Hewett Photography Blog

Last weekend the girls and I piled in the car and went to Bozeman for a night, just to get away for a bit and so Jenn could shop at stores we don’t have here in Billings. On the way home, K was fussing a bit in her seat (even though it’s only a 1.5-2 hour drive), so we decided to pull off at an exit near Livingston that had a sign up for the MT Grizzly Encounter.   We had no idea what it was, but they advertized that we could see bears, and they were right off the highway, so we took a chance. $14 later, we parked in the lot, wandered over 50 feet or so and found Lucy staring us and a couple other tourists down.  She’s only ~9 months or so old, and these guys had rescued her when she was only a couple weeks old, so she is still getting play time to herself.  She was a typical toddler, never still, always on the move, so I didn’t get too many pictures that were very sharp, but these few give you the flavor for the experience.  There was a storm front blowing a cold wind in, so we didn’t stay long enough to see the older, bigger bears, but K was suitably excited for a few minutes, and was then very willing to get back into her carseat and let us proceed in peace.

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K is asking more and more often to “do pictures”, so I’m trying to honor those wishes whenever possible. Tonight I managed to get a good one. As usual, click the pic to see it larger.

As you may know we recently bought a house, and have been getting settled in over the past couple of weeks. We knew that there had to be deer in the area, since several of the trees in the backyard had marks from where the deer have been either chewing the bark or scraping their antlers. We hadn’t seen any, but our new neighbors had told us that there were a couple large bucks roaming the area that frequented their yard and ours.

This morning, we noticed that there were a couple bucks just laying down in the backyard. I grabbed my camera and thought I’d see if I could get a decent pic. As soon as I steeped out onto the deck, the smaller one was up and moving to the fence. The bigger one (above) must have felt like he was protected enough with that splendid rack, so we took his time getting up and stared me down. I stayed back and had my 200mm lens as long as it would go. I got several frames of him, but liked this one the best. By my quick count, that’s 5×7, if you don’t count the small spikes at the skull.

Anyone still checking this blog for updates?  Anyone?

After our move from Denver to Billings, I just haven’t spent as much time doing the photography thing as I used to.  Part of this is not being around a regular group of fellow enthusiasts (I miss the CO Strobist group!), and another big part was not feeling like I really had the space in the apartment to get a good photo – it was just too much of a pain in the @$$ to move everything out of the way to get a clean background.  Well, now that we’ve bought a house with a LOT more space than we had before, I finally feel like I can leave some things setup and then be able to grab a quick portrait here and there now.  Like tonight, I asked K if she wanted to take some pictures of her new slippers.  I hope that this is the start of some more regular photography and some more regular posts here.  I certainly plan to make more time for it!

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Just a quick photo from tonight. I needed to stretch my back so I did a quick yoga pose; when I came up I noticed K doing the same thing next to me, so I grabbed my phone and got a quick pic of her.