Kenton Rowe’s fortune as a wildlife photographer would change in less than one second; the amount of time it takes for a shutter to open and close, the light burning a digital image onto a disk.

And in that second, the mountain lion and her cub were forever captured, their likenesses then downloaded to a computer, printed to paper and presented to a panel of judges who would sift through 70,000 photographs at this year’s National Wildlife Federation photo contest.

Rowe placed second in the contest with his compelling photo of the mother and cub. Snapped above the Sieben Flats, the image captures a rare wildlife moment and reveals the beauty of the natural world.

“I heard Montana Outdoors was going to be doing a story on mountain lions,” Rowe said, explaining how he got the image. “A few guys called me up and said they had seen a lion on Sieben land, and they thought it had babies.”

Sure enough, the lion was there with her cubs, holed up in a cave about 1,500 feet above the flats. Rowe made the arduous trek with his gear and spent the next three hours shooting photos.

Just opening their eyes, the cubs were taking in their first real glimpse of the world around them. At times they paused to nurse. The mother was still.

“She lay on her back feeding the babies,” Rowe said. “I had to shoot at 800 ISO because she was back in the cave and it was real dark. I tried using a flash, but her eyes just lit up.”

The photo captures a unique wildlife moment. The shy cats are rarely seen, even by those who know where and how to look for them.

But to Rowe, the photo also reveals the reasons why he became a professional photographer. By freezing time, the image gives the viewer a permanent look at a fleeting moment in the natural world.

“Every one of my pictures has a story behind it,” said Rowe, seated on a couch in his California Street home. “I go to a place and find what’s beautiful about it. To me, that’s what photography is about. People’s lives are so fast, they often overlook what’s around them.”

Rowe began as a self-professed amateur in Nebraska nine years ago. Even while shooting weddings with a point-and-shoot, his images gained the attention of others, prompting him to set out as full-fledged wedding photographer.

But shooting weddings was only a means to an end. The income paid for new camera gear he applied toward his real interest — shooting natural history.

“I always liked shooting natural history, but it’s pretty competitive,” Rowe said. “I’m hoping to shoot for National Geographic in the next couple years. Everything I’m doing is kind of geared in that direction.”

One image at a time, Rowe may be moving closer to his goal. Back in 2004, while shooting under contract for Nebraska PBS, he met famed National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore at a fundraiser.

Not wanting to appear star-struck, Rowe didn’t mention his goals at the time. But three months later, when he captured a photo of a Nebraska coyote with mange, he got his chance to approach the idolized Sartore.

“Everybody got really excited about that coyote picture, because no one had seen an image like it,” Rowe said. “Nebraska Land Magazine decided to run a story on it, and I decided to touch base with (Sartore) to see if he knew of any national publications that might be interested.”

As Rowe tells it, one thing led to another and he soon began working with Sartore on an internship. He learned the value of wide-angle lenses, and using them to capture the environment around his photographic subjects.

With the fire burning in his South Hills home, Rowe keeps his gear close at hand. The images that have garnered him a growing amount of attention are logged on his desktop computer.

He pulls them up on a large monitor laced with billions of colors — a yellow finch on a yellow sunflower; a bear looking directly back with warm, brown eyes; a mountain goat frolicking on Froze To Death Plateau.

His award-winning photo of the lion with her cub sits in a frame propped against the door.

“I want to tell a story about what this land has to offer and what’s here, and capture it in a beautiful way,” Rowe said. “I have a photojournalism bug in my body that just wants to tell a story.”

Rowe was raised on a small Nebraska farm and admits to training chickens to ride on the handlebars of his tricycle. He has been around animals all his life and he approaches them cautiously while moving in for a photo.

In that way, he says, becoming a good photographer is 50 parts luck and 50 parts skill. There’s a level of patience involved, along with being a good observer.

“I saw this fox one day, and she was up on a hump of dirt, so I went and found that it was a definite den,” he said, describing another photo in his collection. “Being spring, I knew that she probably had some babies, so I went back a few days later and sat in the rain for six hours waiting for the sun to pop out.

“I knew it was going to clear up,” he added. “Once it did, sure enough, the babies came out and started playing.”

Like so much of his work, the resulting image freezes time. The light will never again shine exactly as it did that day, where two baby kits stood playing in the cool spring weather.

“That’s what’s unique about photography,” Rowe said. “You can capture an image that freezes time, and it’s something that nobody has ever seen.”

Reporter Martin Kidston: 447-4086 or mkidston@helenair.com