You can find the work of journalist and author Scott McMillion on his new Web site. Scott McMillion is an award-winning journalist, and the author of Mark of the Grizzly. He is also senior editor of the terrific Montana Quarterly magazine for the past five years. Scott’s Web site has his magazine and newspaper articles, videos, and info about Mark of the Grizzly. The site has the nifty iPaper PDF viewer so you can read his magazine pieces, and see the excellent photography that accompanies them, right there on the site. Mark of the Grizzly was the very first book I read by a Livingston author just before I moved here in 2002, and I have been reading Scott’s writing ever since. I was also interviewed by Scott for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle when I started LivingstonOutLoud.com in 2005, and I had first-hand experience of how well he gets his subjects. So it was a real pleasure to work with him on his Web site, and to read some of the articles I hadn’t read before. Scott’s style is distinctive, smart, insightful, wry, and often moving. Consider his lead in for the current Bugle Magazine article “Elvis Has Left the Building” about a well-known Yellowstone...

I was given a Sigma lens for a Nikon 70 (film SLR) years ago, and then started using it on my Nikon D80 (digital SLR) this past year with mixed results. I won’t go into why I felt short-handed with the old lens, but will say that I was not entirely unhappy when I dropped the camera right on the lens while cavorting with the dogs down by the Yellowstone River. The ground was pretty soft, and the D80 is unscathed, thank goodness. However, I now have an excuse to buy a new and better lens. (I will confess that I am neither a patient or a gifted amateur photographer, but I know very well that fine pictures can be achieved with inexpensive or inferior lenses. In short, I will not blame my tools.) In the process of deciding what to get in a new lens–something that can be overwhelming if you need to brush up on everything you ever sort of knew about lens behaviors, from focal lengths to vibration reduction–I came across this great Web site: http://www.kenrockwell.com. Ken Rockwell is a photographer who knows a wide range of equipment, and–best of all in my former-tech-writer/instructor heart–he knows how to talk about it. I’d zeroed in on the Nikon 18-200mm for its versatility...