Glacier National Park

Glacier National Park was beautiful. The weather started out really good. It was warm and the sky was active with broken clouds. That makes it great for photography. A clear blue sky is a boring sky. I’ve been in Columbia Falls. It is a twenty-mile trip to the West visitor’s center and Lake McDonald. Lake McDonald is beautiful. The problem that I had was that Logan Pass from the west side of Glacier to the east side of Glacier was still closed and predicted to open the same day that I am leaving. It is a two-hour drive from where I am staying to the East visitor’s center. Although the west side is beautiful the scenic beauty of the east side is far superior. If I had it to do all over again, I would make my reservations on the east side and do it in July when Logan Pass is open. I also didn’t get the picture that I wanted. The picture that I wanted to duplicate is one of Lake McDonald. It is looking straight up the lake. It is a picture with the mountains on the far side in focus and the reflection of the mountains are in focus. The kicker is that the pebbles in the water in the foreground are in focus. There was only one day that the weather cooperated, and I got the mountains and the reflection. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that I needed to use a process called focus stacking. That is a process where you put your camera on a tripod select all your settings and then take a minimum of three pictures and move the point of focus on each picture from the foreground, the middle ground and the background. Once you have done that you can bring all the pictures into Photoshop and use one of the photoshop functions that selects the sharpest parts of each image and produces one image where everything is sharp. My picture has the middle and background are in focus, but the pebbles are not. After that day the weather changed and got windy so there was no chance to get a reflection.