HI everyone-

Did you ever think that you needed a vacation from vacation?? Well I am about there. Over the last few days I have been suffering from issue after issue after the crash of my main external hard drive.

On the night it happened I got about 2 hours of sleep (July 3). I spent every free second on the 4th trying to retrieve the data. And most of the 5th trying to make heads or tale of the salvaged data and trying to put it back into some semblance of order.

Well that has continued through today. I really started to make progress. I bought a new external hard drive. Started backing everything up to it. And even though the recovered files were a total mess and completely renamed I was happy to have them back.

Then tonight while i was editing and importing images in Lightroom, the power went out. Only enough to go completely off and then turn right back on. It was just enough time to shut off the power supply to the external hard drive. It was also enough to break the connection between Lightroom and that drive.

Well that was enough to completely screw up the catalog, to the point were I have deleted it and started a new one.

In both instances I lost data. What a huge pain in the butt. And we are talking thousands of images here. So you can understand the considerable amount of stress that this has created. Thus the vacation from the vacation thought.

Hopefully if I just hang on tight, use my head and think about where I am going and what is coming next I can work through this and move ahead. Much like the bull rider in the image.

I am picking up my friend and amazing photographer Bryan Allen tomorrow in Great Falls. Then we will spend the next few days in Glacier National Park and at the North American Indian Days in Browning, MT.

It should be a great time. Hope you enjoy today's photograph.

Have a great day!

Hi everyone-

We had a great 4th of July here in Choteau, Montana. The celebration starts here on the 3rd. The town has an art and craft show, called Art On The Green, Keg Hockey, Music In The Park, The Boxing Smoker and the Street Dance at the American Legion.

Also my cousins have a great family reunion picnic. That is the most fun part of the day because we have a lot of fun, get to see family from all over the country and of course eat a ton of great food.

On Saturday the day starts with a Run and Walk (we skipped that...lol) and then the parade. After the parade there is a Steak Fry in the park but we head to another cousins house for one more picnic. Then after that its off to the rodeo. That is always a great time.

The evening ended at another family gathering at my cousin Laura's house. There we made s'mores lit fireworks and of course ended the evening watching the towns fireworks display.

The weekend ended on Sunday with a majority of the immediate family departing for home. My girls, my sister and her son and my dad all headed home to PA to get back to the real world while my mom and I hang out for another week or so.

So here is are a few images from the weekend. There are tons more that will come out over the next year. Hope you had a great weekend and Independence Day!

Have a great day!

Waiting for the parade to get started...


Pony rides in the park...


My little 4th of July Princess...


Can't forget the great rodeo action...

Hi everyone-

Well I am here today patiently waiting for the snow that probably isn't going to come. Between staring out the window and going through all of my information for my tax preparations I took a break and looked through some images from the rodeo I posted last week.

There are a few more i wanted to share. I hope they aren't getting old. I am a huge rodeo fan so if it gets to be too much just let me know.

Today's image is of a clown distracting a bull so the cowboy can safely recover from being bucked off and get to safety.

It's a dangerous but very important job, one I have a lot of respect for. It takes lot to put yourself in between something that is pissed off and out weighs you by many tons and someone who is laying on the ground depending on you to by them the time to get out of Dodge.

I also wanted to address a question that Woody posed yesterday in the comments section. He asked what my thoughts were on shooting RAW vs JPG or some other form of image.

Initially I rejected RAW, as many did, out of fear. What is it, what do I do with it, etc... But once I read enough about the 'wonders of RAW' I decided to try it out. What happened next was simply amazing. Of course the first thing I thought was why haven't I been using this for 2 years!?!

Using the RAW format has revolutionized my images. I strive to get the shot right in the field but that does not always happen. In the days of JPG or film, what you got was what you got. You had to make it work, do the best you could with post processing or scrap it altogether.

Now I can essentially re expose my image in photoshop by using the RAW converter. I can do it globally or I can process the image several times and make more local corrections or changes and the blend them together in photoshop later.

The possibilities are endless. I am not an expert be any stretch of the imagination in the use of the RAW converter or even everything I can accomplish with this format and tools. But doing the few things that I do know how to do is really unbelieveable.

So to answer your question simply I think RAW is the way to go. But there are a few complicators to just making an blanket statement like that... Fisrt off is that RAW files are a lot bigger than what you are using now so they will eat up storage space quicker. And secondly the Photoshop RAW converter now supports jpg images.

This means that you can now do things to jpg's that you couldn't before, at least easily. So now you have to decide what you want to use. Keep in mind that quality wise there is no comparison, RAW is the way to go.

If I am shooting for a client, or shooting on one of my trips for the purpose of creating images I always shoot in RAW. If I am shooting a fire, I might consider shooting jpg. (most of those images are not going to be printed huge) However I don't do it that often. I normally do that to conserve space if I am running out of memory.

I do shoot in jpg mode when we're on vacation and are just taking "Hey we were here type of shots".

Like I said I am not an expert in all things RAW, but those are just my thoughts. If anyone has anything to add please feel free to do so.

Hope that was helpful. Have a great day!