Full Moon Rising
We escaped to Montana for a couple of days yesterday. The drive along the Going-To-The-Sun road that bisects Glacier National Park was beautiful with great views through the mountains in the evening light. When we pulled into Columbia Falls, we noticed a glow along the mountain ridge on the west side of the park. The moon was rising fast and we didn’t have to wait very long to watch it clear the mountains. It had a very different feel from the last moonrise I watched in the Khutzeymateen and was every bit as beautiful. A great start to our getaway in another great part of the world.
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A blue moon in the Khutzeymateen
Canon 5DIII camera with a Canon 500mm lens: 1/1000th of a second at f/4 on ISO 2500
On the last night in the Khutzeymateen there was a short break in the clouds right as the full moon was clearing the tree tops across the bay. This was the fourth moon of the season earning the distinction of being a blue moon. It seemed an appropriate way to end a spectacular visit to this wonderful inlet.
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A flight into the mist
This Canada Goose led a small flock off the lake at the Wild Rose Estates, west of Bragg Creek, and disappeared into the mist rising off of the water.
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A dancing abstract
I was looking through my image library for abstracts that I could use for a print series I’m working on and found the image above. I had photographed a reflection pool from the fourth story of a hotel in Mandalay, Myanmar. Leaning out of the window and using a longer lens, I was first drawn to the koi swimming in the shallow water. However, the trees on edge of the courtyard were casting energetic shadows across the gently rippled surface. I photographed the fish with the shadows for a little while and then dropped the fish altogether. The patterns of the distorted tree shapes in the water mesmerized me. I think of dance in the one above.
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Palm tree sunset in Wailua
We had a lovely sunset a couple of nights ago. The western of Wailua, where I am staying, has a few mountain ridges and valleys blocking the view to the ocean directly but the on this night the sky was beautiful. A stand of palm trees in the courtyard made a great silhouette to anchor the pastel lines.
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Sunrise along the Cowboy Trail
(please click on an image to link to a higher resolution version)
The Cowboy Trail runs through Bragg Creek and is lined with evergreen forest on either side of the town. On the weekend I was heading out to Wild Rose to see about some of the birds there. I left home as the morning colour was coming into the sky. I was not planning to shoot the sunrise but within a few minutes of driving down Highway 22X, the road’s less evocative other name, I pulled over and spent a few minutes watching the clouds soak in the warm light. It was an easy diversion and a great start to the day.
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Hawaiian Landscapes: Sunset in Hanalei
As a good friend said while writing me birthday wishes today, I’m a lucky duck. We landed in Kauai last night so I was able to spend my birthday touring the island’s eastern and northern areas. It was a great day in the forests, on the beach and in the water with my family. I started the day making abstract images of wet leaves with my son and finished the day photographing in the Taro (Kalo) fields in the Hanalei Valley with my dad – both very special moments. A wonderful day for a fortunate web-footed broad-billed bird like me. Thank you for all of the very kind messages and warm wishes.
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Calgary Wildlife: Night Geese
Another evening down at the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary tonight. The wedges of geese and colonies of gulls flying in at dusk are really fun to watch. There are easily hundreds of birds returning to the Bow river for the night. Sunset was just after 6 and by 7 the birds had settled on the rocks in the channel.
After all of the chaos of the returning birds, I liked this isolated Canada goose that was standing motionless. I guess it was sleeping as it did not move for this 13 second exposure. The light reflected from the street lamps above the Deerfoot lit the water like fire. With the small silhouette of the goose anchoring the frame, I like this composition.
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Silhouettes: Elk on a Ridge
The Sibbald Herd is a large group of elk that forage west into the front range of the Kananaskis mountains and east to Springbank near Calgary. They move within a relatively thin band along the eastern part of their land and are often in the scrub brush that edges the farmland along Highway 22 between Highway 8 and the Trans Canada Highway. They often graze behind this ridge in a shallow valley but on this morning I found them lined up among the trees and the rocks. They were quite interested in my for a couple of minutes and then resumed grazing and wandered back behind the hill.
