Welcome to the mountains...

The last few weeks I have been looking through a lot of my old pictures. I've been doing this for a couple of reasons. 1.) There is a lot of cleaning that I have to do on my laptop. 2.) There is a lot of work that I have to do with old pictures. 3.) The weather here has been depressing and I need to see some color again!

Every time I look at these pictures I notice how much work that there is to do so it got me thinking. I am going to start a series that shows much more in depth what I was doing while at school this summer. I don't know how long or short this series is going to go. My goal by doing this is so that after I am done with this series of blogs, I have my computer cleaned off and all the files in proper working order. The bonus is that I know some people are curious what I spent all my time doing since they have only seen a small portion of my pictures from this summer.

Let me say that I went to RMSP to get better so this will show you the progression of how I did this. A lot of these pictures are not portfolio pictures. They are a record of what I did and how I got to where I am now. If there is any prospective RMSPer's out there who end up reading this I hope this helps and I wish I could have found something like this before I headed West.

These were a few of the pictures that I took on the way. We didn't stop much due to the weather. It was a dreary trip to Montana from Minnesota. We stopped at Mt. Rushmore and the weather was so bad you couldn't even see it. I mean nothing. Kind of depressing as we drove a couple of hours out of the way to go there when we could have been sleeping. Since the weather was so bad, we really didn't stop to take any pictures. Not that I didn't take any.... Let me tell you it isn't smart to photograph while driving but, it is really hard to do when I had never seen the mountains. I mean I have to take the picture for prosperity's sake right???

The second is from right when we arrived in Missoula, MT. There was this big M on the mountain and everyone was walking to it so...we did to. Let me say that this was very humbling, as I thought I was in good shape but I had never hiked up a mountain and this wasn't even a real mountain hike. I was sore the next day. After killing ourselves we wanted to see downtown. As we were walking in I got my first glimpse of Brennan's Wave. Always a good place to photograph if you are into taking pictures of kayaking. My wife and I spent a little while here as we both had never seen somebody kayaking and were amazed at how graceful it is. I was down taking pictures and talking to the kayakers when I met Forrest Woodward. He is the one in the yellow kayak and he is a great photographer who happened to be an assistant as RMSP and I would have class with him the next day.

That's the first days, not as many pictures as I would like but more importantly, a lot of good memories to hold onto for us, as my wife headed back to Minnesota right before school started.