Last night and today

Last night I went up Springhill Road north of town.  It was here that I managed to find the Northern Lights.  I also found a couple cool night landscapes.  Today, I was driving home when a lightening storm hit just to the west.  Naturally, I had to pull over and attempt some lightening images.  I never did get the awesome huge lightening bolts, but I'm still pretty happy with what I got.  This one has a little tiny bolt in it, and the cloud lit up so beautifully!!

Georgetown Lake

Last week, I went to Georgetown Lake, which is right outside of Anaconda, MT.  After several beautiful sunsets, a lake kayak trip, and some random wanderings around, I managed to get home and put these on my computer.  The light up there was amazing beautiful and incredibly vibrant.  With these images, as with most of my images, I tried not to touch them up.  However, the photograph of the mountains in sunset over the lake needed to be toned down a bit.  The colors from that particular sunset were overwhelming in person, and I'm excited that my camera was able to capture what I was seeing.

Northern Lights

Ok ok, I know these aren't the most top notch quality images, but I was just so excited about getting the Northern Lights no matter how faint they may be, that I'll brag about these images forever hehe!!  My first time ever attempting to photograph them (I didn't even know if I would get anything, last night they weren't really visible to the naked eye), and I think for the first time, they turned out ok.  I can't wait till winter!!  I'll go back up this same spot and try to get them again.

Sunrise, Weather Balloon Launch

Last week, I was invited to attend a NASA weather balloon launch by one of my friends who had scored a sweet internship with them over the summer.  I drove to Livingston, MT's airport (really just a landing strip) a couple hours before the launch to catch the sunrise.  These images are a mixture of the sunrise and the weather balloon launch.  It was interesting to photograph a sunrise, but even more fascinating to see this launch happen.  It brought back childhood dreams of wanting to become an astronaut!

Stars!!

Here are some star pictures that I took tonight.  It was a clear night but I couldn't photograph for very long as the moon is still super bright.  One and a half more weeks and the moon shouldn't be a factor!

More Hylite Stuff

Yup, here they are!  The promised Hylite images!  Believe it or not, most of these were taken after ten at night.  Bear in mind that it was full moon last night and these exposures are at least five to ten seconds a piece.  I had fun photographing these!  The best part is I didn't do much in photoshop.   I LOVE my new camera!!  The fact that I don't have to touch things up makes me super happy.

Fun Time With Long Exposures

Last night I went back up to the Reservoir and decided to take long exposures.  Each of these were taken with my 50 mm (my new favorite) set at f/10 for ten minutes.

Lily Pads

Here are some lily pads in Yellowstone.  I'm heading to Yellowstone again next week, so there will be more images!!

Hylite Reservoir

I took these the other night up at Hylite Reservoir.  I recently got a new camera, so this was the inaugural photo shoot!!  I think it was a success, and I'm really happy with these images.  They were all taken with a Canon 5D Mark II with a 50mm lens. Shutter speed was anywhere from 2-5 seconds and the f stop was set at 1.4.  I plan on heading back up there either tomorrow or Monday night.  I want to retake one of the images to get rid of the tree in the foreground (not a huge fan of the blurry tree, but others have disagreed with me).  Still, for the first time really using this camera, I feel that the evening was a huge success!!