Time for some Montana scenery.

Robert was busy working in the yard,so I went to take photos by myself. There are times when it's good to go alone for it's so much easier to think of camera settings and what you are trying to do with each photo you take. When we're together, we're so busy visiting sometimes it's hard to think about what I want my camera to capture.

I had planned in the begining to stay kind of close to home and didn't think I'd roam further than Freezout Lake. I didn't find many birds, or animals there so I took the road that goes behind Priest Butte, hoping I'd see a coyote, maybe a bear, hopefully some deer or at the very least a raven or a gopher! Nothing. So I concentrated on scenery.

Got back to Choteau, had hardly any photos so I headed toward Pishkin because the mountains were calling to me. I ended up on the Peebles Cut Across Road and took photos of Ear Mountain as I went along.

The landscape was totally bare of animals. I didn't even see birds. I came back toward Choteau and when I got to Eureka lake, I ate my lunch and hoped some birds would fly into or around the trees. Sometimes I see Pelicans on the water there.  No such luck so I enjoyed my cheese and ham, and came home!

Do you love to roam about the countryside? What do you see when you're "out there"?
Donna Ridgway

Split Personality

This is a beautiful horse, but I took an ugly photo of her! Because she's so sweet, and such a wonderful girl, I had to try to do something nice with this photo! A tribute to her...

I opened the photo in Photoshop, looked at it for a long, long time, thinking.... Because of the color of her eyes, and the abstract qualities of her blaze and mappings, her eyes don't seem to belong to the same horse!

And because of the same weird look of the blaze, and some distortion of the lens, the bottom of her face needed to come off here. So crop it I did.

Looking at what I had a bit longer, I thought I'd make her black and white all the way. Because she still seemed to me, to look like two different horses in the same face, I decided to split the photo!

Wanting a division between the faces I have here, I decided to place her onto a background. As I placed the pieces of her face on the background, the name of this work came to me!

I give you:

Split Personality!

If you didn't know what I've done here, you would never guess this is all one horse. Photoshop is so much fun. Don't be afraid to play with it. You never know what will come to you as you sit staring at your computer screen!
Donna Ridgway

Rising Eagle, photo of eagle.

For Valentine's Day, we went out on a photo shoot. It's our favorite thing to do, and you never know what you might find! As it happens, we saw this eagle on a knoll, sitting on a post. As I walked toward him, he shot me dirty looks, and when I was invading his personal space to closely, he stretched his wings for flight. Here he is, tippy talons on the post, one second before he flew away. These birds are incredibly huge when they stretch out like this. It was an awesome sight.
Donna Ridgway