Baby Trip 1 • Bears • Fall Color • Monument Valley

Baby Animal Trip 1

The first thing I should say is that I am so not a morning person.  This trip was more like work and not so much like a vacation.  There were a number of reasons for this.  The first being the not a morning person thing.  You see, the best time to photograph things is at dawn and at dusk.  This trip happened in June - the same month as the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.  Translation, I had to get up at 5 AM everyday!  Really, really, really not a morning person.

Another problem was that I just got a digital camera this spring.  I did not think I would like using a digital camera but I have not used my film camera since I got it.  I really love it, but it still sort of freaks me out.  I like having a slide I can touch when I am finished.  Only having a digital file that can disappear with a hard drive crash is unnerving.  I have two laptops.  The oldest one is very light weight and easy to take on a trip.  It is also very slow.  The newest is huge.  I wanted something I could play games on when I was traveling by car.  With the power supply it has to weigh at least 12 pounds.  Carrying all my camera equipment and 12 pounds of computer equipment on a plane just seemed to daunting a task.  So, I took the old, light, slow computer.  Big mistake.  I forgot the old computer only had USB 1.  It took over an hour to download my 2 GB card to my laptop.  I also bought a USB DVD recorder so that I would have a backup in case the hard drive failed.  Once I downloaded the files from the camera to the laptop it took another hour to burn the files to a DVD.  I shot way more pictures with the digital camera than I would have with film.  In 4 days I shot around 2500 pictures. Every minute that I wasn't shooting or sleeping I was transferring files.  I was getting about 6 hours of sleep a night.  By the end of the trip all I wanted was 8 continuous hours of sleep.

The animals, however, were wonderful.  Baby animals are just adorable.

We stayed in Bozeman, Montana.  Bozeman is 90 miles away from Yellowstone, which I discovered about two days before the trip.  Sometimes it pays to look at a map and see where you are going.  If I had realized it sooner I would have taken a few extra days to see Yellowstone.  It was too much hassle to change all of my plans that late in the game.

Would I do this again?  Absolutely.  It was wonderful even if I had to get up early.  However, I will have a better computer next time.

Tour Operator - Animals of Montana