Bryan Allen Photo Blog » The Incredible Photography of Bryan Allen

Today’s post will be the first of several from my recent, and first trip ever, to Montana! My friend, Brian Bastinelli, recently invited me to Choteau, Montana to spend some time with him and his family in the incredible Glacier National Park. We also attended the North American Indian Days, which is a large powwow held annually in Browning, Montana in the heart of Blackfeet Country. Brian is a superb photographer in his own right and I encourage you all to check out his work.

I want to send a HUGE Thank You to Brian for the invitation and personal tour guide service! This was such a relaxing and rejuvenating trip for me. Brian has spent something on the order of 35 years visiting Glacier and has a Native American heritage and ties to the community in this part of the country. I was able to simply relax and take it all in without the typical logistical and travel related pressures. Most of the time, it was just the two of us traveling around at our leisure, unencumbered, relaxed, and able to spend some great time together immersed in the beauty of the place and the rich culture and tradition of the Blackfeet. How incredible is that!

Well, as you might imagine, I have a ton of images from the trip. I will make several posts and try to divide the trip into logical and consumable bites. For this post, I’m going to step out of my comfort zone a bit and show some work that’s a little different for me. If you know me and my work, you know I SHOOT PEOPLE! But for this post, it’s just me and the “grand landscape”. Seems only fitting to pay homage to the grand landscape of Glacier with my first post from the trip.

Now I love to photograph a beautiful landscape as much as the next guy, but I’m just not one to get up at 3am on the dreariest of days (bad weather makes for great light you know), hike into the perfect spot which I would have scouted months or years in advance, set up in the dark, wait for the perfect confluence of conditions to occur, and then capture that precise moment in numerous bracketed exposures to later assimilate into and High Dynamic Range materpieceNope, I guess you could say I’m a little more of the accidental tourist type of landscape photographer. If I “accidentally” happen upon a great scene, with maybe some minimal planning, then you can bet I’ll enthusiastically attempt to record it. My friend, mentor, and fellow photographer, Craig Tanner, would be horrified at this outlook but hey, “I are what I are” and I’m OK with that.

Now as fortune would have it, one doesn’t have to try real hard to hit a home run in a place like Glacier. Incredible and breathtaking grand landscapes abound . . . even in the middle of the day after sleeping in, having a late breakfast and piece of pie at the famous Park Cafe, and sauntering into the park by say mid daySo, with all of that background, here are a few landscape images from my trip.