outdoors

Twin Lakes – Roadscape

Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Journaling, Light Intensity, Photoblog Intention, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Still Life, Weather, Winter
Alberta Highway 35 near Twin Lakes, Alberta

Alberta Highway 35 near Twin Lakes, Alberta

Distances travelled within Canada’s vast landscape are huge. Travel along its roadways demands commitment to best use of drive time between point of origin and destination so you get where you are going and so you enjoy where you got yourself to. Within this travel predicament kinaesthetic awareness of the road counts as much as visual presentation in terms of road familiarity. Curves, drops, bumps and inclines inform you in your travel along the road. Artists depicting the predicament of Canadian travel often poke fun at vacations enjoyed from a car’s interior as the terrain passes by as much as it is something enjoyed at the destination’s endpoint.  A better way to see more of Canada’s landscape is accomplished looking through a camera lens; doing so requires you to stop your vehicle, stow it safely along the roadside, get out of it and interact more substantially with the environment you encounter.

An iconic rendering of Canada’s roadscape is what the image presented here is about. I’ve photographed a portion of the up-and-down incline leading up to Twin Lakes along Alberta’s Highway 35, one hundred and fifty kilometres south from High Level en route toward Edmonton. In distance, the incline covers five kilometres of road surface and rises onto a land mass noted for the temperature change that occurs from bottom of the incline to its crest. In winter a double-digit temperature change can occur and is accompanied by a marked change in weather travelled through. Ascending or descending, driving this incline is a tricky endeavor in winter, something compounded by snow. While one aspect of this image favours the artist’s tongue-in-cheek take on ‘Windshield Time’, the manner in which most Canadians see their Canada rolling past them, the image also recalls lives of former students who as new (and perhaps impatient) drivers were trekking through this bit of terrain on second- or third-ever tries; one bright future ended in a vehicle roll-over. Another life was impacted by partial paralysis.  It’s this portion of road in this image that seems to surprise drivers … even experienced ones. Last November, descending the incline in snow was an activity more akin to skiing than rolling forward in a half-ton truck.

Listening to:  Gillian Welch’s I Dream a Highway from her Time – The Revelator album, Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road from her album of the same name and High and Dry from Radiohead’s The Best of Radiohead.

Quote to Inspire: “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” ― Ansel Adams

Postponed for Better Days

Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Photoblog Intention, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Season, Still Life, Winter
Saw Mill - Whitecourt

Saw Mill - Whitecourt

Different economic forces press on the development of Alberta’s natural resources. The fall-out can mean that resource development is postponed for better days. Twenty minutes north from Whitecourt, Alberta, down a long, winding hill into a valley, a sawmill sits in disuse waiting its return to operation. In my northward return drives to High Level through this year, I’ve been meaning to capture this image. On Sunday I found myself with time enough to halt my Nissan Altima along the side of the road and allow myself opportunity for looking through my Canon 70-200 mm F 2.8 lens.

Listening to:  All This Time, Liberal Backslider and This Is Us from Martyn Joseph’s Thunder and Rainbows album on my return journey to High Level.  My trip southward to Edmonton allowed for a six hour listen to Susan Sontag’s collection of essays in an audiobook version of On Photography, a good articulation and wrestling with photography issues.

Quote to Inspire – “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern organic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” – Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. “In Plato’s Cave,” On Photography, Farrar, Straus (1977).

A Slippery, Melting World

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon Camera, Gas Station, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, School, Service Station, Still Life, Weather, Winter

A busy week has me posting photographs almost a week beyond date of image capture. Last Friday’s photowalk took us through High Level’s southern side, a slippery, melting world, a world of water splashing and flowing and soaking through. Photographers captured freeze-frame splashing, the results of big chunks of ice being thrown into puddles.  Others’ photographs were more about water’s ripple and reflection, water moving and water that’s settled.  Beyond this, water misted in the spray generated by vehicles traveling among wet, wet High Level roads.

I used my Sigma 10-20 mm in two ways, first to distort line and shape of subjects close by and secondly to photograph landscape traveled through.  The subjects photographed include an RCMP three-quarter ton truck, playground equipment at Spirit of the North Community School, a bog-runner truck … in development, the curbside view of Quality Motors (our local Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge Dealer) and the Extra Foods Gas Bar (part of the Canadian Superstore chain).

