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Back at it, and back to Ministik

Sarsaparilla leaves show the first hint of fall colour on a warm morning at Ministik Game Bird Sanctuary east of Edmonton, Alberta.

First fall colour

So, I’m back from my work in Fort McMur­ray, I’ve had a chance to rest up a bit, and I’m look­ing for­ward to resum­ing my project of mak­ing a new print every day. Just a sim­ple print today from a pho­to­graph that I took ear­ly last Sep­tem­ber at the Min­is­tik Game Bird Sanc­tu­ary. I’m head­ed out to Min­is­tik tomor­row morn­ing for the first time in a long while, and hope to come back with some new pho­tographs that I can share here.

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Foggy boreal morning

Mist rises from several small mirror smooth lakes in the early morning of a warm summer day in the boreal forest of northern Alberta, Canada

Morn­ing fog over bore­al lakes

Here’s anoth­er pho­to that I took from the chop­per on my way to work one morn­ing last shift. It’s from a dif­fer­ent morn­ing as the pre­vi­ous pho­to, but from the same gen­er­al area—near Namur Lake in north­ern Alber­ta (~100 km north­west of Fort McMur­ray).

This was a tricky image to print. I tried to get the bal­ance right between detail in the shad­ows, but still hav­ing the land­scape dark with just the top of the fog light­en­ing as the sun first peaks over the hori­zon. It was also hard to fig­ure out the right white bal­ance to use—the Auto WB on my cam­era was quite cool (very blue shad­ows), and set­ting it to Day­light WB made every­thing very orange-y. I set a man­u­al bal­ance some­where in the mid­dle, lean­ing towards cool—does any­one know a good tip for set­ting white bal­ance for sunrise/sunset so accu­rate­ly rep­re­sent how the scene was per­ceived at the time?

This’ll be my last post for a lit­tle while as I’m going up for anoth­er shift, but hope­ful­ly I will return with many more new pho­tos to share!

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Aurora Borealis over black spruce

A towering curtain of northern lights hangs over a dense boreal black spruce stand in northern Alberta

Auro­ra bore­alis over black spruce for­est

Finally—a pho­to­graph of the Auro­ra Bore­alis on borealisimages.ca! (Although, for the record, the title I’ve giv­en these galleries—‘Silvicola bore­alis Images’—is derived from latin roots, and rough­ly trans­lates to ‘inhab­it­ing the north­ern for­est’. The pre­fix ‘sil­vi’ (or ‘sil­va’) relates to the for­est, as in ‘sil­vi­cul­ture’ which is the prac­tice of grow­ing and tend­ing a for­est. ‘Bore­alis’ refers gen­er­al­ly to things north­ern in nature, and is from ‘Bore­as’ — the Greek god of the north wind.)

This is def­i­nite­ly the dark­est pho­to that I’ve ever print­ed, and I’m quite hap­py with the way it turned out—the print lit­er­al­ly felt heavy with ink! On-screen, I could see a lit­tle bit of detail still in the spruce trees, but I can’t see any of that in the print yet. We’ll see if view­ing it in bright day­light will reveal some of those dark­est details, but oth­er­wise I think they look fine as sol­id sil­hou­ettes too.

I took this pho­to in north­ern Alber­ta while doing owl sur­veys this past spring. It was the first time I’d pho­tographed the north­ern lights, and it was a lot of fun to try out a whole bunch of dif­fer­ent tech­niques, equip­ment, and of course, patience… I’ll be doing a round of bat sur­veys in the next lit­tle while, and I hope to get the chance to apply some of what I learned this spring to mak­ing more images of these beau­ti­ful north­ern lights.

(Click to enlarge the image—you should be able to see the stars in the full-size image too!)

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Morning light in young pine

The first strong rays of morning sun burn off the last of the fog hanging in a dense young pine stand in the boreal forest of north-western Alberta, Canada

Morn­ing light in young pine stand

This patch of for­est was pret­ty much the oppo­site of the one in yesterday’s photograph—it was a thick, messy, sec­ond-growth tan­gle of young pine, alder, and oth­er shrubs. But when the fog start­ed burn­ing off, and the first strong rays of sun start­ed pierc­ing through to the for­est floor it was so beau­ti­ful, it almost made up for how soak­ing wet I was walk­ing through it (and it smelled amaz­ing too!)

