Oct 2008
Creek photos
10/30/08 08:55
You can take this photo. You need: A) camera and tripod; B) 10 year old that will sit still for 2.5 seconds.
Muskrat magic
10/28/08 20:01
Humm after me: Muskrat Love ... Mmmmmm
There are some technical aspects to this shot. For one, the reflection and low light will almost always give you the wrong meter reading. The D300 has a tendency to overexpose water shots. In this case though, the reflection as fairly bright, so it was reading an underexposure. I went with what looked good; about 2/3 stop over and then tweaked it in Photoshop. We have a city Park nearby that has lots of muskrats. Still, they know something is up when the camera starts clicking and they take off.
Look for reflections
10/23/08 08:48
While most people around here are gearing up for hunting season, the fishing isn't too shabby, either and the crowds are decidedly thinner than the summertime. Here some anglers take to the water in the Badrock Canyon section of the Flathead River. It looks serene, but it's a noisy place. There's a highway behind you and a train track in front of you. Get down river a ways and it becomes much more pleasant. I'm always looking for reflections in the fall. Wait for low light, then shoot away. You'll take your best photos in the last 10 minutes of the day.
Go wide
10/21/08 07:27
I still keep my old F5 around for one reason: Super wide angles. You can pick up a Nikon 16mm fisheye manual lens for cheap (less than $100; many times less than $50). The one I have also has built in filters for shooting black and white film (or for shooting some real funky color film). The idea behind this photo was to get the tops of the trees I was standing under while still having the seemingly shorter trees fill some of the background. Aspens are my favorite tree in Glacier. They have so many birds and wildlife in them, they're tough not to like.
Making night turn to day
10/17/08 21:42
This is a familiar sight in Many Glacier. But if you look close, you'll see star tracks in the background (those long streaks of light). It's about a 20 minute exposure, lit entirely by moonlight. The tech specs: taken with a D300 in RAW format, I had the long exposure noise reduction set on high, the camera set up on a tripod. The camera had about half a battery left and died in the cold (it was in the teens) in short order. In fact, when I went to pick up the camera the next morning, it was completely white with frost. At first I was worried I'd killed it completely because it didn't work, even with a new battery, but I thawed it out over the truck heater and it came back to life, which is a good thing, because a D300 costs about $1,800.
Disappearing moose
10/14/08 08:05
I watched the moose drink, lick his lips, scratch himself with his back leg, drink some more, then scratch himself on a tree, a small tree that could have done without a big old moose scratching itself on it, thank you very much.
He was a big moose by Glacier Park standards. Glacier’s moose are the shiras variety — they have smaller antlers than Alaskan moose. He scratched himself some more on the small tree and then started heading up the slope toward the trail.
Right about then four guys in their 20s came around the corner and I expected to hear some hoping and hollering as they encountered or at least saw the moose.
But nothing. Zero.
What the?
The guys made it to me and I gave them a look.
“You didn’t see a moose?”
“What moose?” they asked.
“The moose,” I said. “there’s a moose right there.”
Then I pointed down the slope.
The moose was gone.
Well, sort of gone. He was as gone as a moose can get in Glacier. It’s always fun to watch a 1,200 pound gangily legged animal disappear in a couple of steps, and this moose had done just that. It hadn’t done much, really. It just lay down in a patch of willows and began chewing its cud.
All you could see was the paddles of its antlers, and you had to look close to see that.
“He laid down,” I told the group.
They came back for a look-see. The moose could have cared less. He was a good 50 feet below the trail, content.
Such is life in Many Glacier in the fall. The tourist season is over. The hotel is shuttered up for the winter. The campground has gone primitive (no running water) and the nights are cold and the days shorter every day.
It might be the best time of year, if you can put up the fickle weather, which can range from snow squalls and wind to pleasant sun and blue skies (sometimes all in the span of a view minutes.)
The idea of fall journeys into Many is to set up base camp and then hike and be patient. Very few days are a complete bust. You take what comes. One day, it might be a lowly muskrat, who swims to your feed and decides to eat his lunch. Another it might be a 13 mile hike, earmarked by a bull elk in the aspens and a dipper swimming endless laps in a bitterly cold lake. Other days its mountain goats in their winter coats or bighorn sheep chewing their cuds on sun warmed rocks or a wolverine that sniffs its way along the cliffs, looking for an easy meal.
The wolverine is too far away to yield any decent pictures, but still, it’s a wolverine, so big that at first, you thought it was a bear.
One ewe in particular has a lamb that jumps on her back, bites her horn and prods her on. It’s getting dark mom, time to go up higher on the slope, the lamb says. And then you see the tragedy in it. The mother has a badly broken leg, but somehow has been able to forge on, raise a kid, despite the odds against her.
Life persists here, in this raw and nasty and beautiful and forgiving place. Soak up the sun while you can. The wind is coming. Change is a breeze away.
See the entire photo spread in the upcoming issue of Glacier Park Magazine.
Oil drilling on the front
10/09/08 08:30
The state is proposing selling oil and gas leases on the Rocky Mountain Front. Read about it here.
Ruby afternoon
10/09/08 07:30
Columbia Falls has a nice Park down along the river which is a good place to photograph birds, particularly if you're short on time, like I was yesterday. Boy Wonder and I went down there and found some ruby crowned kinglets, a small frustrating bird because they always seem to be one branch too far away or just barely hidden in the brush. The male flares its ruby crown in the spring when mating season begins. These birds have a long and tremendously beautiful song, but like most birds, they don't sing in the fall.
So they do bend forward
10/04/08 12:42
While working on a piece about the 20th anniversary of the Red Bench Fire in Glacier National Park, I came upon this doe. She was curious and in a split second, she licked her lips and bent her ear forward like a dog. I've seen plenty of whitetail deer ears on full alert bend backwards, but the forward curl is a new, and very fun, thing.
Fall creeping in
10/02/08 07:53
