Tower Rock

Tower Rock State Park is a small few acre park with a unique history. It was here that Lewis and Clark climbed up onto the large rock buttresses to gain a vantage point for navigating the canyons of the Big Belt mountains. It is a great place to climb around with a few steep sloped with a mixture of scree and boulder scrambles. The views are pretty nice from the top although the highway tends to detract from it a bit. What it does offer to the photographer's lens is an array of rock formations from small boulders to 400 foot high towering walls, weather beaten dead fall timber and lichen and moss covered rocks and you do get great glimpses of the Big Belts which hold snow into early summer.

For this trek i went light taking only the camera and my all purpose 18-250mm sigma lens. This combo was more that sufficient to capture the types of shots I was after.

Clouds

A great evening of boiling cloud formations rolled into town and I just had to capture them. I drove a few miles north of Great Falls, MT to Benton Lake wildlife refuge which provided a great open unbroken horizon to work with. I was shooting almost directly into the sun and while that is not the ideal situation it did provide great glow to the clouds which provided the neccessary contrast I was after. I set my camera to Monochrome(black and white) and opted to add red filter effect to enhance the sky/cloud contrast. The result was pretty much what I was after....