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Due to incoming inclement weather and my own unfortunate choices, my recent camping trip to southwest Montana near the Idaho border was shorter than I intended. One of those choices will affect what you see and don’t see on Feathered Photography in the coming days so I figured a trip report was in order, in part to explain why.<\/p>\n
I spent 2 1\/2 days in and near Montana’s Centennial Valley before I tucked my tail between my legs and headed for home. Following are some of the highlights and all of the lowlights of those days.<\/p>\n
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Day 1: Really only half a day because I didn’t arrive at my destination until early afternoon. After setting up camp I spent the rest of the day and evening reacquainting myself with some of my favorite places in the universe, after nearly three years of not seeing them. Much of the time it was mostly cloudy and a little windy so photo ops with birds and wildlife were few and far between but I was finally in my element again so it was great fun anyway.<\/p>\n
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Day 2: My second day was pretty much a bust photographically because I chose to spend most of the day in the Centennial Valley and when I arrived there the entire valley was socked in with fog.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/pronghorn-in-the-fog-4072-ron-dudley.jpg\")
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Typically when there’s fog in the valley it’s mostly found in the lowest areas and it clears early in the morning but this time it filled almost the entire valley and much of it stuck around until midday. By the time it cleared the light was too harsh for decent photos so I just made the long drive back to my trailer for lunch and a much-anticipated long nap. But I’m a light sleeper and far-away mooing cows meant that I never did drop off.<\/p>\n
Late that afternoon and evening I toured some other favorite old haunts but didn’t have a lot of luck with birds.<\/p>\n
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Day 3: My third day was just about perfect for weather and light and birds were abundant.<\/p>\n
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I chose to take a chance with fog in the Centennial Valley again and this time I got lucky. The high mountain valley is huge, 15 miles wide and 45 miles long, and about the only fog I encountered was at the far west end over Lima Reservoir. This was my view right at sunrise from the top of Monida Hill (a small mountain, really). I’d estimate that the lake fog we see was about 5 miles away from where I took the photo.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/swainsons-hawk-4521-ron-dudley.jpg\")
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Twelve minutes later I found my first bird of the day, a handsome and cooperative Swainson’s Hawk. Day 3 was one of my best days in the valley for birds in all the years I’ve been going there.<\/p>\n
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But during those three days there was other ‘stuff’ going on in the background, just to make life more interesting I guess.<\/p>\n
On day two, during my midday break while I was in my trailer trying to process photos on my old laptop computer, my generator just quit. When I investigated, the control panel said there had been a “ground fault” and at first I couldn’t get it started again. When I tried again later it started immediately and I never had a problem with it again. But it was in the back of my mind for the rest of the trip. I’d be in big trouble without a functioning generator.<\/p>\n
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One of the first things I noticed when I set up camp on Day 1 had the potential to ruin my entire trip.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/trailer-roof-vent-damage.jpg\")
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This is what was left of the vent cap on the roof of my trailer. At home I park my trailer on my driveway beneath some trees and in the nearly three years since I’d used the trailer those trees had grown, with some of the branches hanging down lower over the top of the trailer than they’d been previously. So when I pulled my trailer out of the driveway to head for Montana, my vent cap was destroyed. I didn’t realize it until I arrived in Montana.<\/p>\n
Water damage in the trailer from rain is the last thing I need so Friday morning, with a big storm on the way, I headed for home. I patched it temporarily with the only sheet plastic I had (plastic garbage bags) but by the time I got home, driving at freeway speeds, my patch had been shredded.<\/p>\n
And all the way home, nearly 300 miles, I worried. Would I make it home without getting rained on and how was I going to patch my roof vent again and do tree surgery so I could get my trailer parked, all with a bad back?<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/tree-surgery.jpg\")
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But I managed to do both. Here my trailer’s back on the driveway and these are the catalpa and elm branches I had to remove to get it there without doing any more damage. I’ve got my work cut out for me to get this mess cleaned up.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/trailer-roof-after-tree-surgery-scaled.jpg\")
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This photo, taken from one of my bedroom windows, shows that I now have plenty of room beneath the trees to park my trailer safely. The vent cap on the front of the roof is now covered with (heavier) plastic again. I have an appointment tomorrow with my trailer dealer to have a new vent cap installed.<\/p>\n
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I had one last nasty surprise when I got home.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned in a previous post, my old laptop won’t process RAW files from my R5 so I had it set to save RAW files of my photos to one memory card and jpegs to another. That way I could use the jpegs to post to my blog during the trip and still have the RAW files when I got home.<\/p>\n
But somehow I screwed up the settings and ended up with jpegs saved to both cards and no RAW files! For many reasons, I absolutely despise processing jpegs.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/partial-screen-shot-of-my-photo-organizer.jpg\")
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Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I loaded the photos that were supposed to be RAW files into my photo organizer and they all turned out to be jpegs (notice the JPG extension after each file #). And to make matters worse, many of the photos I took on this trip were softer than they should be. I see no reason why that would be related to them being jpegs rather than RAW files, so I’m stumped. Just before I left on this trip my photos were sharp as sharp could be.<\/p>\n
So you may not be seeing many of these trip photos on Feathered Photography. I just don’t think I’ll have the heart to suffer through processing hated jpegs that turn out to be softer than they should be. Through nobody’s fault but my own.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
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PS – I just remembered another interesting event from this trip.<\/em><\/p>\n One evening I noticed that ranchers had unloaded over a hundred cows from huge trucks onto US Forest Service land very near to where I was camping. They simply backed the trucks up over a cattle guard and unloaded the cows on the spot, only a few feet from the cattle guard that was meant to keep cows away from the nearby freeway (I-15).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Very early the following morning when it was still mostly dark I was headed for the Centennial Valley when I noticed that one of the cows had attempted to cross the cattle guard during the night and got stuck on it.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n When I first drove up she was laying down on the cattle guard. She immediately tried to stand up but two of her feet were stuck in the guard so she struggled to do so. By the time I got my lens on her to take a few soft photos in the near-darkness, only her left hind foot was still stuck and immediately after I took this photo she got that one out too.<\/em><\/p>\n So, the cow had successfully crossed the cattle guard – something I’d never seen before. I was worried that she’d make it the short distance to the freeway and cause an accident but by the time I thought of that possibility I had no cell service so I couldn’t report it.<\/em><\/p>\n However, when I returned a few hours later there was a representative from the Forest Service there, apparently monitoring a few of the other cows that obviously still wanted to cross the cattle guard. So I told him what I’d seen and showed him my photos, which he was very interested in. He said he was going to speak to the rancher about it.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/dumb-cow.jpg\" "\\"dumb")
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