Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics.

Great photo opportunities arrive when they arrive.  Here are some tips to help you to be prepared. 

First, create a camera first-aid kit with zip lock bags, a ground cloth of some kind, a light pair of running or BMX gloves, and a microfiber towel. 

• Storing things in zip lock bags helps keep them dry. 
• A ground cloth comes in handy to spread out gear and locate essential accessories or to dry something off. 
• Gloves with rubber grips prevent the “whoops” of dropping something in to a snowdrift. If you do drop something – your camera, a lens – immediately dry it off with the microfiber towel and you may save it from water damage, or outright ruin.  
• A microfiber lens cleaning cloth along with a cleaner, like Purosol Optical Molecular Lens Cleaners. 
• A packet of Rainsleeves™ to keep your camera dry if it begins to snow, or rain. These even work when you’re using a tripod.

Then, keep your camera loaded with fresh batteries and a couple freshly formatted memory card. 

• Cold saps batteries — put them in a pocket, next to your body, to keep them warm. Have extras on hand.
• To protect your camera and card reader, a clean and dry memory card is essential. 

One more essential suggestion for your gear: add a polarizer. It’s lightweight, minimizes snow glare and makes clear winter skies pop. On a digital camera, you can also accomplish this by simply changing the camera's white balance to “cloudy” or “shady”. You may also want to add a high quality UV filter to protect your lens from the weather and to reduce excessive blue at high elevations.

Take a lot of images and check each on your LCD screen in the field to be sure you got the shot you wanted.  Then at the end of the day, protect your images by transferring them from your camera's flash memory to a computer and backing them up to an external drive at the end of each day.