A feathered portrait
A Canada goose poses for a portrait at the Vermilion Lakes early on a misty morning in the Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada.
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A Bald eagle’s branch dance
I found an aerie of four Bald eagles east of the Crowsnest Pass this weekend. They perched in still dormant trees that divide up several farm fields. From these perches, they can hunt for the ground squirrels that scurry between their holes among the short grass. This eagle had just finished his meal and I caught him adjusting his position on the branch. It looked a bit like a line dancing sidestep to me.
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Forest portraits of a Bragg Creek moose
When the mother and calf had retreated into the woods, this moose remained in the meadow and kept grazing.
When she moved into a stand of brambles, I used larger apertures to minimize the depth of field to separate her head from the branches in the foreground and background.
The shallow plane of focus and a black and white conversion worked well for this image below.
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A raven’s portrait
Stopping at a viewpoint along the Icefields Parkway on Sunday to photograph a pair of friendly ravens during the second day of John Marriott’s Jasper Fall Wildlife Workshop. This raven lived up to advance billing and was a pleasure to photograph. This portrait was one of my favourite images from a wonderful wintry day that saw us photographing mountain goats, bighorn sheep rams and bull elks in Jasper National Park.
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Bighorn in Jasper – a portrait
Today was a great first day for the workshop I’m up in Jasper for. The workshop is led by John Marriott and it has been great picking up some of his vast knowledge of animal behaviour, tracking and anticipating a better moment. Over the 11 hours we were hiking, driving and scouting in the Greater Jasper area, we tracked several moose and wolf trails. That was really great – it didn’t deliver us onto either of these animals but such a good opportunity to learn. We did find many (many, many) groups of bighorns scattered around, a couple of elk encounters (one herd and a couple of individuals) as well as a few deer here and there. It was the Bighorn sheep that captured most of our attention and we spent a couple of hours on a slope where roughly twenty rams had assembled as we enter the front side of the rut. We waited for the head butting but they weren’t in the mood. It proved to be a wonderful opportunity to watch their behaviour and photograph subtle behaviours. This male typified the braggadocio of some of the larger rams. It was a really good day.
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Kian in the shade
We spent most of the weekend outside enjoying the warm weather that continues to coax the greenery to return. As spring begins to show more color, I am enjoying bringing that back into my photography. When Kian called down from the upstairs deck there wasn’t much work on my part to create this portrait of my wonderful son. The open shade presented lovely light and shadow across his face and the background was cool enough that highlights behaved.
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Mele Kalikimaka!
Merry Christmas from our crazy little family. Thank you for all of the season’s greetings that people have sent our way. We hope you have a great time with your family and friends over the holidays. We’re heading down to play in the sand at Perfect Beach (as my children have labelled a small spit of shore near Kapa’a that they love to swim off of) so we will be taking advantage of the warm weather here in Hawaii.
Before we came to Kauai for our family holiday over the Christmas break, I photographed the kids in Redwood Meadows with Santa Claus while he was taking a break from the North Pole. While I was setting up the lights, Bobbi and I snuck in a family shot on the set.
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Commuting on a rainy day
The rain came in last night and, with dark clouds apparently anchoring directly above Calgary, fell all day.
The trains were a somber affair both in the morning and in the afternoon. I thought this gentleman’s body language and the resigned look on his face accurately portrayed the mood of the city on this rainy day in May.
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2010 Favourite Photographs – People
Nuns at prayer in a convent in the Sagaing Hills in Mandalay, Myanmar in Southeast Asia.
In 2010, I made a goal that I wanted to photograph people more. My first love is nature photography (landscapes and wildlife) but the more portraiture, street and travel photography that I do, the more I enjoy it. To support this extension of my art, I have attended lighting workshops, read a wheelbarrow full of books, tried to spend more time photographing humans and shared some of the knowledge gained with other photographers in my ecosystem.
Much to learn and practice yet but 2010 was a good step forward. I’m excited to build on this momentum and see where the people I photograph in 2011 take me.
Here are some of my favourite images from last year.
My trip to Myanmar in February was a really wonderful experience. Photographically, this land is fantastic for the variety of people, cultures, landscapes and other opportunities. Here I wandered through Yangon’s Chinatown and was able to have a few good conversations with the residents as they spoke Mandarin as a first language instead of Burmese.
I was fascinated by these young men who ran blocks of ice from trucks, up the cobblestone street to these ice crushers and then back down to the dock for the fish to be packed in. Very hard work done barefoot without any breaks through the morning while the fish are being shipped out around the city and beyond.
This marble carver in Amarapura works in his family’s yard along a street filled with stonemasons. These craftspeople create incredible statues from the alabaster mined from the hills in the surrounding Mandalay area. Again, very hard work.
The monks of Southeast Asia are magnets for many photographers, and I was no exception. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with many of these men that I met and loved photographing them in their surroundings.
A very kind man who I gestured and chatted with briefly in Old Bagan after he motioned me over to have a look at my camera. He was happy to let me photograph him and gave this picture a nod when I showed him the screenshot.
Probably the coolest guy I met in Myanmar. This gentleman had a group of younger monks and lay people circling him and they were having an animated conversation which I enjoyed watching as much as I enjoyed making this photo.
The younger monks line up to receive offerings from the community, grateful for the dedication of these boys and men to the faith they all share. The food collected is distributed among the monks and eaten in silence. A large portion is distributed outside the brotherhood to the less fortunate who wait patiently for the monks to hand it out. There is a dignity among even the poorest which can be glimpsed in the photograph of the man below but I was not able to wholly present here.
The monks showered using metal bowls. A fast shutter speed froze the droplets and the motion of this simple action.
In Amarapura while walking through a monastery, I looked in on this monk as he swept the courtyard seemingly lost in the repetition.
My children always figure prominently in what I’m up to and here are just a couple of what could be a near infinite series of photos of them through the year.
A couple of black and white portraits to complete this set.
Thank you for scrolling through a few of the highpoints of the year with me.
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Mike – a portrait
A portrait I made of a good friend when a group of us were out golfing.
Christopher Martin Photography 