First Snow at Wedge Pond: A Morning of Winter Photography
Last week it snowed for a full day while we were up in Kananaskis. A day in the saunas, steam baths and outdoor pools of the Nordic Spa in the village was a pretty great way to enjoy the abrupt turn to winter. The forecast called for clearing skies overnight so I set an early alarm for the morning.
Driving along Highway 40 in the dark, I could see the outline of clouds and clusters of stars between them. Walking down to Wedge Pond, the snow was well above my ankles. I hadn’t planned on a snowy shoot so my footwear was far from up to the task. Wet feet and slip-sliding around aside, it was beautiful.
Dawn slowly revealed the lake and the surrounding valley. The trees decked out in white sleeves. Tall grass on the hillside and the stony shoreline both blanketed with snow.
Above, clouds stretched over Mount Kidd and the neighboring peaks. Early light painted the first ones pink, later the mountains looked like the sunlight had spun their eastern flanks in gold.
Across the water, bright yellow peaked out from under the sleeves of a few of the trees. The last remnants of the autumn colors that ring Wedge Pond in September each year.
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Smoky summer sunsets
The rain the past few days has cleared the air west of Calgary. When the wildfire smoke was heavy before that, the colors from the sunlight filtering through the haze were surprising and very unusual. It made sunset an interesting little photographic adventure.
I thought these images looking at the eastern flank of the Rockies near Bragg Creek from the first day of August were stunning.
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Storm clearing over Water Valley
Photographed north of Cochrane in Water Valley in the early evening in June. The trailing edge of a storm had lost its enthusiasm with only a ragged veil of rain left to haze the Rocky Mountains slightly.
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Evening night morning in the Valley of the Ten Peaks
A good friend and I went up to Moraine Lake at the beginning of June. We photographed from dusk into dark, crashed out for a couple of hours and then shot the sunrise. These are a few of the photographs as the time rolled by.
Into the night…
Rising with the sun…
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Sunshine over Spillway
In December while my son was in snowboarding lessons at Nakiska, I drove further into Kananaskis Country. At Spillway Lake, along the Smith-Dorrien Trail, I found the sun laying low above the silhouettes of the forest and the mountain ridge lines.
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Early autumn alpenglow in Kananaskis
I’ve been lucky to enjoy a number of great mornings (here, here and here) in the mountains as summer has wound down. Last weekend I went to Kananaskis to see how the autumn colors were coming in at the higher elevations. I went to Wedge Pond ahead of the sunrise and waited for the darkness to lift. Soon enough it did, and quickly, revealing the larch along the shoreline were starting to turn but there were more lime greens than yellows and golds. I’ll be back again in a week or two to try to catch the stands of gold before the needles fall and the leaves blow away.
I was not disappointed in any way though. The mist swirled across the calm water, drawing a line through the middle of the mountains and their reflections as the early morning blue gave way to the alpenglow.
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A chaotic sunrise in Banff National Park
Before the sun rose over the Fairholme Range, the scattered clouds stacked up in layers over the mountains. They fought to catch the early splashes of pink and peach as the day approached. The chaos of these splashes of color across the broken sky were beautiful to watch.
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Splashing sunlight on the Rockies
I spent the first half of the weekend in the Rocky Mountains of western Alberta and loved every minute. An amazing display of the Aurora Borealis over Lake Minnewanka and the first Grizzly bears that I’ve seen this year were among several highlights from the trip. In this image, clouds cleared out of the valleys just after sunrise in Kananaskis. I was continually reminded how beautiful this part of the world is.
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My favourite landscape photographs from 2015
I had fun pulling together this list of my landscape images that stood out to me. Last year I spent time in some beautiful places near and far which certainly helps towards making pretty pictures. Within those moments, I really enjoyed composing the images to try to create something more compelling than just pretty pictures – although I like those too!
I felt like I put more effort into my wildlife photography last year but am happy with the progression with my landscape images. The sky makes up so much of what makes or breaks a landscape image for me and I see my exploration of that continuing in 2016. If you are interested in seeing these of images, please click on any image or this link to open the image gallery. Thank you for visiting now and throughout the year.
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Dawn at the Columbia Icefields
After a chilly night photographing and then sleeping at the foot of the Athabasca Glacier, I shook off the cold with a cup of tea before getting out of my sleeping bag and taking a look around. It was about 5:30 am when I was up and the blues and whites in the sky and on the mountains were lovely as they waited for the sun to light them up.
The image above was made at 5:47 am and less than 10 minutes later, the pink sunlight of dawn was splashing the upper reaches of the mountains on either side of the glacier. It was beautiful and I took turns between watching the light move across the slopes and trying to remember to photograph.
I started where the light first reached along Parker Ridge and Hilda Peak on the western side of the Sunwapta Pass, then worked to the right watching as Mount Athabasca and Mount Andromeda were hit with shafts of light here and there.
I panned across the Athabasca Glacier towards the Dome Glacier and saw the light show unfolding there a couple of minutes behind my location. I ran to my car and drove to a viewpoint where I could see up the valley to the glacier and up to the peak of Mount Kitchener (the first image in this post). It proved to be a good move and I was able to watch the sunlight as it transitioned from pink into gold.
When the golden hue started to drain out of the light, I packed up and headed north towards Jasper. A couple of kilometres down the road, I noticed this peak still basking in beautiful light. I stopped and made this last image of a fine morning in the Rocky Mountains.
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Rocky Mountain Sunsets
During the chinook of the last few days there were several beautiful sunsets that I took time to enjoy. Looking west at the Rockies is one of my favourite skylines and their silhouette at dusk often adds immensely to a landscape photograph.
The chinook ended last night with the arrival of a snowstorm which continues this morning. I’m not too dismayed, it was nice to have a break of warm weather in the middle of winter.
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Back to the reflecting pools in Kananaskis
My friend and fellow photographer Jeff Rhude and I made it up to the reflecting pools which provide a beautiful mirror for Mount Kidd while it was still dark. While dawn was still only a bit of light to the east, I used an exposure just a bit over two minutes long to see this early morning.
The wind was blowing in short blasts as we were waiting and once it was brighter I took an opportunity to show a bit of that in the blurred water.