I photographed these animals about an hour after sunrise with the sun still below the crest of this ridge. The strong backlighting made for wider range from dark to light than my camera can capture so I chose to work with the structural elements within the scene. Reduced to black and white, there is an interesting relationship between the land and the elk highlighted in these pictures.
Playing around on this last one. I like how the white bushes look like splatter paint.
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Clearing Skies at Sunset
Sunset along the Rocky Mountains when looking west is often worthy of enjoying when possible. I was able to watch this interesting sky develop a few days ago as the daylight slipped away.
Here the sun just slipped behind the ridges of the mountains of eastern Kananaskis. I underexposed this scene to avoid burnt out highights near the sun. I like the resulting detail in the clouds and the golden hue of the image. Eight minutes later, I captured a larger scene of the sunset. The cotton candy texture and beautiful colour in the upper clouds steal the scene in the image below.
One of the last photographs I made was well above the mountains. Here I did not underexpose yielding a brighter scene. This has a heavenly feel to it that I find interesting.
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The Fishermen of Inle Lake
I returned from Myanmar with several thousand images to work through. I was able to spend a fair amount of time editing while on the road but it has still taken a while to start ordering the different subjects into some cohesive groups. The first one that I have completed is a set of graphic art style images made of the fishermen on Inle Lake. I have made this into a book and am expecting my proof copy within a couple of days.
First, a little detail about Inle Lake, Inle is located in Shan state in central Myanmar and is at an altitude of 2800 feet. The lake is about 14 miles long, 7 miles wide and has an average depth of seven feet (up to twelve in the rainy season) and is roughly 50 square miles in area. It is large, shallow and filled with reeds that sit just under the surface – I never saw the bottom of the lake during our three days spent completely in boats and stilt buildings on the water. There are about 70,000 people living on and around the lake. Most live in stilt homes of all shapes, sizes and condition. The streets to all of the villages, large and small, are predominantly canals. While I was there, the dry season was in full swing and the water levels were very low which had the largest visible impact on the small villages where there narrow canals were just mud in many places. Dredging was constant and, beyond a bit of rerouting and a few pushes from friendly villagers, our boats weren’t impeded too much.
The fishermen ply their trade all around the lake and the river mouths. They all work off small, flat hulled oar powered boats that they stand in back to navigate and then fish off the tip of either end of the boat. Most fishermen man their boats alone but occasionally I saw two fellows partnering on one skiff. The boats are mostly made of teak wood and are about 15′ long and maybe 3′ wide. What draws particular attention, is their method of rowing. They stand up using one leg to balance on the canoe, wrap the other leg around their long oar and propel their boat using a kicking motion. When they are intent on moving quickly, they keep one hand on the top of the oar and then drive oar wrapped leg hard which results in them moving pretty fast. While fishing, they hook the oar with their leg so that they are free to fish using both hands and can still maneuver their craft with a high degree of dexterity. They fish using a tall, conical net which they drop into the water when they see fish directly below them. Once in place, they push it down into the ground with one foot, keeping the other foot on the canoe, and then use a spear to skewer the fish through a hole at the top of the net which sits above the waterline. It is a wonderful display of balance and strength as these men work from early in the pre-dawn, through the day and into dusk. There are a number of species in the lake that the fishermen catch. Of these, the Inle Carp is abundant and forms a staple of the lake people’s diet.
I will post a blog of the lake people, detailing the lives lived on Inle in pictures but in this series, I wanted to play with the constantly changing shapes and compositions of these men as they worked the lake. I focused on the angles and patterns created by the fishermen, the boats and the nets. To create the graphic effect, I overexposed the shots while I was on the lake, then converted the images into black and white and adjusted the contrast in Adobe’s Lightroom later. Shooting early in the morning, I worked in low contrast light mostly and was able to eliminate the horizon, the surrounding hills and other distracting background elements in camera via the overexposure approach. These men were concentrated on the fish but tolerated our presence. We provided the men photographed with a tip as we shot them for almost a half an hour. They were not distracted by the cameras and I was pleased to be able to capture their regular movement which I found very appealing.
more to come…
