Hiking and Landscape Photography： Log Jams, Reflections, and Challenging Light in Northwest Montana

Hey everyone, welcome back to the woods. Today is my favorite kind of photography trip, kind of day, whatever you want to call it. Because it's exploration. I'm somewhere I've never been before. I'm coloring a new space in on my map and I couldn't be happier about it. It's Memorial Day weekend as of filming this and it's absolutely amazing. There's nobody in the trailhead when we got here. I flew the drone along the Flathead River and it was just stunning. Low hanging clouds, peaks that look like the Matterhorn but not. And then there's been some intermittent fog here and there along the trail. I didn't film it because the fog was moving so quickly and honestly I have no idea if any of the shots turned out. I'll probably throw them up even if they suck. But I was posted up here at this little overlook and the fog was just moving between all these bright green larch. They were, you know, little gaps were lighting up and I don't know if I got anything good but it was a lot of fun. It was that high speed, high intensity photography that, the kind of stuff that just keeps you going. Even if the images aren't good, it's just a ton of fun. So that said, I'm with my mom today. She doesn't want to be on the camera but I'm taking my mom for a hike today. She loves to go out as much as I do. She stops along the trail whenever there's wildflowers. The only reason we've made it this far this fast on the hike is that the flowers aren't quite out yet or else you have to about drag her up the hill. Probably where I get this from. So I'm going to turn around and I don't think there's actually anything there to shoot but I'm probably not going to put up an image for this. There's a really beautiful peak in the background with some high alpine trees, snow, and I think there's actually a dying glacier up there as well. I'm going to try to sneak through the branches and get a shot and if it did somehow turn out, I'll present it now. But otherwise we're going to keep bebopping up the trail and get to the final destination today which is a lake. Which the air is pretty calm so I'm hoping we have reflections. Fingers crossed for reflections. But anyways, we'll keep on going. Alright, I'm going to take a moment to trash talk Pacific U here. Any forester who's worked with this stuff in its brush form hates it. This thing is as strong as iron and you'll never push through it. It pushes you around. This is another plant with hatred in its heart. See, there we go. This is called Devil's Club. Anyone who's worked around Devil's Club knows that it's appropriately named and those thorns, they get stuck in everything. If you wear a pair of double front pants and you walk through this stuff, you will have those thorns for the rest of the time you own those pants and they will still get you. They break off and they stay there. Horrible, horrible plant. Well, we've reached that nice point in the hike where the trail turns into a stream. Very common spring conditions and yeah, the old drainage features, they aren't holding up like they used to. Good dog water in spot. That's one of the fun parts about exploring is you get to the points where you've got these forks in the trail and you've got no idea where to go. So, we're going to do it live. Just try to check a few out as we go along the lake here now. Well, what reflection was here is no more. The dogs have made sure of that. However, that peak probably does not come across near as impressive on this small camera as it does when you're standing right here. This will definitely be a shot that I take, but also that water is a lot more calm. I'm going to go over there and see if I can get a reflection first and then focus on that before the morning winds pick up too much if Willow will oblige. Well, before I get much further to the lake, there's a really nice scene right over there with some of that low angle light coming through the trees and hitting the lake at a pretty soft angle. If that turned out, here's that shot. I rather like how this image turned out with the bright reflected light from the pollen on the lake. I couldn't figure out if I like this image more with color or in black and white. Let me know what you think. Well, I don't think there's a reflection to be had here. It's just a little too breezy. This is a really good one to bookmark, though, and say, yeah, I'm going to come back here where I know the conditions are calm and see if I can get one. That side is still more calm, though. Maybe I can hop across there. I'll try to get across this log jam, see if I can do that safely, and then set up on the other side. This is probably the part where you assume the idiot falls in the lake with all of his gear and loses the data for the shoot like the thumbnail suggests. However, these Nikons are built for rugged fools like myself. The actual way that I nearly lost everything for this video was my Osmos memory card corrupted about a quarter mile from the truck on my way back out. Thankfully, a local IT company was able to recover the footage so this video could still That was a nightmare to get over. I definitely fell through about three times. My mom's got the dogs. They're kind of freaking out right now. Willow does not like being separated