 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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 Golden sunlight on spruce shoreline This photograph is from a gorgeous morning that I spent in the Obed Lake Provincial Park in western Alberta. This is not actually Obed Lake itself, but one of the smaller lakes in the park. There were loons swimming around, sparrows and warblers singing, and it was too chilly still for the mosquitoes to be flying — perfect.
The yellow colour in the image is actually toned down a little from what it looked like straight out the camera — it was really yellow. (I guess that’s why they call dawn and dusk the “golden hour”.)
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 Great grey owl hunting from thin aspen sapling The photographs from my two previous posts were both taken while I was doing owl surveys and waiting for the sun to set (with camera at the ready, of course). So I thought I’d post an image of what we were out there looking for.
I don’t shoot a lot of wildlife, but I simply could not resist filling up a memory card while watching this owl hunt for rodents under the thick, spring snow. It was amazing to watch him (or her, I’m not sure) listening from the tops of these small aspen trees before swooping down and diving feet-first into the snow after his prey. I had the pleasure of watching from a distance for over an hour before he finally gave up, or got full, and slowly moved off.
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 Glowing dogwood behind bare aspen saplings Another sunset photograph taken while doing owl surveys, this one was taken on a clear evening which made for less interesting skies as the previous night but allowed for more predictably progressing, steady light on the ground.
This time of year, my eyes ache for colour after the long winter and the red-osier dogwood shrubs are often the first real glimpses of spring colour as they flush red in the very early spring — even before the snow has melted. In this image, I like how the intense red of the willows in the last, warm rays of sunlight contrast with the cool blues of the aspen saplings that are already in the evening’s shadow.
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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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 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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 Golden autumn aspen shoreline If you’re in the Edmonton area, and haven’t been out enjoying (and photographing) the fall colours this week, I have one word for you — go! I’ll let this photograph speak the thousand words’ encouragement.
I’ve been exploring the south-west corner of Ministik Lake Sanctuary, following game trails along the shore of Oliver Lake and coming across views like this one. This is one of my favourite autumn combinations — yellow aspen & birch, bright dried grasses, all against a blue sky reflected in a still lake, and with just a few dark spruce thrown in for accent. Gorgeous.
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(Click photos to enlarge)
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