Find­ing an inter­est­ing com­po­si­tion in the dense bore­al under­sto­ry is one of my favourite pho­to­graph­ic chal­lenges. If you’re inter­est­ed in this pho­to, I have a port­fo­lio of sim­i­lar images enti­tled “Branch­es”. You can find it by click­ing here, or fol­low­ing the nav­i­ga­tion bar up top. Here’s the descrip­tion that I wrote for that port­fo­lio:

There are times when I stop while walk­ing through the dense under­sto­ry com­mon in the bore­al for­est and aspen park­land to admire the com­plex beau­ty of the entwined branch­es, wil­lows, grass­es, and leaves. Then I bring my cam­era up, and as I look through the lens the com­plex­i­ty turns to chaos as the lens com­press­es the scene onto a two-dimen­sion­al plane. This is when the chal­lenge (and fun) begins. By mov­ing the cam­era a few degrees to one side, chang­ing the focal length by a few mil­lime­ters, or open­ing the aper­ture a few stops, a com­po­si­tion may be found that is bal­anced, pleas­ing to the eye, and cap­tures some of the beau­ty entan­gled in these forests.

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Old growth aspen trunks

Three massive aspen (Populus tremuloides) trees dominate an old-growth mixedwood stand in the boreal forest of west-central Alberta.

Old-growth aspen

This was a gor­geous for­est stand to work and pho­to­graph in, and, unfor­tu­nate­ly, a bit of an odd­i­ty to find such large, old aspens left out on the land­scape. My goal print­ing this image was to pre­serve the sub­tle­ty of tone and light & shad­ow, but still cap­ture some of the bril­liance of this stand in the ear­ly morn­ing light.

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Owl hunting

A Great Grey Owl listens for rodents under the snow while hunting from a thin aspen sapling

Great grey owl hunt­ing from thin aspen sapling

I’ve writ­ten about this image before, and I want­ed to print it today, as it’s got a very dis­tinct sep­a­ra­tion between the sharp, in-focus owl and the com­plete­ly blank sky where any grain or tex­ture is pure­ly an arti­fact of sen­sor noise and sharp­en­ing in post-pro­cess­ing. As I men­tioned yes­ter­day I tried the strat­e­gy of push­ing the clar­i­ty and sharp­en­ing as far as I think looked good on my mon­i­tor, before back­ing off a bit. Yes­ter­day the print came out look­ing real­ly good (although it had a slight green­ish cast that I hadn’t noticed on-screen), so I fig­ured I’d try it on a much less for­giv­ing pho­to today. We’ll see how it turns out…

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Boreal mixedwood colours

Aspen, spruce and pine trees display a range young boreal mixedwood forest in western Alberta, Canada

Colour­ful mixed­wood trunks

I’m writ­ing this post as my print­er churns away on this one, and I’m real­ly inter­est­ed to see how it turns out. I’ve often heard it rec­om­mend­ed to push a giv­en pro­cess­ing tech­nique a lit­tle too far, and then ease back a lit­tle. By doing this, you dis­cov­er the lim­it of the tech­nique with­out cross­ing it. This sounds rea­son­able in prac­tice, but I fear that you then have all your images at the edge of what’s accept­able, and per­haps sac­ri­fice some sub­tle­ty. A cer­tain sub­tley, is often hard­er to notice at the moment that you’re work­ing on an image in Light­room, but can eas­i­ly be essen­tial to mak­ing a good image a great image. I guess the goal is to be able to rec­og­nize when an image requires that sub­tle­ty, and to make sure that you’re not cross­ing that line.

So with that in mind, I picked this pho­to (which, although I quite like it, I don’t think is very sub­tle at all) and pushed the clar­i­ty and sharp­ness to the lim­it of what I thought looked good on my screen. Once the print is fin­ished, it’ll be inter­est­ing to see how well (or not) that trans­lat­ed on to paper.

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