Meadows in the Sky, with alpine flowers in bloom

Red paintbrush, purple lupine, yellow arnica, mauve daisies, green fir trees, grey rocks. Intense colour abounded everywhere. I felt like a kid in a candy store. It is nature’s Butchart Gardens. This is Mount Revelstoke National Park in British Columbia, at the peak of alpine flower season. The ecologically fragile alpine meadows are traversed by well- maintained trails of varying lengths. The park itself has easy access from the Trans Canada Highway near the city of Revelstoke. The Park Service has constructed a 26 km Meadows in the Sky Parkway, a paved road up Mount Revelstoke, taking the visitor to a parking area. From there you can hop a 1 km shuttle bus to the trail heads. Depending on your physical fitness I would advise the photographer to walk the road, at least one-way, ideally both, as the flower displays along the road are particularly exquisite. More information on the National Park can be obtained by visiting the National Park’s website.

For flower photography along the trails and road I carried my backpack and tripod with lenses ranging from 16-35 to 200-400. I used my macro lens sparingly. My lens of choice was the 70-200 but I liked using the 24-70 when the skies cooperated. I prefer soft overcast light for flower photography but when the sun was out and the skies were filled with nice clouds it enabled me to include the spiky fir trees in landscape images. The best time to visit is in August. This past  year (2011) was a late bloom- third week of August. I found the Park Service staff to be very friendly and generous with their time, answering emails and phone calls as I checked in on progress of the flower display.

Lupines, paintbrush and arnica in bloom

Alpine meadow with red paintbrush and rocks

Red paintbrush blooming along the Meadows in the Sky Parkway.

This is what the photographers come for.

Dawn Blast off- Ducks and sandhill cranes

We had the ‘pleasure’ of photographing Bosque under unusual winter conditions. Sure, the refuge gets snow on occasion but never in the amounts, coupled with the extreme cold temperatures as we experienced in early December this year. Our Bosque veteran tour leaders, Gordon and Cathy Illg remarked that not only have they never seen conditions like these before, they have never seen pictures of conditions like these before.

Frosted cottonwoods near the Flight Deck

While I love photographing wildlife I am also partial to landscapes, plants, and abstract patterns. The unusual conditions created by that memorable winter blizzard persuaded me to divert my attention from the birds, for periods of time, to capture some amazing scenes, without feathers. Here is a small selection I hope the reader will enjoy.

Frozen crane ponds with the Chupadera MountainsFrosted cottonwood and Chupadera Mountains before dawn

Cottonwood at dawn

Frosted sunflower seed heads near icy pond

Squabbling cranes in the blizzard

Greetings from snowy New Mexico! We are staying at a motel in Socorro that is about 20 minutes from world famous Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Bosque draws bird photographers in their thousands to see and photograph spectacular congregations of snow geese and sandhill cranes, along with other avian species plus a few mammals too. This area was hit hard by a slow moving storm out of Arizona that dumped 25 cm of snow, forcing road and school closures. Worse still was the closure of Bosque (now re-opened). The local residents don’t have the snow removal equipment and resources that we are accustomed to in Northern Ontario. As the saying goes  “necessity is the mother of invention”. We saw one person ‘blowing’ his driveway clear with an electrically powered leaf blower.

Wild weather brings many photo opportunities. This refuge and its birds have been photographed very well, over many years, a billion times.  Those of us capable of braving the weather had the opportunity to depict the birds in unusual conditions- a howling blizzard and its aftermath. Now that the Park Service plowed the loop roads the facility has re-opened. It is still quite cold by NM standards. The birds are accustomed to roosting in shallow ponds at night and these ponds are presently ice covered.

Flight of sandhills over snowy New Mexico mountains

Fresh snow on the Mountains near Socorro.

It’s not all about cranes. There are thousands of snow geese and ducks as well as other species of raptors and waterfowl. These coots were huddled on the fresh ice.

Cluster of coots on an icy pond

Still photographers and videographers are able to book private, customized sessions alone or in small groups. In addition there are numerous group ‘photo tours’ offered either near the ranch or on location, as far abroad as Red Rock country in Utah.

In late February I will be joining a tour with emphasis on winter predators, featuring mammals such as wolf, grizzly, fisher, bobcat and small mammals along with some exotic species like Siberian tiger, snow leopard, and Barbary lion.

Troy is an expert animal trainer and the animals will be posed near you and made to behave in natural ways, including action shots like running and leaping. Joe and MaryAnn McDonald attest to Troy’s expertise and feel that this is the best wildlife model experience among several good ones from which to choose. Other pro wildlife photographers such as Dennis Fast feel the same. The experience is friendly, exciting and intense. You’ll wonder how those memory cards fill so quickly!

I like to combine a session at Animals of Montana with photography in Yellowstone, which is only about two hours from Bozeman.

For more information about pricing, dates, tours etc, please visit Troy and Tracy’s website .

Here is a selection of images from a Winter tour and a Baby Animals tour.

When I stop for a photo opportunity my first instinct is to produce documentary photos. These could be landscape, intimate environmental portraits or close-ups. One of the beauties of digital photography is knowing that I have bagged the shot according to histogram and review screen so I am often left with the question ‘what else can I do?’ Usually my answer  (apart from trying different angles and waiting for changes in light) is to try interpretive approaches with my camera. Here are some examples.

