Summer thunderstorms here in the Bitterroots are a double-edged sword! They are gorgeous, loud, and impressive for sure. This one produced 550 strikes in the area and started ten new fires, and very little precip. That’s the downside, the upside is the storm’s beauty. It’s hard to stop watching as it floats by. Thankfully, our first responders are the best, and the fires are either out or contained. It’s nice to be able to continue the beauty after the storm.

We don’t put out food or houses specifically for the squirrels. We do tolerate them because at times, they are entertaining. In the springtime, we are pretty diligent to keep them out of birdhouses. As you can see here, even after placing a secondary baffle to resize the hole, this mom still chewed through enough to get in. We came back from a week’s absence to find she had taken up residence and had dropped four kids. While we are the landlord, we couldn’t evict them. We would check on them every so often, much less than Maggie, who was pretty much plastered to that tree. Every time we’d get this stare. You look closely at mom’s eye, you can see me standing there with the Z180-600 on the Supadupa looking back. She’s always seemed to be saying, “Who you lookin at?!”

“We’re looking for BTS of the Delta being used …. ” the email read. I really suck at taking BTS, it just simply doesn’t come to mind to do when I’m shooting. In this case, the BTS was for advertising for my favorite people at Platypod. I have the Delta with me all the time, it’s so small and compact, it just works great. I have lots of shots taken using it, but dang it, no BTS. Shame on me!! So when the email came in, I took it as a challenge to not only just create a BTS shot they requested, but tell a story, what I need to create. Here’s where the story gets really good as far as I’m concerned.

The Platypod photo and BTS arrive into the hands of the very gifted Dave Williams (such a good guy, I will always treasure our conversation at PSW!). I sent no text, just the two photos, the two you see here. Dave then worked his creative professionalism and took my photos and perfectly put words to them. You can read them here, and I couldn’t have written the words any better! In the simplest of terms, when your photograph tells its story reaching the viewer without your saying or writing a single word, you know you’re on the right track. In advertising, when you do that, you receive not only a paycheck but a call next time. That’s jackpot! And it’s the reward when the challenge creates the story.