Week 10

Things are wrapping up with the end of Summer Intensive (my first half) on the 15th. This week we had two finals. In Business and Marketing we had to turn in a business plan. I dreaded this final all summer, but it turned out ok. And it was a good exercise to think about how I would start a business. I also had a Lighting Class final that was five of my favorite images from studio. Which I have included for your viewing pleasure.

This week we also had final days in the print lab before our big Visual Studies project is due. We had an open studio time where we could do whatever we wanted with the studio strobes. And there was one last computer class and a help session for the on camera hot shoe flash.

I didn't do anything very exciting this weekend as I had to go to school on Saturday morning and work on my Visual Studies project. Cora had family in from out of town so we spent several hours on Saturday cleaning the house and cooking for dinner. It was a fun evening with lots of good food. Today I went to the Western Montana State Fair for a city-wide church service. It was a beautiful day to worship outside. The best part was that I met a guy from Wasilla who goes to WBC and knows a lot of my AK friends. What a small world! I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing my Photo Studies final. This final is a photo journalistic essay with a magazine query letter to an appropriate magazine. It felt a little like being back in college.

next week will be a week of finishing up and saying good bye to some of my friends that won't be staying for the rest of the program. Friday is graduation if anyone is in the Missoula area and wants to see a lot of photography.

Too Late...

I picked the blue one but turned it as a vertical. Thanks, Laila!

Graduation is coming....

Summer Intensive graduation - my half way point- is next Friday. I have to pick 5 photos to show at graduation during a slide show. I am going to put some of my shots from my Visual Studies final but have to choose another one to go with it and I am having a hard time deciding. So if you read this before Saturday afternoon, write me a comment on your vote between these three.

I also put some new photos on my school web site.

Week 9

It is high time I caught you up on last week. It was a short week of class with only two full days. Most of them were in lighting and studio. We had one class to get ready for our big final project where our classmates looked at our images and gave us feedback. It was good, but confusing for me. Some of what I had in my head didn't translate to my classmates so that was a bit frustrating as we are in the final days of this project.

We then had a 5 day break from class. Wednesday I spent all day writing my business plan for my business and marketing class. Thursday I worked on my final project, ran errands, and went with Cora to her parent's house for dinner. Friday I worked on a few things and then headed north again. This time for a "photocentric" view of Glacier. Cora's brother, Lucas, took me to some of his favorite spots in return, I brought along my older digital slr and gave him some photography pointers. So with dueling cameras, we hiked a little in the Two Medicine area, drove up to the Chief Mountain trail head (but it started raining just as we got there), stopped at one of the most iconic photo spots in Glacier, took lots of pictures of waterfalls, and had coffee at Many Glacier Hotel where we saw the other side of the peak we climbed last weekend. Another great weekend and fun adventure.

Alaska Friends

Tuesday night I got to hang out with my buddy, Rachel Kroon, and her kids. They were in town visiting family and I got to sneak in on a little of that time. I have known her for 8 years and for 4 of those years we lead a group of middle school girls together at church.

When I left Alaska 2 years ago she only had one little one... now she had three. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of Rach, but here are her little ones.

Thanks Rach! What fun to catch up with you and play with your little guys!

Glacier National Park

I knew it would be an interesting weekend when the white Chevy blazer pulled up in front of my house playing jazz music. I soon met Ryan and Amanda, my escorts north to Glacier. Lucas, my roommate Cora's brother, had invited me along to go hiking with him and his friends. I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into because I knew that I wasn't anywhere near as active or in shape they were. We spent Friday evening at Lucas' summer place on a Biological Station on Flathead Lake where he cooked dinner for us and several other friends.

Saturday we drove to Glacier and straight to the top of the Going to the Sun Road. I hadn't paid much attention to the plan for the day as I was just tagging along as the poky photo geek. I was just hoping I didn't slow them down too much.

I was feeling pretty good about keeping up with them for the first 4 miles. And what an amazing 4 miles of trail it was! I had a hard time watching my feet I was so distracted by the view and the mountain goats that just looked at you when you passed by a few feet away from them... less skittish than cows.

