Category Archives: Photo of the Week

Photo of the Week: Week 37

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After about a month or so, I was finally able to get back out to the Rockies for some shooting this week. Shooting on the prairies and working on those images lately has been a great change of pace for me, but it sure felt good to spend some time out in the mountains again this week. This was just a little detail image I shot near Bow Lake shortly after sunrise. With clear skies above and windy conditions on the lake, I decided not to bother shooting the classic Bow Lake sunrise shot and to look elsewhere for something more interesting. Actually, I even had a little nap and some breakfast first! I ended up not even taking a single shot of Crowfoot Mountain or the lake and the glaciers. It’s amazing what you can find when when you pull yourself away from the obvious shots and look a little deeper at what’s around you. I found this bed of cracked mud in an area nearby that I thought had some potential so I ended up spending most of my time working in this little spot. While this image certainly doesn’t have the wow factor that a dramatic sunrise image at Bow Lake can, I still like it for the more subtle and simple feel it has. And besides, I didn’t have a big dramatic sunrise to shoot that morning, so how much sense would it have made for me to spend the time and effort setting up for that shot only to bring back a lacklustre image? I’m learning that it isn’t always about the big light and wow factor, and that the more I let go of always trying to bring back those type of images, the more free I am to explore and find meaningful images no matter what the conditions.

Thanks for stopping in, I hope you enjoy this one.

Photo of the Week: Week 38

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When I set out on this challenge of posting a photo each week, my goal was to push myself to get out shooting more often and be creating images more consistently. Some weeks this has been pretty easy to manage where I’ve had really productive days out shooting and come back with a nice selection of images to choose from. This past week however, it definitely felt like more of a challenge than it has in a long time. I returned from a morning of shooting out in Kananaskis Country pretty disappointed in myself after shooting very few pictures and getting nothing I was happy enough with to post here on the blog. I suppose it’s to be expected that I’m not going to knock it out of the park every time out, but it still stinks to feel like you completely struck out. I guess the key is just to keep going out and keep trying to make images. The consistency was a big part of what I was trying to establish with this project and I do feel like I’m achieving that goal at least.

Thankfully, I did build myself a little bit of a buffer into the project rules that let me select an image to post from within the previous two weeks of the post date. So, this week’s photo is from a recent trip about a week and a half ago up to Bow Lake where I spent some time focusing on the details of the plants and grass along the shore. I went in kind of a different direction for me with processing this image so I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it. I was going for a little softer looking image so I purposely didn’t pull in the black and white points like I normally would, or push the colours and contrast. I was aiming to keep the soft pastel hues intact and create more of a mellow and peaceful tone in the image. To be honest, I’m a little on the fence with this one. What do you think, does it work for you or not?

Photo of the Week: Week 39

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This last week was a busy one for me and it was a bit of a challenge to squeeze some shooting time into the schedule. Given the limited time I had, I decided to stay a little closer to home and went out to Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park which is located just east of Cochrane, only about 30 minutes from where I live in north west Calgary. I had heard much about this new provincial park but had yet to spend any time exploring or shooting there so I thought I’d give it a shot. I was going in kind of blind that morning, arriving well before sunrise, and not having the slightest clue where I should go or set up for first light. Normally, this isn’t really the way you’re supposed to do it, but I wanted to challenge myself and just try to be as open as I could to what I was seeing around me and do my best to react to that. It was actually quite refreshing to look at a completely new area without any preconceived ideas of images I would make. I found that I was able to relax so much more and just focus on the scene as it presented itself and work on the images as I saw them. While there are certainly merits to pre scouting your locations ahead of time and planning out your shots (techniques I often use as well by the way), I find this type of blind approach to not only be a great creative exercise, but also a really enjoyable and relaxing way to work.

This image was taken just as the sun was making it’s way over the horizon and through the thin cloud cover in the east. I was really drawn to the beautifully soft, low angled light that was bathing the grass and trees in this scene. The low light also allowed me to use a longer exposure (5 seconds) and capture the motion of the grass blowing in the wind. I shot two horizontal images and stitched them together for the final result below.