Listening to the Steve Miller Band – Rock’n Me, Take the Money and Run and Mercury Blues from the Fly Like an Eagle album;  other songs have included Murray McLauchlan’s Hard Rock Town and Ryan Adam’s Chains of Love.

Quote to Inspire – “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange

B-Sides, Photographs that Linger

Barn, Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Farm, Farmhouse, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Home, Homestead, Light Intensity, Photoblog Intention, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Spring, Still Life, Winter

Sunday – photographs that I’d intended to post linger on my computer’s desktop in a file of edited images.  The week has been busy with obligations taking me into my nights. The first image is one of a barn located in a muskeg bog, just south of Figure Eight Lake on Alberta Highway 737; it is out of the weather and close to a water source; no house or homestead is in the immediate vicinity.  One could have burned down. Or, perhaps the barn is associated with the homestead in the second image; this homestead is treed in and built on higher ground a kilometre further south on the west side of the same highway. In another image an inuksuk has been assembled at the southwesternmost corner of someone’s farmland alongside Alberta Highway 685, stating to all comers that others have stood right there, where they now stand. Within metres of the inuksuk, a heart-shaped wreath is fastened below a ‘no through road’ sign, perhaps inviting people to come and investigate. The next photograph presents a second rendering of the Fairview horses and lamas in spring’s sunlight; there’s a glow of sunlight from the animals. Beyond this, are the other b-side renderings of the Dunvegin bridge, photographed last weekend.

Listening to Tonic’s rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s Second Hand News, then there’s Sister Hazel’s take on Gold Dust Woman and Shawn Colvin performs The Chain, all songs are part of Legacy:  A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours’ album.

Quote to Inspire – “I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.” – Ken Burns

Dunvegan Photowalk, A Possibility

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Light Intensity, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Still Life, Winter
The Peace River - Dunvegan Bridge and Dunvegan Gardens

The Peace River - Dunvegan Bridge and Dunvegan Gardens

On October 1, 2011, as an educator having completed several month-long tasks associated with the September 30th student count and the paperchase associated  with ministry deadlines at 11:00 p.m., the night before, the prospect of participating in a Kelby Photowalk was there, was a never-done and was possible. As a late, ‘day-of’ registrant one photowalk I could get to from High Level, Alberta, if I started my drive early enough was the photowalk in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.  A five-hour drive would see me there with time to spare; the photowalk would start at 1:00 p.m., B.C. time. This was the photowalk I took part in. The other photowalk that was within driving distance but started much too early after my sleeping hard was Fairview-based but would take in the area in and around the Dunvegan Bridge, the Dunvegan historic site and the Dunvegan Gardens. That photowalk took place, in part, along the banks of the Peace River found in the image presented here.

In reviewing this image today, I note that several features of the river draw my attention. The river winds its way through the huge, open space of the river valley. The valley is welcome contrast to the linear, familiar landscape surrounding High Level in which you can look forward, side-to-side and behind you; but up-down depth of perspective and distance are fixed. Standing midpoint up the valley slope allows good change of perspective – opportunity to look down into the valley toward the river and the opportunity to look along the sides of the valley (almost a hallway of sorts) to appreciate its relief (the land’s wrinkles leading down to the river). This kind of perspective as I enjoyed it from a Kelowna hot tub looking down onto Lake Okanagan is one feature I will emulate if and when I ever purchase a hot tub, enjoying a hot tub’s warmth from a height while looking out upon something below.

The photograph, here, is a high dynamic range (HDR) shot in which colour, texture, relief and light are crisply enhanced, capturing attention. Beyond this, the subject of the image – the river – holds attention because there is natural flow and movement, an indicator of spring’s upcoming arrival.  The river holds broken ice and moves along the surface of the water.  And, the sky’s blue reflects in the water.  All this reminds of former life in Fox Lake, Alberta when each evening I’d trek to the Peace River, enjoy its expanse, then return home. I walked to the river through all seasons.  For me, this photograph of the Dunvegan river valley and reminiscence of the Kelby Photowalk seem to point to a richness in opportunity for photography throughout each day and through all seasons.

Listening to – Over the Rhine’s Drunkard’s Prayer album; songs standing out – Born, Who Will Guard the Door and Spark.

Quote to Inspire – “The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.” – W. Eugene Smith