 Bright morning light on Whirlpool Mountain Here’s another photograph from my first photo-trip of the year in Jasper National Park. I made this image from along the Icefields Parkway, about 20 minutes south of the town of Jasper. I’m not sure about the name of this peak, but my best guess is that it’s Whirlpool Mountain, just south of Mount Edith Cavell and north of Mount Geraldine (if anybody can confirm/correct this, please leave me a comment).
The deep blue of the sky is due mostly to the use of a polarizing filter which really brought out the contrast between the sky, the shadows on the mountain, and the bright snow-covered faces.
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 First light on south face of Mount Edith Cavell Happy New Year! After a great trip to the west coast for the holidays, I had the pleasure of spending my first photography trip of the new year in the heart of the Rocky Mountains — Jasper National Park. I could hardly have asked for a better way to start the year than to be out there watching the sun come up over freshly snow-blanketed peaks, and freezing my fingers on my camera. I have a bunch of new photos that I’m excited to share, so check back soon!
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 Resting winter bison It’s been a wintry couple of days in the Edmonton area, but these bison don’t seem to mind it. I took this photograph out at Elk Island Park recently, and I love how the fresh snow is just lying on top of the large bison. I had the good fortune of being able to watch a small herd slowly moving along and grazing through the snow for about an hour before they moved further off into the trees.
I made a lot of images of the herd, but I was surprised when I got home and could look at the photos large on my computer, how many times there were stray pieces of grass in front their faces — not necessarily ruining the shot, but definitely distracting. I guess it makes sense — the bison spent almost the entire time grazing with their heads just above the ground, and the dried grass was often over half a meter high. It’s just interesting how, while I was there, my brain could ignore the visual distractions, but at home, the light yellow-brown slashes against the deep, dark brown really stood out. Something to watch for next time…
P.S. I hope you like the “new and improved” larger in-post images starting with this entry. As always, you can click an image to view it full-screen. Enjoy!
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 Paper Birch along rocky Ministik shoreline It is unusual to find exposed rock along the shores of the lakes in this part of Alberta, but this beautiful shoreline along Oliver Lake in the Ministik Game Bird Sanctuary just east of Edmonton had several hundred meters of this gorgeous blue-grey stone typical of the Beaver Hills/Cooking Lake moraine landform. Tall reeds and grasses, all dried up by this time, grew from between the stones and above the high water mark there were aspen, birch, and spruce. And then there was this tree — growing near the water in a little clearing.
My timing was just right — all the tree’s leaves had turned to this reddish yellow, with a few fallen to the ground to contrast the colour of the rocks (the next few days were quite windy, stripping most of these leaves for the season). When I first arrived at this spot, the sun was reasonably low in the sky, but the white bark of the birch tree was still reflecting too much light and the contrast was more than my camera could capture. Sometimes, bracketing exposures and combining them to an HDR image for processing can reign in such high-contrast scenes, but in this case a slight breeze was rustling the leaves and grass stems, which makes it very difficult to blend multiple exposures successfully.
Looking to the west however, I noticed that a bank of high stratus clouds rose a few degrees above the horizon in the otherwise perfectly clear sky. Normally, this is bad news if you’re trying to photograph dramatic late-day sidelighting and sunset colours (which I was trying to do). In this case though, I waited until the sun had just dipped behind the thin leading edge of the clouds, causing the light to dim a little and to diffuse ever so slightly — reducing the contrast in the scene, but still lighting the brilliant fall colours. I hurried to capture a few compositions that I’d determined while waiting for the light, and far too quickly — the light was gone. I walked back to the truck as the lacklustre sky simply grew darker with the sun hidden behind the advancing clouds — but I couldn’t possibly have been any happier.
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 Morning mist and early autumn birch I had the pleasure of spending a morning out at Ministik Lake, and what a morning it was. The forecast was for clear skies and the first good overnight frost of the year, with temperatures down to a few degrees above freezing. As the sun rose, light fog rose from the lakes and hung in the still air, frost hung lightly on the understory leaves, and the clear autumn light shone off the first of the birch trees just beginning to change colour — it was exquisite.
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 Bright morning after rain I’m slowly working my way to a major update/revision of my galleries (which, I apologize, have not been updated in a long time), and part of that process is a ruthless editing-down of my collection to best showcase my favourite images. Unfortunately, that sometimes means leaving out ones that I really like, and this image is an example of that. While it’s currently in my “Summer 2007″ gallery, and I like it at least as well as some of the ones that “made the cut”, it just didn’t fit with the other selections. So, I decided to post in the journal here instead, where hopefully it can still be enjoyed all on it’s own.
I made this photograph between Rocky Mountain House and Nordegg, Alberta in early June 2007. It had rained heavily the night before, and the branches and lichens in this dense black spruce stand were dripping wet as the sun came up. Each drop acts like a tiny prism, catching the light of the low sun. When the lens is de-focused as I did here, each specular highlight becomes a glowing circle of light, each with a slightly different colour depending on the angle. I know my blurry, out-of-focus work is not everyone’s cup of tea, but in this case I think it really made for an interesting image (I’ve included a “straight” shot of the same stand below for interest’s sake), and it’s also a great example of how the optics in a lens can create effects “in the field” that are unattainable using post-processing software (i.e. Photoshop). I’d love to hear your reactions to this image, just click below…
 Bright morning after rain – in focus — —
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(Click photos to enlarge)
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