I will definitely be visiting Glenbow Ranch again to do some more shooting and exploring. The park is much bigger than I first realized and I know now that there is much more to see. If you’re in the Calgary or Cochrane area, I’d encourage you to go check it out and take a walk or a bike ride on one of the many trails and pathways that wind through the park. Fall colour is in full swing out there right now and it’s absolutely beautiful!

Photo of the Week: Week 40

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This week’s photo was taken on a calm and overcast morning out at Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park last week when my good friend Wayne Simpson and I ventured out hoping to shoot sunrise and make the most of the beautiful fall colour. While we didn’t get much of a sunrise, the overcast skies and rain early on left us with fantastic light and conditions for detail images. We had a great time exploring with our telephoto and macro lenses looking for intimate scenes down in the valley bottom. This image was one of my favourites from the morning and was actually bit more of a challenge to make than you might think. Because I was working so close to the subject, even with my macro lens stopped down to f16, I didn’t have enough depth of field to render all of the leaves and drops in sharp focus. I ended up taking several exposures (5 in this case) and moving the point of focus for each one to capture everything in the scene sharply. I later combined the layers together in Photoshop using the auto align and auto blend layers commands. I haven’t done much of this type of focus stacking in the past or had a lot of success with the auto blend mode but I think it did a pretty good job on this one and I’m quite pleased with the natural looking results. I’ll definitely keep this in mind as an effective tool for future use on this type of image.
As always, thanks for stopping in to have a look. I hope you enjoy this one!

Photo of the Week: Week 41

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I just returned from a few days of shooting down in the Cypress Hills area of south eastern Alberta with good friends and fellow photographers Peter Carroll, Darwin Wiggett, and Samantha Chrysanthou. We had a genuine mixed bag of weather and conditions on the trip which kept things both interesting and down right challenging at times. I arrived a day earlier than the rest of the gang and was rewarded for my promptness with heavy cloud cover, rain, blowing snow, and my personal favourite, sideways slush. I was also lucky enough to discover that all of the gates to the roads leading into the Cypress Hills park were closed to all traffic due to the extreme forest fire hazard. After a windy and stormy night in the tent, I woke up to a thick coat of wet slush blanketing the world and felt like I’d been thoroughly skunked. I did my best to stay optimistic and productive with my time and after a warm breakfast (thank you Tim Horton’s in Medicine Hat!), spent the better part of the first day and a half scouting and getting to know the area from the comfort of the heated seats in my truck. As Darwin, Sam, and Peter pulled in late on Wednesday, it was as though the light followed right behind them and things improved significantly. For those of you who don’t know Darwin or is work, he is just that good. He doesn’t have to look for great light anymore, it chases him!

This week’s photo of the week was made early on in the day Thursday while Peter and I were out shooting together. The gates to the park had since been opened and we were able to get in to explore and shoot some of the awesome fall colour of Cypress Hills. This shot is a pretty good representation of the conditions we had with the fresh snow blanketing the forest and the colours of fall still hanging on. This was just the beginning of what turned out to be a very interesting and rewarding day of shooting for us. I’ll have more to share on this in the next few days as I make my way through processing the images so stay tuned for more!

Photo of the Week: Week 42

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This week’s photo is another image made on the trip to southern Alberta with Peter Carroll, Darwin Wiggett, and Samantha Chrysanthou about a week and a half ago. As I mentioned in my last post we had quite a variety of weather conditions in the few days we were there which is just part of what makes this time of year such and exciting time to be out shooting here in Alberta. Even over the course of just one day that Peter and I spent out shooting together, we saw 3 distinct seasons in the span of about 12 hours (more on that in an upcoming post).