This photo is a documentary landscape image of autumn colour. Documentary images tell stories and describe scenes, perhaps providing some insight into ecological or behavioural relationships in nature.

Using in-camera multiple exposure I then treated this scene with an interpretive approach. One frame is exposed in focus followed by five frames out of focus (shallow depth of field) with a bit of zooming thrown in. It creates a dreamy, Orton-like effect. If you don’t have in-camera multiple exposure it may be possible to shoot 5 or 6 separate frames and then combine them later. There are a number of possible variations but I find that 6 frames is a nice starting point for satisfactory results.

Something else I like to do, if I can produce long shutter speeds, is walk with my camera while the shutter is open. Long shutter speeds can be achieved with neutral density filters as well as low ISOs and polarizers.

I try this technique on little-travelled back roads. I call it ‘drive-by-shooting’. I try to set the camera controls to produce a shutter speed around 1/8 s, f16, auto focus and aperture priority exposure. As I drive by colourful subjects, I point the lens out my window, one-handed, and loosely try to stay with that subject as I fire the shutter.

Camera Movement is a tried and true interpretive technique that works well for fall colour, especially if I have tall tree trunks. I like the technique for horizontal as well as vertical. I try to use shutter speeds 1 s and longer and I keep my camera on the tripod, with the ball head loose. I tend to use telephoto zooms for this technique (70-200 mm) but some neat results can be produced using wide-angle lenses, since these lenses exaggerate perspective.

In the meantime I got a blog post from Adventure Photography in Colorado. Cathy and Gordon will be leading a group to New Mexico (Bosque del Apache for birds) in December. Brenda and I signed on for that tour. Their blog post was packed with great pictures of Colorado Fall colour. That helped to nudge me to get off my eastern butt and get out there to see what I could find. Fortunately the weather was calm, making for great reflections around here, since we have so many lakes. Close to Home are Simon Lake and McCharles Lake/Vermilion River. The colour planets had indeed aligned and luck was with me as the maples had not yet passed their prime.

Reflections in Simon Lake

These two locations are minutes apart, by car.

Reflections in the Vermilion River

Two orcas surfacing in the Johnstone Strait

I’m home now after nearly 12000 km and four weeks and many hundreds of gigabites of unedited material. John Marriott’s Orca and Marine Mammal tour aboard the Ocean Light II was a success from many standpoints. I met some very nice folks, had great accommodations and food while on board and enjoyed a variety of excellent photo opportunities, thanks to a knowledgeable skipper and crew (Chris and Jenn) and tour guide (John).

Whale photography is challenging. The subjects spend most of their time underwater and don’t always surface in predictable patterns. I also had framing and focusing issues caused by the boat movements in ocean swells and that meant there were lots of throw-away pictures. John mentioned that successful whale photos require four elements: light, subject, behaviour and lack of wind-calm seas. Fortunately we had all four elements much of the time. Sadly, no breaching Orcas, but there was sufficient interesting behaviour, great backlight, calm seas and lots of marine mammals to keep the motor drives smoking. When things were quiet we downloaded and edited. I had to keep ahead of my laptop’s 350 GB reserve. Two 2 TB Hds had sufficient space for everything but I like to have the Raw files in three places to start.

The skipper is required to stay outside a minimum distance from the whales, so I found I used my 600 mm regularly, mounted on a Wimberley head. Other participants had crop sensor cameras with 100-400 or 500 mm lenses so they got about the same magnifications. It was OK if the whales swam within the 100 m minimum and sometimes that occurred. For the pictures posted below, we followed a pod of orcas as they casually made their way down Johnstone Strait, perhaps loafing, sometimes hunting, There was a rhythm to the process and we learned to predict where and when the whales would surface. The backlit waters and plumes from their ‘blows’ created contrast which was visually exciting. The big bull would announce his imminent presence by showing the tip of his dorsal fin as he rose for air. In addition to orcas we had some exciting encounters with humpback whales.

Two orcas surfacing in the Johnstone Strait

Humpback whale diving in Blackfish Sound

Next. Bait balls and lunge feeding.

Many thanks to Chad for helping me set up this blog.

This is an initial post to get things going. I am a photographer, based in Northern Ontario. As such I expect to post pictures along with words. I specialize in North American wildlife and landscapes, along with plants, gardens, abstracts and photo impressionism. I hope to post news, images from recent photo shoots and insights into how I do photography.

Currently I’m prepping for an extended trip out west, my second in four months. Brenda is staying home this time, minding the fort and the gardens. I’ve taken John Marriott’s offer to participate in his Orca tour http://blog.wildernessprints.com/2011/08/orca-and-humpback-photo-tour.html and I will be leaving Lively on Wednesday to travel to Vancouver Island. I hope to combine the Orca tour with some late summer mountain photography in both the US and Canada. Meanwhile, thousands of unprocessed digital image files remain in the backlog of the computer. Such is the life of a digital photographer. I can never keep up!

Here’s one or two shots from the May trip.

Palouse farmland from Steptoe Butte State Park

Loons on Herbert Lake, Banff National Park

Reflections in Vermillion Lake #3, with yellow-rumped warbler. Banff National Park