Northern Idaho and Montana Photos

My wife and went to visit my dad (and son) again this last summer. My dad lives on Lake Pend Oreille in the summer. It is a beautiful location but I have struggled to see how to really capture it. It is mostly forests, water and sky. A complicating factor seems to be that it is surrounded by mountains and so the morning and evening light is very limited. So I have limited myself to a few interesting 'intimate scenes' and others I have to been satisfied with. Being a holiday with family also limits me to times that don't disrupt planned activities. Dinner is the most intrusive with respect to photography as the evening is most likely to provide the best light at times.

In my series of posts on The Glory of Our West. There is one photo of the lake taken in the late 1940's.

Pend Oreille Lake
FRED BOND, Los Angeles. 4x5 Speed Graphic camera; 7-1/8" B&L. convertible protar lens; Harrison C-1/8 filter; Kodachrome film, daylight type; 1/5 second at f:25. Brilliant mid afternoon, September.

A nice photo but not really special. I have located the spot where this is taken and I had hoped to 'reproduce' it but failed to find the time with the right conditions.

This year as in past years some days were plagued with smoke from forest fires. In 2015 I used this to some effect to create this below. And that year (like this year to a lesser extent) the smoke limited larger scale photos.