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.
I took a great walk through Ministik Lake Game Bird Sanctuary yesterday afternoon — always one of my favourite places to photograph (click here to see why). The weather we’ve had this year has been just right for growing mushrooms (warm days, lots of afternoon showers), and there was a fantastic selection of beautiful species on show. I’ll not write too much, just post a bunch of photos to inspire those of you who — like myself — have both photographic and mycological tendencies, to go out and find some fungi.
Shaggy Mane
Bolete
White Anise-scented Clitocybe
Bracket mushroom
Scaly Hedgehog
Northern Roughstem
Green Russula
Puffball
Tinder Conk
Bracket fungus
Small unidentified mushroom
Amanita mushroom
Branched Hericium
Northern Russula
P.S. My mushroom ID skills are not terrible, but do not take my word that these are what I say they are. Instead, I’d recommend taking the word of Helene M.E. Schalkwijk-Barendsen in her gorgeous book Mushrooms of Northwest North America by local Edmonton publishing company, Lone Pine.
And, on that note, if you think I’ve gotten the ID wrong on any of these or you can be more specific (latin names would be great!) I would really appreciate a note left in the comments.
I’ve recently upgraded my computer to a newer machine capable of processing the beautiful high-definition video files that my 5DmkII can produce. It’s a lot of fun to learn about the whole new world of video capture and editing, and I’m just starting to get a bit of a handle on things.
One thing I’ve been doing recently as a first step into working with video is to make a photograph and a video of the same subject. These are basically still photographs, with motion. What I like about making shots like these is that sometimes, the motion in a scene is an important part of the “essence” of the scene, and now I have a way to try to capture that too.
In this example (compare the video in this post with the still photograph in yesterdays post), I used a long-ish exposure for the still image (1/2 a second) to hint at the movement of the water, but I also captured this short video clip. I tried (somewhat successfully) adding a vignette effect to match the processing of the photograph. What do you think? Is there something additional in the video that’s missing in the still photo? or does the video just add complexity to the image without adding to the “essence”? In any case, it’s fun to experiment with, and that’s the whole point. I hope you enjoy it.
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.
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…
I know it’s odd to call this post “Dried fireweed detail” when 95% of the photograph is out of focus. For me however, this image captures the essence of the detail — and the depth — of the dried seed pods. The title’s also a bit if a play on words — using “detail” in the sense of a close-up of a portion of a larger work, like when a small section of a painting is enlarged in a book to show a painter’s technique, for example. I really enjoy getting in close to a photographic subject to look for an angle that can capture the greater “whole” of the subject while showing only a small portion.
Several of my favourite Alberta landscape photographers have been posting small galleries of their past year’s best landscape photographs, so I decided to do the same. It was fun to look back through a year’s worth of photos, and impossible to decide which were my “favourite”. I decided to pick one favourite photo from each of the locations in Alberta that I regularly make photographs including: Jasper National Park, Waterton National Park, and the Icefields Parkway in the Rocky Mountains; and Ministik Lake Game Bird Sanctuary, Whitemud Ravine, Gold Bar Park, and the Strathcona Science Park closer to my home in Edmonton.
I’ve posted all of the photos below as a group (in chronological order) but I will also create a separate entry for each photo to provide extra details about the image like I usually do — just click on the link below each photo to go to it’s detail page. (It will take me a little while to get them all up)
I hope you enjoy this small collection, and I do always appreciate it if you leave a comment with your thoughts or reaction. Happy New Year, and I wish you many fine photographs in 2010!
