing your electronics to the elements, or simply just dropping a lens.  I’m willing to carry a little extra weight (one extra camera body) to prevent that.

As you can tell by the first picture, I spent my summer training mountain goats in Glacier National Park.  I got quite good at it.  I had that goat sitting there for several minutes while I lined up and took the picture.  Or maybe I just came around the bend and found him sitting there…I forget.  Either way, I like the shot.  I have a few more from when he stood up and looked at me.

The second picture is of the same group of bighorns I saw the day before.  This time they were sitting up on a ledge sunning themselves.  I had to wait a while for one of the big ones to get up and look out over the pass like he is in the image.  It’s too bad my lens wasn’t longer so I could have gotten a closer shot.

You’ll see a lot of these in Glacier National Park and they’re not very shy around humans.  These pictures were all taken along the Hidden Lake trail from Logan Pass.  Marmots are not very exciting, in my opinion.  They’re not even that cute.  The only reason I took any pictures of them was because I can’t recall ever seeing them in the wild before.

On my second day in Glacier National Park, I headed back to Logan Pass and hiked the Hidden Lake Trail back to (surprisingly) Hidden Lake.  Even in mid-July, parts of the trail were buried in over six feet of snow.  It was weird walking on snow in the middle of summer…and slippery too.  Hidden Lake was beautiful…one of the bluest lakes I’ve ever seen.  I highly recommend this hike if you ever get to Glacier National Park.

Here are two pictures of sunset taken in Glacier National Park.  They were taken less than two minutes apart with the same camera, lens, and camera settings: 1/90sec,F22 at ISO400.  They were shot in RAW.  I just warmed up the color temperature significantly (to about 19000°K) in the first one to bring out the orange and cooled down the temperature in the second (to about 3900°K) to bring out the blues.  I did this in Lightroom during post processing.  Initially, both images looked pretty much the same other than the slight differences in composition.  The second image is a lot closer to what it actually looked like to my eyes, but the first is closer to what we tend to imagine when we picture a summer sunset.  I guess this shows that photographs don’t always accurately depict the world as we see it…but, you already knew that.

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.

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.