Small boreal waterfall

Small boreal water­fall in feathermoss

It’s been a busy sum­mer, but I’m slowly start­ing to work my way through all the pho­tographs that I made dur­ing my time in Banff and in the boreal for­est of north-western Alberta. This pho­to­graph is of one of my favourite things to come across while walk­ing through the for­est — a small creek flow­ing over a lit­tle water­fall. You can usu­ally hear them a few steps before you see them and it’s such a peace­ful, relax­ing sound — birds in the back­ground, cool morn­ing breeze in the tops of the spruce — beautiful.

One of the big chal­lenges of pho­tograph­ing in the boreal is that there is so much detail — under­story plants, fallen leaves, twigs, etc. that it is some­times hard to con­cen­trate the focus of the viewer on the intended sub­ject of the pho­to­graph. In this case, I used a fairly heavy vignetting in post-processing to darken the detail from the cor­ners and con­cen­trate the atten­tion to the water and moss. I have a port­fo­lio of boreal pho­tog­ra­phy where I used another, more exper­i­men­tal tech­nique to achieve the same goal. Click here to have a look at that portfolio.