Yellowstone

These are a quick selection of some of the better pictures I took at Yellowstone. I haven't finished editing all of my pictures yet but these are looking like some of the best. I had a 55mm-200mm lens on a cropped camera at Yellowstone which almost worked perfect. I was unable to get any good pictures of the wolfs or coyotes. Anything somewhat close to me I was able to capture.

Attempting a Sunset

I was up at flight ops and an incredible sunset happened. There was only a small gap between all the infrastructure which I could get a clear picture without light poles, planes, cars, and buildings. I do not know what the best picture is. All I know is that I tried to get every picture possible in hopes one would be good. I shot on 400ISO and f6.3 to f11. it was all hand help so I had to keep a high ISO  and low aperture to keep the shutter speed fast. It was slightly windy so a high shutter speed was needed to prevent blur in the tree. I don't think the entire picture is in focus because of the low aperture settings. I would have rather had the great color and low noise with a little blur than noise and worse color.  

5 Picture

Took on Phone AUTO ISO50 3.94mm f2.4 1/480
Taken on a foggy day in Billings up on the rims. Phone was an auto did a decent job, lightroom really made the picture look great.

 ISO1600 24mm f11 1/2000
I took this driving down a road from Big Sky. For driving photos I wanted everything to be in focus because I had little time to compose the pictures. The high ISO helped me keep the shutter speed high so that I could prevent blur from the driving car. The wide angle also helped to prevent the blur.

 ISO400 200mm f6.3 1/400
I was up at the airport working when I looked outside and saw an incredible sunset. I grabbed my camera climbed onto one of the wings of our planes and took this. I did not have a tripod and it was a bit windy. I needed to zoom in to full 200mm because this was shot between a lot of other airport junk and parked cars and planes. The 1/400 was almost enough to get all the motion blur out of the tree and the f6.3 was almost enough to get the tree in focus. I didn't want to raise my ISO any more because my camera doesn't take great pictures above 400. The colors were too good to try and shoot a higher ISO. I barely rose the saturation and vibrancy on this picture, the colors are very close to true.

 ISO800 135mm f5.0 1/125
I was trying to take more sunset pictures but the sunset didn't get great and the light wasn't good. So I lowered my aperture and took this. The lighting was bad and the picture didn't look good in color.

ISO100 55mm f8 1/250
Took this earlier in the year while on a flight. The picture was taken through the planes window which caused some blur in the right side of the picture. The white balance was on incandescent and my camera was on jpg. This caused the color to be very blue and I could not edit the color to be correct. The picture looks much better in black and white.

Jasper National Park

This is a picture of Spirit Island in Jasper National Park in Canada. The Picture was taken by Raymond Gehman of National Geographic

Jasper National Park is a place I would love to take a road trip to. It is located North of Banff National Park and West of Edmonton. It is the largest national park in Canada and home to very densely populated wildlife. The best time to go to Jasper would be late summer to early fall.

There are many ways to explore Jasper. A popular way is  to drive and camp at the assortment of campsites. There are also hundreds of miles of trails which you can bike on, ride horses, or go backpacking. There are 82 backpacking campsites in Jasper.

For more information go here!
http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/parks/jasper-canada-park/

3 Picture Midterm

These are three of my best pictures this semester. Unfortunately I lost my SD card this past week and wasn't able to take my DSLR with me for two picture adventures but my phone camera hopefully sufficed.

This was taken on my flight over the Beartooths on a flight with Rocky. My camera was set to ISO100, 55mm, f/8.0, 1/250. I wish I would have taken this picture on slightly different settings. I needed a faster shutter speed to prevent the blur in the picture. I believe I could have dropped the aperture a stop and still had everything in focus (I also shouldn't have shot through the window of the plane). But overall I'm happy with the result for my first attempt at aerial photography. 

 This was taken with my phone camera on AUTO the auto settings were ISO 50, 3.97mm, f/2.4 and 1/400. I wasn't planning on taking pictures of anything this day, I went to a ranch to ride horses and the sun unexpectedly broke through the clouds as it was setting. I wish I had my DSLR but I had lost the SD card that morning. 

This is by far my favorite picture I have taken this semester. This was taken on a rare foggy day up on the Rims in Billings. I had just missed the tree being covered in frost, there is still a little bit but I wish I could have got there earlier and taken a picture with the frost. Like I said before I didn't use my DSLR becasue I had lost my SD card a few days before. My phone came in clutch on the AUTO setting and took this for me. It was a very impromptu picture as explained in my previous post.  My camera took this on ISO50 3.97mm f/2.4 and 1/480 shutter speed.  

Fog in Billings

A crazy event happened in Billings on Wednesday Morning. There was fog! In  my four years of living in Billings I have seen that thick of fog less than a handful of times. When I woke up I immediately wanted to get some pictures. However, I had lost my SD card for my DSLR and my phone was dead because I had forgot to charge it the night before. I charged my phone to 12% on the drive up to the the rims and ended up pleasantly surprised with the results from Auto on my camera from my phone. The results are below.

Flying Paradise Valley

As an aviation student I have the opportunity to take my camera up with me while I fly. I managed to take my camera with me on my flight through the Beartooths and Paradise Valley. I didn't get as many quality pictures as I would have liked and learned some good lessons. Fist is set up your camera on the ground. My white balance was not on auto and all my pictures ended up extremely blue before editing. I did not open the window of the plane and all my pictures are blurred on the edges. My flight was at high noon so the lighting was not great. My headset also kept changing the settings on the camera which made it hard to shoot on a manual mode. I did end up taking some cool pictures, just not great award winning pictures like I tried to imagine. 

 This first picture is taken just east of Paradise Valley. I'm honestly not sure if I could find this valley again

 I do not remember where we were when we took this picture but I do like the result.

 This was taken at around 9000ft over Gardiner looking Southwest, I think.

 This is taken of a group of Cabins on Hebgen lake which is Northwest of West Yellowstone.

 I tried so hard to get a decent pictures of the geyser and steam activity in Yellowstone but this below average picture is the best I got.

 This could be my favorite. This is looking North just Northwest of Gardiner at the start of Paradise Valley. The whole flight was surreal and this was one of the coolest spots I've flown through.

 I think this might be Emigrant Peak, not sure, but I think so.

I remember we dipped down pretty low into a valley and flew almost uncomfortably close to some peaks. This was one of the peaks which caught my eye so I took a picture of it.