We stopped for lunch here where the guys are leaning against the rock wall. And if you look up above them... yes this is where things get interesting. We basically left the trail at this point and started climbing up this , shall we say ... cliff, toward the top. Fortunately they gave me a few pointers about rock climbing as we went. Sometimes I was wishing I had longer legs to make the next foot hold, but I managed to scramble up the rocks somehow.

This is where the scree and chimneys come in to play. Scree is loose rock that you have to get across at different points to find solid rocks... very tricky and my least favorite part of the climb. Chimneys are kind of like corners with hand holds that you have to climb up.


Eventually we made it up to a saddle where a glacier had once been. I came over the ridge and sighed, "we made it" and Ryan just looked to our left and said "we still have to go up there"... so I amended my comment to "we made it this far".


I decided the saddle was as far as I needed to go in one day as I was most concerned about getting down and I had never attempted this type of a hike before. So my three hiking buddies started up the next section of the peak and I leaned back on a nice sloped rock with moss perfectly situated under me and watched them disappear over the rocks. I had a beautiful afternoon on top of a mountain waiting for them to return. Once they came back down we headed down the to the main trail. It was slow going as we tried not to knock rocks down on top of each other. The photo of them laughing is just after we got back down to the main trail to hike back 4 miles to our car.

The last photo I put red arrows to show where we climbed. The lowest arrow is part of the main trail we hiked in on . The middle arrow is the saddle where I spent my afternoon at 8500 feet and the top arrow is Mt Gould about 9500 feet... they climbed to the highest part... I am just not sure where that is along this ridge.


That night we slept out under the stars in a nearby campground. And woke to the hum of motor home generators. But we were off again and my body was reminding me of my age. I did my best to ignore it but when we started hiking on Sunday I had a hard time ignoring the protesting. There was a plan to climb another peak and the guys did climb one, but Amanda and I opted for a 6 mile hike down to Hidden Lake near the top of Logan's Pass. We had lunch on the rocky beach with more mountain goats. Once back from the hike, we sat on the board walk near the visitor's center to watch big horn sheep and people as we waited for the guys to get back. It is amazing what footwear people will attempt to hike in...

Once the guys got back we drove back down to Flathead Lake and went swimming before Ryan, Amanda and I hopped back in the white blazer and drove back to Missoula.

Today is Wednesday and my body finally feels normal again. But what an introduction to Glacier... definitely an adventure I will never forget.

Week 8

This week I spent a lot of time on my computer working in Adobe CS3 and printing some of my favorite photos. There was a class on photojournalism and more still life studio photography. We also had a couple of guest lecturers, one on weddings and the other a newspaper photojournalists. Things are beginning to wind down for Summer Intensive (the first 11 weeks of the 5 1/2 months I am here) so we are working on final projects that will be due the first two weeks of August.

My best stories are from this weekend. I have a lot of photos, but need to do a bit of processing before I write my complete blog. I had my first taste of Glacier National Park... and oh what a taste. There was a road to the sun, new friends, mountain goats, vertical climbs, chimneys, scree, stars, people watching, seeing the fingerprints of God and another amazing adventure.

Week 7

Week seven already? This week I printed a bunch of my photos, learned about still life photography, heard Peter Reid Miller - famous Sports Illustrated photographer - speak, learned about matting and framing and started scratching the surface on learning Adobe CS3.

But this weekend Cora insisted that I come with her family to a cabin about 2 hours north of here. It turned out to be several families of close friends. I knew I was going to fit in when someone started giving me a hard time and I had only been there 30 minutes. I even included a group shot of my new friends.

Cora's mom and brother took me with them on a hike in the afternoon. It was hot but beautiful and we found huckleberries, which seem to be quite a valuable prize here. I told them that I didn't think I had ever tried them before so we had to photograph the momentous event.