On Friday morning, the 4 of us spent the first part of the morning shooting along the shore of Elkwater Lake which was just a short walk from our campground. Thankfully, the rain and snow from days before had let up and we had some really nice conditions to work with on this that would be my final shoot of the trip. I made several images that morning, starting with some wide scenes of the sunrise over the lake and slowly working my way down to more intimate details. While I started off relatively pleased with what I was capturing, as the morning went on, I was feeling less and less satisfied with my efforts and found myself struggling to come up with anything very interesting. Many times I put the camera to my eye and simply didn’t see any reason to take the shot. It felt as though I was trying to force it and I found myself just getting frustrated. At one point I realized the rest of the gang had moved on well away from where I was and decided since I wasn’t making a whole lot of progress anyway, just to take a walk and catch up. I’d only just taken a few steps down the boardwalk along the shore of the lake when I noticed the heavy frost on the surface of the decking and all of these tiny yellow leaves laying around. Aha, finally something had caught my eye! That brief little break in my train of thought and struggle to force some kind of creativity out of me was all I needed to get back into the creative groove. I quickly gave up on finding the group and opted to pull out the macro lens and stare at the ground for a while. I got to work framing up different compositions with the frosted leaves on the wooden boards and when I got to this little scene, I made the image… then stopped. This was my final image of the shoot and I knew that I had found what I’d been looking for that morning.

From there it was off to the local coffee shop where we met up for some much needed hot coffee and a great time of laughs and hanging out. Thanks to Sam, Darwin, and Pete for a great trip even if our time together did only overlap for a couple days.

Also, be sure to check out the latest post on oopoomoo to see some of what Sam and Darwin were up to in the next couple days of the trip.

Photo of the Week: Week 43

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I finally managed to get back out to the Rockies for some shooting this week, and boy did it ever feel good. It had been about a month and a half since my last trip out west which, as far as I’m concerned, is much too long to go between visits. I’ve been juggling a pretty busy schedule lately, and even this week it was quite a challenge to squeeze in some shooting time, but I was glad to make it work. Joined by my good friends Wayne Simpson and Brad Anderson we headed out to Spray Lakes early one morning to see what we could find to put in front of our lenses. While we didn’t have much of a dramatic sunrise light show, the low clouds, fog, and fresh snow provided a wonderfully calm and moody atmosphere. It was such a peaceful and quiet morning, the kind that just reminds you how awesome it is just to be out there and taking it all in. We didn’t have a whole lot of time there with the quickly changing weather, but it was certainly enjoyable for the time we did. As the snow started to come down more heavily, and at a rate faster than we could keep it off our lenses, we realized we were done and hit the road.

This week’s photo is one of the few images I made in the pre-dawn light on the shoreline that morning. I hope you enjoy this one, I certainly enjoyed making it.

Photo of the Week: Week 44

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This week’s photo of the week is another shot from the cool morning I spent at Spray Lakes in Kananaskis Country just over a week ago. After first making the wide scenic shot from last week’s post along with a few other poor attempts (which I won’t be showing you!), I honed in on a couple of details from within the larger scene. I had to move pretty quickly to get these last few images because the falling snow was coming down very thick and heavy by this point. I had spotted this little scene earlier and had the image in mind that I was going for so thankfully, it was pretty quick to set up. The biggest challenge of the morning was probably the task of changing lenses in the heavy snowfall. I’d been shooting the wider images with my 14-24 and needed to switch up to some longer glass for the detail image. It was quite a trick to remove one lens from the camera and then uncover the rear element of the other and make the switch without getting any snow on the elements or inside the camera body. I was very close to not even attempting the switch and abandoning the image altogether, but my better judgement (which might be debatable) kicked in and I went for the shot.

Technically and compositionally this is a pretty simple image, and that’s exactly what I was going for. I used a longer exposure to smooth out the rough water and reduce the falling snow to more of a fog, (in this case 10 seconds did the trick) and set the white balance to daylight to retain the blue colour of the scene. The composition was intentionally kept very minimal with the stumps on the lower left, placed using the rule of thirds, pointing up and into the scene. The horizon line was also placed at roughly a third of the way up the frame. I tried a couple variations on this one, first without including the horizon line, but then as I noticed the fog had totally obscured the opposite shoreline, I decided to include it as another layer of tonality. Looking back at them now, I much prefer this composition to the others. I didn’t use any filters and the processing was also very minimal with the final result looking very close the the raw capture from the camera.

I really like being able to say something about a scene using as little as possible in the frame. Simplifying a grand scene down to just a few elements is quite a challenge but I find this process very rewarding. I realize it may not be for everyone, and it certainly doesn’t deliver much of a “wow” factor, but more and more I’m coming to appreciate the space and simplicity in this type of image. As it is in so many creative fields (I can certainly relate to this in my musical background), less really is more.

