Early November was spent on a photographic trip to Montana and Wyoming, which included in the itinerary Yellowstone and Grand Tetons National Parks, several ex-gold mining ghost towns and of course large swaths of countryside outside of the national parks that dominate the two states.

The trip was with 13 other fellow photographers, organised by Light and Land and jointly lead by Charlie Waite and David Ward. It was a first class trip to a part of the States that I haven’t previously visited.

The trip out was pretty torturous due mainly to a 6-hour layover at Minneapolis, but as airports go this is a pretty good place to be stuck for 6 hours! In any event, it provided an opportunity to meet and get to know the other photographers on the trip – a bit of an icebreaker before the tour properly started. Charlie and David met us at 11:50 pm local time (6:50 am - the next day UK time - ouch!) at Missoula airport and we quickly drove to our 1st hotel to get some sleep before day one of the tour.

Throughout the tour the weather was good – almost too good as it would have been nice to have a bit more cloud detail at times. Montana is one of those States that is largely unspoilt by progress – mobile (cell) phones simply don’t work as the population densities are not big enough to make it economically viable to establish a phone network – my kinda place! It remains predominately a ranching/farming state, with huge expansive vistas making it difficult at times to judge scale and distance – genuinely “big sky country”.
"Abandoned Truck"

Over the two weeks I suffered from one memory card failure, although this was not fatal as I was able to recover the images. Compact Flash cards were reused after first being reformatted. I travelled with four 2Gb cards, which is enough for just over two days worth of shooting. I figure that this is enough to allow for not having the opportunity to backup images everyday if the schedule is too busy, but as it turned out I found time every day. I don’t like using larger cards since if a failure does occur, only one days shoot is likely to be lost – larger cards mean more material at risk at any one time. All images on the trip were duplicated to portable storage and to the laptop computer. I consider that two copies are sufficient insurance against a hard disk failure or theft of one of the backup devices – the two copies always being kept separately.

Pretty much everybody on the trip was using Manfrotto 410 geared tripod heads – these really are the head of choice for landscape photography as they allow for very precise adjustment – far superior in most circumstances to a ballhead. It became apparent (something I wasn’t aware of) that these heads, whilst super at the job they do, are not the most rugged of designs. They don’t like being dropped or knocked heavily. This can result in broken plate castings, jammed and sheared gear mechanisms and slipping adjustment mechanisms. From memory two 410’s failed in one way or another although with a few tools and in one instance thanks to an excellent camera store in Bozeman (F-11 Camera Supply), they were both repaired. In fact F-11 was a fortunate “pit stop” for us, allowing one other tour member to replace a broken lens (due to a tripod blowing over) and several of us to augment our kit, where we had found that bits had been left at home or extra items needed.

After about two weeks back in the UK, I am nearly halfway through the management and processing of the RAW files. I am pleased with both the range of the material and the number of keepers. A new gallery will be added to the site shortly, in the meantime I have included two images from the earlier part of the tour.