Autumn color – Lake O’hara

The best season for photographers has come. I mean autumn season! Trees along streets have already changes to yellow in Calgary so Rocky mountains must be really beautiful now. Another good thing of this season is camping sites are not as busy as summer. Last year, I traveled to Lake O’hara. I met many photographers over there and many of them carried Canon or Nikon DSLRs. But also, interestingly, I could see more unique formats of cameras, such as old film Hasselblad, Infrared film, Kodachrome, and pin hall camera. I brought my 4×5 view camera as well as my regular camera sets. The photo bellow is the one of the images I took with 4×5 in lake O’hara.

Also this is the photo I could sell at the last gallery exhibition. PLease click the photo for the larger image.

Image like Chinese Ink Painting

Last week, I went to a photo trip to Lake O’hara, Yoho national park with 21 members from Foothills Camera club. We stayed at the Elizabeth hut for 2 nights. No exception of this year, we had bad weather. I saw the sun light for probably 4 hrs in total in the whole trip. I even experienced my first snow this autumn.

In the morning of the 3rd day, it was really foggy outside. Everybody stayed in the hut and enjoy breakfast and slow start of the day.  I grabbed my camera gear and rushed to the location where I had checked the day before.

I had a particular image in my head, inspired by Chinese ink painting. I wanted to capture an image of the quiet, monotone scenery  like chinese people painted their scenery with only black ink on paper. At home, I added a tinge of blue to the image as Darwin Wiggett suggested in Outdoor photography magazine. I guess I successfully obtain the image I imagined. Obviously, photos of the gorgeous Canadian Rockies are always appreciated, but these kinds of the introvert images also appeal to people in the long run, I hope.

By the way, I stitched 5 images to make this one image. I used the panorama head built by Greg Nuspel, who is also an excellent photographer in Calgary. You shoud check out his website.

Landscape photography in a cloudy day

Thinking of this summer, I had rainy days or at least cloudy days almost every weekends. What even worse is those cloudy days were overcast weather, so I did not see any cloud patterns…. just boring gray sky.  It is obviously difficult to shoot gorgeous landscape pictures in this condition.

One day, I hiked the rockbound lake trail in Banff national park. It became cloudy, really cloudy and sky was plain gray when I got to the lake. But I had already hiked 7 km. I needed to capture some images anyway.  So I changed strategy.

I walked around the lake shore and I found a rocky area and a weed. This could be a good chance to try the 12mm lens I bought recently! I set up my tripod and I approached the lens as close as possible to the grass. Actually those 3 rocks are only 1 m away from the grass. I could successfully eliminate the sky from the frame.