Thanks for looking, I hope you enjoy this one!

Photo of the Week: Week 45

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Conditions around Calgary have been interesting for the last week or so with an unusually long string of foggy, overcast days with heavy frost clinging to everything. Normally when we see conditions like this around here, they’ll only last for a few hours, not several days. The fog usually doesn’t stick around for long and the frost is either quick to melt or be blown off by the wind. I was struggling all week with a very busy schedule to try and get out with the camera to take advantage of these wonderfully photogenic conditions. Thankfully, at the end of the week when I was finally able to squeeze in a couple hours of shooting time, the fog and frost were still hanging around. I took a quick drive up on the back roads north west of the city Friday morning and came back with a couple nice images. Unfortunately, my time was quite short and I was rushed with the commitments of the rest of the day’s schedule. I find it to be quite a creative challenge in those type of situations, especially when I haven’t been shooting at all for the last several days and don’t have my head and eyes fully engaged. Maybe for those people who do this more often, and much better than I do, this isn’t quite such a struggle, but for me it’s still pretty tough to be very creative in a rush. Despite the challenge though, I was relatively pleased with some of the results of my efforts (emphasis there on some of the results… the rest were pretty embarrassingly bad!) from the morning.

This week’s photo is one of the last images I made as I was working my way back towards town. I was first drawn to this single tree, nearly all alone in the field and started by making a few shots where I excluded any other trees from the background. Then I noticed the second tree off in the distance and really liked the way the shape and proportions of the second tree kind of echoed those of the first tree. Using the rule of thirds as a rough guide, I framed up a composition that included both of them. As with my image from last week’s post, this image is very minimal and makes use of a great deal of space and simplicity. For some reason I’ve really been drawn to these type of images lately. Maybe it’s just a mental escape from how busy the rest of my life has been lately!

Photo of the Week: Week 46

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This week’s photo of the week is a little different for me, in that it was taken right in my house, at the kitchen table. I just wasn’t able manage any time away to get out to do any shooting and was forced to get creative much closer to home. This was just a simple macro shot of one of the leaves of a plant we have that sits on our kitchen table. I’ve always liked the combination of green and purple on the leaves and thought it might make for a pretty image. There really isn’t a whole lot more to say about this one, I hope you like it!

I finally have some time set aside this coming week to get out to the Rockies again so stay tuned for some new images in the next couple weeks.

Photo of the Week: Week 47

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This week’s photo of the week is the first of my images from a trip up to Jasper last week with my good friend Wayne Simpson. We ended up spending most of our time shooting at various places along the Athabasca River along the Icefields Parkway. The views of the peaks along this stretch are particularly impressive and the rushing river combined with the ice formations on the shore provided plenty of potential for images. This image was taken on the very last morning of the trip and after 4 overcast days, we were pumped to see a clear sky and some sunlight for a change!

This shot was taken with my Nikon 14-24 lens with a Lee 2 stop hard edge grad filter and a 3 stop solid ND filter. Using the solid ND filter allowed me to get a 6 second exposure which smoothed out the water as you see it here. Because I was so close to the foreground ice and achieving enough depth of field to render the entire scene in sharp focus was nearly impossible, I blended two exposures together after focusing on the foreground and background separately.

I have lots more to share from the trip so stay tuned over the next few days to see more.

Thanks for stopping in and having a look, I hope you enjoy this one.

Photo of the Week: Week 48

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This week’s photo of the week is another image taken on my trip up to Jasper a couple weeks ago. I’ve been sharing a lot of wide angle landscape scenes from the trip since I got back, so I thought I should show something a little different for this week. When the mid day light get harsh and less conducive to capturing the big scenes, I often switch up to my macro or telephoto lens and start looking around on the ground for details like this one. In this case, I was using my 105mm f2.8 macro lens and got down pretty close to the ground to frame up this leaf within the lines in the ice. The leaf is maybe only about an inch long, to give you an idea of how small this little scene was. The biggest challenge was probably just not wrecking the shot by breaking the thin fragile ice with my tripod legs while getting into position!

It’s a pretty simple one really, just a leaf on some ice, and I liked the way it looked. Hope you do too.