We started the day hoping to get Big Horn Sheep descending from a hill in the morning light. I was hoping to shoot blurry, motion shots using longer exposures and rear sync flash. Everything was setup to make the situation happen except the subject never showed up. The whole effort climbing the 200ft hill and trek across a half mile of railroad tracks yielded nothing. The sheep never arrived. We waited and waited and they never showed up. All wasn't lost though. Being an impatient person, I rarely just stand there waiting. I usually am moving around--close to my tripod mind you--looking around. I even check behind to make sure I'm not missing thing. I learned this from past experience where I patiently waited for a senic to fully develop when just to the side, something unexpected and amazing was materializing. So, it makes sense to look around when nothing else is going on.

In our case this morning, I just happened to look behind, away from the expected approach of the sheep, and saw the colors developing. I didn't really have time to pull out my wide-angle and decided to concentrate on a narrow portion of the glowing colors and mountain range. Like my other panoramics, this image is a three image composite combined to make a single image.

By the way, this was the most sunlight we saw all day.

Later, we searched Maligne Road. Found a Bull Moose near Maligne Lake though none of my images were that great. Still, hanging with such a huge animal for any period of time was awesome.

The best images of the day were taken in a fairly benign situation. Near the Maligne Canyon visitors center we found a couple Big Horn Sheep Rams hanging out on a small grass strip. The snow was falling but it wasn't sticking. Chas and I watched the other particpants shoot and didn't initially bring out our equipment. How many Big Horn Sheep portraits do we need? I thought I already had the best portraits I could want so this situation didn't look worth the effort of getting the gear out of the cars, on the tripods, and up the five foot hill--we were kind of getting lazy. Well, we were wrong. Eventually we did relent, setup, and shot our portraits. One ram was particularly cooperative. When anyone moved, he'd raise his head scanning the situation giving us opportunities to get our shots then go back to munching the grass. Quite surprisingly to me and Chas, we got some of our best portraits during that little visit. It far exceeded our initial expectations. I guess we can chalk that up to a saying; "you can't get any pictures if you don't get out and shoot".

Cheers

Tom