Well I’m back in business after the mysterious hard drive failure earlier this week. Thankfully, everything was well backed up and I was able to restore my system without losing anything. The whole thing went down on Monday while I was out shooting for this week’s photo so it left me unable to post in time for the Monday deadline I’ve set for myself. I was pretty disappointed because I had made quite an effort to get out shooting that day after a very busy and exhausting couple of weeks without a chance to get out. Even after cutting it so close, I still wasn’t able to get an image up in time!

So, better late than never, here is the image for this week:

I decided to give Vermillion Lakes another try to see if I’d have any better luck with the sunrise this time. After the clear and colourless skies I had the last time I was there, I was really excited to see the nicely textured clouds hanging around as I walked out onto the ice. Unfortunately though, the sun just wasn’t quite able to make it through and light things up for me. Even with the lack of colour, I’m still pretty happy with how this one turned out. I hope you like it too.

Thanks for looking!

This week’s image is a little different. That’s because as nature photographers, we mostly tend to gravitate towards the obvious naturally beautiful scenes. Cool mountain lakes, majestic soaring peaks, golden sunrises and sunsets… you get the idea. All that stuff is great, and I love to photograph it whenever I can. I really wouldn’t be much of a landscape shooter if I didn’t. But what about places where the beauty isn’t so obvious? Like say a bunch of burned out charred tree trunks with dead brown needles on them? That’s not really describing a lot of natural beauty there now is it? Well maybe it’s just me, but when I drove by this stand of trees on the Spray Lakes road where a recent forest fire had gone through, something caught my eye that made me want to capture some images. I was really drawn to the contrasts in the colours and the graphic nature of the lines and shapes I was seeing. While yes this is a scene of destruction and death for these trees you could say, it’s also a natural and healthy part of the life cycle of the forests. To my eyes, there was certainly beauty worth capturing here, and I hope this image gets some of that across.

Well, I’m going to be honest here, I’m not very impressed with myself this week. In the busyness of life and work over the last 2 weeks, I did not get out shooting at all until late yesterday afternoon. I’m not trying to make excuses, I’m merely stating the reality that I did not make the time to shoot due to the other things I was doing instead. My intention in starting this weekly photo assignment was to push myself to get out more regularly and consistently put more time into making images. I feel like I just haven’t done that in the last couple weeks, and not surprisingly, it shows.
Landscape photography takes time. There just isn’t any way around that unfortunately. It takes time spent scouting locations, exploring the scene, working compositions, watching weather conditions and light, often returning later when the light is right (usually many times!), and so much more. If you’re after great images, there’s just no substitute for putting in the time, and that’s precisely what I did not do.
This image was one of only a few frames I shot last night out in Kananaskis. Not only did I not put in much time this week, I was incredibly inefficient with the time I did spend out shooting. Instead of settling in on a location early on while there was still some daylight left and just working for some images, I hurriedly looked around and drove up and down the road looking for something better, or more interesting, or in nicer light, or, or, or… you get the idea. All I did was waste my time. I eventually just stopped at a spot and realized that I needed to get down to business and do some shooting before the sun went down completely. This is the best I came up with in my rushed attempts to find something and make a shot, and frankly I’m not crazy about it.
So, I guess maybe this week’s post is less about the photo and more about a lesson learned on my part. Now, to make some time this next week to get out and do some shooting!

This week’s photo is of one of my favourite peaks in the Rockies, Mt. Chephren. If you’ve driven up the Icefields Parkway, I’m sure you’ve no doubt seen and noticed this impressive peak towering high above Waterfowl Lakes. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about it that keeps calling me back to try and get a better shot. Perhaps it’s because, despite many attempts, a great sunrise has been so elusive for me to capture here!

One day last week I ventured out well before the crack of dawn, leaving Calgary at 4:00 am to put myself in front the peak in time for sunrise. There was a specific spot I was looking for that I hadn’t visited before but based on some searching on Google Earth, I had a pretty good idea where I was going. As I snowshoed in along the river, I was relieved to see that I had found the location, and very impressed with the view! While the sunrise didn’t really happen for me, I was still able to come away with a few nice images and really enjoyed the couple hours I spent shooting there. For this image, I opted to go black and white due to the lack of colour in the scene, and then add a bit of a warm tone to it.

Thanks for looking, I hope you enjoy this one.

