Goats and Flowers

Mountain goats in a field of wild flowers at Glacier National Park.

Be sure to visit Camera Critters.

Have Camera, Will Travel

Close up of the Lake McDonald beach.

For the next two months I'll be posting intermittently. I have a good excuse - I'm starting a sabbatical next week. During my sabbatical, I'll be traveling around the Southwest USA. For the first month, I'll be spending a lot of time with family and friends. But for the second month, I'll be hanging about the sights of southern Utah and Northern Arizona. As I'll be camping a lot, I'll have a hard time connecting to the internet on a regular basis. I will probably use my iPhone to post photos taken on the iPhone (limited by available 3G cell connections).

My rough itinerary, photographically speaking, is as follows:

• Whitesands National Monument, NM
• Chiricahua National Monument, AZ
• Saguaro National Park, AZ
• Joshua Tree National Park, CA
• Santa Catalina Island, CA
• Las Vegas NV area
• Zion National Park, UT
• Bryce National Park, UT
• North Rim Grand Canyon, AZ
• Arches National Park, UT
• Monument Valley, AZ

Any suggestions of other "can't miss" locations?

Painting Hidden Lake

While hiking the Hidden Lake trail in Glacier National Park, we came across this painter painting the lake. What a skill to have! I've considered taking a painting or drawing class. I don't think that I would be any good, but I do think that some of the art theory taught would be very useful when composing a photo.

Make sure to visit Sepia Scenes.

Click here to see other photos from our trip.

Avalanche Creek

This is Avalanche Creek in Glacier National park somewhere along the Trail of the Cedars. I was surprised at how wet Glacier National park is. Apparently, it's considered to be western most extreme of the Pacific Northwest's temperate rain forest.

A couple of days before this shot, we hiked up to Avalanche Lake (in the dark) to grab some sunrise shots. On the way back down, I saw this creek and knew that I had to return when there was more light. It looked like a perfect opportunity to use HDR, or High Dynamic Range, techniques. I took 6 different shots from EV -3 to EV 2 (i.e. very underexposed to very overexposed). At home, software is used to combine the images into this.

I'm still very much a novice using the software. It has lots of controls to tweak in order to adjust the image. To be truthful, I'm not sure that I like this result. I hope to have time to go back an play with other versions and see if I can get something better.

Be sure to visit Water Wednesday.