from me. So if it wasn't such a good shot over here, I don't think I would have gone through all that trouble. But of course, now the light's not near as good. It's always how it goes, isn't it? You see something, you pursue it, you get to the other side, things change. It's not what you were looking for. So I took the first shot. I just went for a straight reflection line across the middle and super simple. I think I'm going to refine this more. I think I want to get low. I think I want to try to capture some of the shapes in the foreground here and see if some more of this pollen that's kind of filming a, it almost looks like mist in the water. It's kind of cool. I'm going to try to see if I can do something that highlights that now. And I don't know, experiment a little bit. I went through all the work to get here. I'm going to be quick and mindful of my mom watching the dogs, but I got to, got to get it while I'm here. All right, what I just did is I got down really low right here. I didn't film it. The process was a bit cumbersome, so apologies for that. But what I did is I just found some really nicely shaped rocks here in the foreground, got down low, switched the polarizer on, see how it looked. And I couldn't quite capture that really nice misty looking pollen in a way that didn't just look like noise in the clouds, probably because we have some pretty, pretty flat cloud up in the sky right now. But so what I did is I just focus stacked that and I think it turned out pretty good. Hard to say. The glare is so bad over here. I didn't try to show it because I couldn't even see if things were lining up and if they were focused over here. So hopefully that turned out. If it did, here it is. This image didn't work out for other reasons than the poor light. While focus stacking, I had accidentally focused on the pollen on the water rather than the rocks below, resulting in the lowest stones in the frame being out of focus. All right, well, I'm going to wrap it up over here. I don't think the light's going to get any better. Bummer. But a great place to know about. Awesome little shoot. I'm going to put all my gear back in my bag and wander back over the log jam. I thought maybe having a tripod as a extra walking stick would be helpful. No. If I had different feet on it, maybe that'd be the case. But all I wanted to do was slide around and it became a liability. So hopefully you will learn from my mistake there instead. But yeah, I'm going to go wander over and then it's kind of bummer the light's flattened out, but we might try to pull out the long lens again and see if we can get that really impressive peak here to do something for us. So I'm not going to try to film it. I'm just going to get back over to the other side. All right, we made it back across the log jam. No issues. The whole reason I went there was to maybe get a little better light and a reflection. Look at that. Right back where we started, reflections. Every bit as good as it was over there, but that's just the name of the game. None of the gear got damaged. The Osmo did get hung up in a hawthorn bush. I mean, I did too. That was pretty unpleasant, but somehow everything worked out okay. I do think I'm going to bust out the long lens and go for that peak. Bad light and all. You can see what I have framed up here. It is really just that monstrous peak. That thing is a behemoth. What I'm going to do is try to get it all in one frame here, but then I think I want to really pull out a lot of detail, and I want to get a pano of this whole rugged ridgeline that cuts across the scene. So I'm not sure what all images I'm going to be presenting here, but here they are now. Well hopefully that pano I took turned out pretty good. In the field it looks absolutely awesome from what I could tell in the little checks that I was doing. The amount of detail that you get in this 100-400 lens is just incredible. Dogs are still running around. When you're photographing with dogs, make sure you get far enough away from the shoreline that you get rid of most of the shake spray, if you know what I mean. If you have a lab, you know exactly what I'm talking about. They'll still come do it. So wherever you put your backpack, water magnet. But as far as photographs go, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to try to target some neat little areas that are catching some of that direct sunlight. I don't know if I'll keep it in color or not. There's a little bit of blue sky returning. That haze is kind of disappearing that I was fighting with earlier, but I'm going to pick out some really zoomed-in scenes and see what we have. Well, I'm all packed up now and that concludes our time here at the lake. I think I came away with a few okay images. More than anything, I'm super excited to come back here in the fall. The larch are going to make this place just pop. So this is the kind of hike, despite being a nice, short, easy one, you just take a day off work and come out and shoot it when the conditions are perfect, when the forecast lines up. So all in all, super successful day. I think I got a few okay images and more than anything, just got out and about on a beautiful weekend. So if these are the kind of adventures you like to see, please consider subscribing to the channel to see more. All right. Take care, everyone.