But I had the most fun on the hike when we found this little waterfall and I lingered taking pictures as they went on ahead in search of huckleberries. When we got back from the hike we jumped in the river, that was much more like a lake, and lingered in the sun to dry off. After a fantastic dinner of grilled fish, Cora's dad took me out on the river to take sunset pictures. As it got dark we build a campfire and I started playing with flashlights, long exposures and painting with light. Here a couple of my favorite. Around midnight as everyone went to bed I set up my camera to take a very long exposure of start trails. Then a couple of us took a canoe out to paddle under the amazing full moon. A couple of hours later we finally got back and my camera battery had died at 74.5 minutes. Here is that cool photo.

Today we went for boat rides, went swimming, sat in the sunshine, had a beautifully simple church service and soaked up every minute. It was such an wonderful summer weekend it was hard to see it end, but I am so glad that I got to be a part of it.

Website

So I thought that putting the link in my blog posts would get everyone to my school site. But I guess it wasn't very obvious. So there are two ways that you can get there. www.mountaintopphoto.com is the actual address and there is a link on www.carrielambing.com. I will also put it on my links on the right.

Week 6 in Pictures

I must start with the bride and groom. This is one of the shots I snapped at the wedding in SD last weekend. I have many more, but just thought I would share this one for now. If you want to see more SD pictures. All of the pictures I put into my slide show project are now up on my class web site under Ranch Photos.

Earlier in the week there was a fire on the hillside above Missoula. The daylight shot is from my front yard looking over the condo's in front. The night shot was taken from a park about a block from my house (both with my telephoto lens).

This week was a little stressful overall, especially with the slideshow project. I am glad it is over and can move on this week.

On Saturday I took some time to just wander around the local farmer's market. It was a lot of fun to walk around talking to vendors and snapping a few shots just for fun. These are a few of my favorites from the morning as well as a few reflection shots of myself.

This morning I got up a little early and went downtown to shoot my first marathon. It was a lot of fun and I can't believe I have never followed my racing friends down to an event before. Here are a couple shots from this morning.

Week 5

This will be short and sweet as my plate is rather full. I had 3 days of class before I took off to South Dakota for the holiday weekend. It was so fun to spend some time with my grandparents, brothers and their families, cousins, aunts and uncles, but the best was celebrating a cousin's wedding.

I also attempted to shoot a major project at the ranch in 2 days... 1000+ photos. And if you add in the 200 I took at the wedding and reception, I got a lot of practice in. That major project is the reason that this will be short. I have just 3 short days to complete it and all my spare time will be devoted to it. But this is good news for you, my readers, as I will have A LOT of new material to put up next weekend.

And, as I promised, I do have a web site set up for class. It is still in process, but I have a few photos up... so enjoy.

Week 4

Wow... it is hard to believe that a month has passed already.

Week 4 was another full week. I learned about zone system for color, visual design, infrared photography, macro photography, color image developing in Adobe Lightroom, printing photos, critiquing photos, and multi light studio photography. But the highlight of the week was being able to print up some of my photos.

Thursday I had the whole day off from class so I got up at 4:30am and drove north. I took some sunrise pictures and drove around back roads taking pictures. I got home around 11, took a shower, cooked lunch and crashed on the couch for 2 hours. Then went back out in the evening to take more photos in town. A good day of 400+ photos.

Friday night after class we took a classmate out for her 30th birthday--dinner and bowling. Just imagine 20 photography students in a bowling alley with disco lights... and lots and lots of cameras. The bowling was definately secondary.

Saturday morning I participated in a peer to peer critique. It was interesting to see what other people have been taking and meet some people from different groups. Then in the afternoon I jumped in the car with 3 other girls and we headed 2 hours north for the Augusta Rodeo. It came highly recommended as a great place to experience Montana and shoot a rodeo. Needless to say there were A LOT of us there with cameras. It as almost embarrassing to be one of the people that had a camera. Saturday evening was the local street dance and Sunday afternoon the rodeo started about 2pm. And it was HOT... in the 90's sitting on the edge of an arena holding a black camera for 3 hours. But it was so fun. Another 400+photo day can't be bad. And I bought myself some boots.

This week will be a light week as we get a 4 day break for the holiday. I am heading to South Dakota for a cousin's wedding and to see family. It should be lots of fun and I will have a lot to photograph.