 Greytones in boreal lake I took this photograph at one of the five lakes in Emerson Lakes Provincial Park, northwest of Edson, Alberta — a great little place that was almost completely deserted the weekend I was there. If you don’t mind a little bit of gravel road, I would definitely recommend this spot for a quiet boreal retreat.
Although the middle of the afternoon is not normally the best time of day for making photographs of the landscape, great photographs are still out there — and (if you ask me) any photographer that tells you otherwise isn’t looking hard enough. In this image, made at just past 4pm on a nice sunny day, I just love how the lake holds nearly the full range of tones from the nearly black shadows along the shoreline to the bright white reflections of the high cirrus clouds and the midtones of the shallow lakebed itself — all mixed together by the slight breeze causing the ripples on the water’s surface.
Add in a couple Bonaparte’s Gulls, a pair of Belted Kingfishers, and a chorus of songbirds — and you’ve got yourself a pretty good spot to sit for a while, making photographs as the clouds shift by (which is exactly what I did…)
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 Three autumn birch It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a new photo, and to be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve made any new images. I have been working on re-processing some images into black and white, including this one here.
I love a great B&W photograph, and after listening to this podcast by LensWork editor, Brooks Jensen, I’ve been inspired to figure out for myself what it takes to make a great B&W image, rather than a pretty-good image. And, thanks to the flexibility afforded by capturing and processing digitally, I’ve been going through my image catalogue and giving it a try.
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 Fresh snow on two black spruce Here’s another photograph from the same outing to Wagner Natural Area as my last post. I like how the wispy-ness of the clouds contrasts the solid, high contrast forms of the snow-covered trees.
These are pretty classic Alberta winter clouds — high, thin, light diffusing layers without much definition (see this post that I wrote last winter). In this case though, I used a polarizing filter to darken the blue sky showing through these thin cirrus streaks, and that added enough contrast to show the delicate patterns of the cloud.
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I am really excited that one of the photographs from my “Talbot Burn” portfolio has been chosen to be a part of the “Forest Show” curated by the Alberta Society of Artists. The exhibition is currently mounted in the Hinton Public Library (Jan 5 – 31), and will be moving to the Edson Library (Feb 2 – 28), the McMullen Gallery in Edmonton (opening reception on March 24, 7 – 9 pm), and the Leighton Gallery in Calgary (opening reception June 4, 2 – 4 pm). My piece was also selected to be one of just a few pieces that will be in a travelling exhibition showing throughout Alberta until 2013. I hope that you can make it to one of these venues, but if not, you can have look at the image in my “Talbot Burn” portfolio (it’s the third image, entitled “Talbot Fire Valley”), or simply click below to view the image full screen.
 Talbot fire valley — —
 Frost covered trees on bright winter day It’s been too long since I last posted a new photograph — my apologies. Here is an image I made recently, on a particularly gorgeous afternoon at the Ministik Lake Game Bird Sanctuary just east of Edmonton. All of the trees, shrubs, and even each blade of grass was bearing a thick covering of frost. The sky was perfectly clear and everything was sparkling — it was beautiful (and cold).
When I was processing this photograph, I used the digital equivalent of the technique of placing a red filter in front of the lens to darken the blue sky. This technique (a favourite of Ansel Adams) adds a dramatic look to the sky and making the brightness of the foreground trees stand out even more.
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 View from Wilcox Pass I will be away from posting for a little while (although to be honest, I haven’t been posting a whole lot anyways — sorry), as I’m off to Banff National Park to go camping for a couple weeks. I’m pretty excited — I spend most of my time photographing in the Rocky Mountains in Jasper National Park, so it’ll be fun to explore some new areas (with my camera along the whole time, of course).
Hopefully, I’ll be able to share some new work with you once I get back, but in the meantime I thought I’d post this photo taken half-way between Jasper and Banff, along the Icefields Parkway (one of the most beautiful drives in the world). We parked near the Icefields Interpretive Centre, and climbed up along the Wilcox Pass trail on the other side of the valley as the glaciers. What I love about this photo is the scale of the view. If you click to enlarge the image, you can just see the trail running down to the right, and there’s even a couple of (very small) hikers on it.
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 Tangle of winter branches II Here’s another detail-oriented image taken during our recent spell of grey, overcast winter days. As I mentioned in a previous post, when the light is diffused so evenly by the low, bright stratus clouds that are common over central Alberta in the winter (especially the past few weeks), it’s often these close-up, detail oriented compositions that I find work best.
I don’t commonly convert images to black and white, and even less often do I process them quite as heavily as I have here. While the contrast was fairly strong to begin with, I’ve “crushed” the darks all the way down, and bumped the background sky all the way up, to really emphasize the somewhat abstract pattern of the tangled branches, accentuated by the lining of snow and frost. Perhaps I’ll also post the original version as well, and I would love to hear your comments as to which you prefer.
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(Click photos to enlarge)
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