Photo Gallery

"Catfish"

Dad and I used to fish a lot at Flathead Lake, about an hour's drive from our home in Missoula, Montana. The lake used to have a lot of "macks" (Mackinaw trout, or lake trout), but an environmental disaster pretty much wiped out all of the salmon in the lake around 20 years ago. The macks fed on the salmon, and a lot of those died out too. From what I hear, the macks are reappearing.

Anyway, this photo was taken around 1975. I was on a fishing trip with my friend Steve. He's a very avid fisherman, but mostly did fly fishing in the rivers near Bozeman and considered a 2- or 3-pound fish to be pretty good sized. He caught this 12-pound mack (one of the smaller ones I had seen) and was really excited since he had never caught a fish that large before.

We were busy fileting the fish, getting it ready to cook in foil in our campfire (it came out VERY well!). A curious cat came around to see what we were up to, and was quite intrigued with the fish head...

<-- This was the original photo, a slide taken with a Pentax 35mm camera. (Click on any of these if you'd like to see the full-size version).

In one of my Paint Shop Pro classes, I did some touch-up work on this image. The image on the right is the touched-up version (run your mouse over it to compare it to the original).

I enjoy playing with the different effects that are possible with Paint Shop Pro and other graphics programs, and have created several variations. My favorite, which I've named "Catfish," is the one at the top of the page. Here is that one again, plus a couple of others. The rollover image for these is the retouched photo, which is the one they were created from.