TWENTY-SIX

Around Missoula

I had big plans. Peak autumn color in Jackson WY is usually the last week in September or first week in October, so I arranged a three day weekend to bask in the grandeur of the Tetons. I would drive home through Yellowstone and capture bison challenging each other for dominance of the heard. But alas, plans don't always work out, especially when you plan in a vacuum. I did use the weekend to toole around the local area to get in a quick fix. 

An old barn in the Mission Valley. I love old barns. This winter, when the Mission Range is snow covered I am going to come back with a large format camera and Fuji Velvia and take panoramas from this spot at sunset. I'm so excited.

This is an old bridge that burned down a long time ago. I don't know why this looks do dark on Blogger. It looks really cool on my monitor before I upload it. 

Some cows enjoying the good life in the warm October sun down in the Bitterroot. Sometimes I miss my Dad even though I had a pretty anemic relationship with him the last few years. Mostly it is when I'm trying to communicate with cows. Only the one cow in the middle - the one standing alone- was at all interested in what I was saying.

Duck pond on Opening Day! Where are all the ducks? 

The ducks are all in this pond (little specks on right side) where you can't hunt. Brains the size of peas, but when I was down here last week the ducks were equally distributed amongst both ponds. Today when the other pond was ringed by shotgun warriors, they are all over here. Hmmm. 

Accidental cool photo. Was all set up to take a picture over the river that you can just barely see behind the right group of pines. For some reason that I cannot explain, the color just didn't make it into the sky across the river. I was all disappointed, when I turned around and saw this little scene shaping up. There is a landscape photography adage that I should pay attention to more often - "turn around stupid".

Just a little backwater off the Bitterroot river. Also some nice greenheads that you can't see because of the wide angle. I would never consider ruining a very nice landscape picture by putting on a telephoto lens and filling the frame with a duck. Sometimes the "golden hour" of sunrise does some very interesting things to greens. The duckweed in the pond was almost glowing against the nearly black water. You can see the rim of red light just over the Sapphire Mountains on the horizon. About 30 seconds earlier, the sun peeked through that opening and bathed this wetland in the most intense purply pinky light, but I was not ready and it lasted less than a minute.

All pictures were taken with a Canon Rebel T1 and Tamron 10-24mm lens. (My Cam-Ron setup) with a circular polarizer on a tripod. The first two were heavily processed in Photoshop. The rest were sharpened, had midtone contrast added for clarity on computer monitors, and saturation kicked up.