This week’s photo was taken on the same outing as my image from last week from the banks of the Mistaya River below Mt. Chephren. After spending the first part of the morning working on wide angle shots, and realizing the best light had come and gone (or maybe just hadn’t come at all), I switched lenses and started focusing in on some details. While not great for wide and dramatic scenic shots, the soft overcast light that morning was ideal for detail shots. There were some great ice formations along the edges of the water and I spent quite some time wandering up and down the river bank making images. Flowing water is one of my favourite subjects to photograph and I just can’t seem to get enough of these kind of shots. I love making them and I’m continually trying to improve on what I’ve done before.

For this image, I was at 1/10th of a second which gave me some nice motion in the water but still retained a fair amount of detail. I was also using a polarizing filter to remove the reflections and darken the water. Knowing that I would be converting to black and white later, this helped to increase the contrast between the water and the ice.
I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out and I hope you enjoy it too. I still have a couple more images to share from this trip so stay tuned for those later this week.

Thanks for looking!

This week’s photo is once again a little late due to the computer issues from last week, but I think that things are finally getting back to fully functional status and I’m slowly getting caught up.

I shot this image just over a week ago out in Kananaskis Country at the Canoe Meadows area. While I’ve shot here a couple of times before and usually had good results, I wanted to try something different than what I’d done before here. I spent quite a bit of time just walking up and down the river bank studying the water and the different rapids without shooting anything before I decided on an idea to try. I would typically shoot scenes like this with flowing water using longer shutter speeds to smooth out the motion of the water and then contrast that against some sort of static object (ice, rock, branch, etc.) in the image. This time however, I decided to try the opposite, and go with a fast enough shutter speed to stop the motion of the water completely. I was looking at the rapids and the way the water was splashing up and down and thought there could be some interesting images there if I could capture it properly.

I knew that I wanted to try and get the splashing water against a dark background, so I used a polarizer to cut the reflections and darken the water. Because of the moving waves and splashes, the camera’s meter was having a really hard time correctly exposing the scene so I just went to manual mode and locked in an exposure that gave me good detail in the brightest parts of the water. Since I needed such a fast shutter speed (1/1000th) to stop the motion of the water, I had to shoot my lens as wide open as it would go (f/5.6 on my 70 – 300), and then push the ISO up to 1000.

The biggest challenge was getting focus on the waves and splashes as they went by because the water was moving so quickly, and because I was shooting with such shallow depth of field. I basically had to just sort of guess and anticipate where the action was going to happen and then do my best to pre focus on that spot. After that it was just a matter of firing off a LOT of frames to try and get something interesting.

While it was a challenging shot to make, I really enjoyed the process and had a lot of fun doing it. I can’t wait to try this technique again soon!

This week’s photo was shot on a trip out to Spray Lakes early one morning this weekend with my buddy Wayne Simpson. It’s been kind of a long dry spell for each of us as far as sunrises go, so it was nice to see some colour in the sky that morning. This one was one of my favourites from the morning, I hope you enjoy it as well. Be sure to check out the image Wayne posted from the morning over on his blog as well.

Now, if you just went to Wayne’s blog and read his post (if you haven’t, go now. I’ll wait), you’re no doubt wondering about the rough morning I had that he’s talking about. I would have been happy to leave out these details of the day, but Wayne has been so kind as to point them out… he’s so thoughtful that way.
While we were looking around an area deciding where to shoot, I was walking along the path beside Wayne when I slipped on some well disguised ice and fell to the ground and in the process of trying to catch myself managed to pull off a complete shoulder roll and ended up flat on my back. Wayne simply look down at me and asked, “What are you doing?”. Miraculously though, I wasn’t hurt at all and more importantly, the coffee I was carrying had not spilled a drop! Further down the path, as we’d only just finished laughing off my tumbling routine and started checking out another area, I put my foot through the snow and straight down into the icy cold water of the pond. This was of course followed by more laughter… and then a change of socks.
Up next and on a more serious note, I discovered that my 14-24 lens had been damaged in a small tumble it took out of my camera bag earlier in the morning. We weren’t laughing at this one though… I had initially checked out the lens after the fall and thought things were ok, but once I mounted it on the camera I realized that the zoom ring wouldn’t turn and that it had somehow become jammed in place. So it’s going in for repair this week and I’ve got my fingers crossed that it won’t be anything too major and that I won’t be without it for very long.

So it was an interesting day out to say the least… One I won’t soon forget.