 Sunset under heavy clouds If you’ve signed up for my newsletter you’ll recognize these past few images that I’ve shared — this one is from a trip to Jasper National Park that I took this spring. I was lucky enough to drive into the mountains just as the sun dipped below the clouds for a few minutes before sinking behind the mountain peaks. I don’t recall my camera settings for this particular image, but I was definitely thinking of the golden rule for landscape photography — “f/8 and be there”.
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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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 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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 Fiery sunset over snowy horizon I’ve been out conducting nocturnal owl surveys in south-central Alberta for the past few weeks, which has given me the chance to take some great sunset photographs, and to try out photographing at night — lots of fun (but lots to learn too!)
This photo came after a whole day of cloud that finally broke at just the right time to allow the setting sun to peek through. If they cooperate, a sky full of clouds sure makes for more interesting photography than a “perfectly” clear sky.
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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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 Waterfowl rising from Ministik Lake Here’s another photograph I made last week, along Oliver Lake out at the Ministik Lake Gamebird Sanctuary. As the sun was setting, hundreds (if not thousands) of ducks were settling on the lake, rising in large flocks if unnamed photographers (or their dog) moved too quickly. I normally try hard when processing a photograph to make sure that there is detail in both the highlights and shadow. In this case however, I found that pushing the brightness up really did a better job of capturing the mood of looking west across the lake into the sun, watching the birds against the brilliant, backlit fall colours. They say the rules are there to be broken, right?
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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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