Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

I attended a photo workshop up in the Michigan UP a few weeks back and took a cruise along the park area. To see the Pictured Rocks you need to view the shore from a boat for the best view. The workshop was with Lake Affect Photographic Adventures (Hank Erdmann & William Clay). The Fall color was late and the weather got overcast for most of the weekend. They now have snow up in the area according to the weather channel reports. I enjoyed the workshop and the Hiawatha National Forest & Pictured Rocks area is a great location for Fall color when the weather is nice. I'll post some pictures from the forest as they get processed.

2009 Rebel Run

Hi;

Got some photos at the 2009 Rebel Run held this weekend. I posted a few and will do some more as I get them processed. It's been dry here this Summer so it was hard to find autos without a lot of dust on them. The reflections are also challenging. They put on a very nice show every year at the fair grounds.

Many Glacier Area

Hi;
Added some images from the Many Glacier region on the East side of Glacier National Park. A few of the lodge and some from the trails around the lakes there. This is my favorite area of the park. Nice campground, good restaurants and the trails are very scenic. The Indian Paintbrush was very red, but I did not see a lot of wildlife on this trip. Many animals were around.

Glacier National Park

Started to post a few images I took while visiting Glacier about a month back. The first images are from West Glacier area since Logan Pass was still closed. I will post more from the Many Glacier area where I camped for for three nights. The weather was rainy while on the West side.

TripleD Game Farm Workshop

Howdy;

I attended a workshop lead by Paul Burwell ( www.paulburwell.com ) at a facility near Kalispell, Montana, Triple D Game Farm ( www.tripledgamefarm.com ) recently. It is a great workshop and Mr. Burwell does an excellent job of assisting students to learn to take better wildlife images. The trainers at Triple D are very good at providing opportunities to get pictures while taking care of the animals. I'm going to post some images under wildlife from the

workshop.

Glacier - First Day

Hi from Glacier National Park;

It has been a cloudy, rainy day here. Got to the park mid-morning and learned they are

still working on Logan Pass. Seems they have a small snowdrift of about 70 feet to clear.

May not be open for a while. Lake McDonald was dreary today so I only took a few pictures

....here's one. Water always blows the highlights. Hopefully I'll get better.

I have a new 70-200 Nikon VR F/2.8 lens and wanted to see how it works with my D700. I added a 1.4 Nikon teleconverter also and tried to get some bird pictures. The auto focus feature works with this setup which is very nice, but the image size is fairly small. Probably the D300 with its 1.5 crop factor would be better. I probably will use the D300 a lot for wildlife pictures.

New category

I added a new category this morning for images taken of perennials I just planted yesterday.

I'll be adding pictures thru the Summer as more bloom.

Camera Club Workshop

Our camera club had a workshop at a local professional photographer's woods yesterday and I posted a few images at Misc. - Camera Club Workshop this morning. I tried another panorama, this one was made of four images. The bird house and the building images are HDR images, made of seven shutter bracketed shots per image. The HDR image I used Photomatix software and the panorama was made in Photoshop CS4. Most all the images were processed in Lightroom 2. I am starting to use it much more since I went thru an on-line video.

One more panorama

Had to try it again. This one was at a park. Tried a few more HDR sets also and had some success. Not much ghosting since they were taken of objects that don't move much. I suspect
Glacier Ntl Park will offer some great opportunities for panoramas when I visit in June.

Panorama

I was not sure the picture would upload, but it looks like it did. This is my first attempt at using Photoshop to allign and blend six images into a panorama.I had to go find a video on-line to show me how to do it and then gradually figured it out. Just a local reservoir down the road.

The HDR tryouts did not work well. As I had read...trees and moving water do not make good subjects for HDR images...too much ghosting. At least I now know how to bracket the shutter speed easily. Always something new to learn in digital photography!

Greetings

I'm adding a blog to my website at BetterPhoto.com and hope it will be up and running soon. I'll mainly be blogging comments on photography, but who knows...maybe some other thoughts. As a amateur photographer I have plenty to learn. I'm preparing for a trip out to Montana to attend a workshop next month. Also been exploring the topics of HDR & panoramas since I want to take some shots and use software to create a few images.

Greetings! More to come later...