If You Can't Shoot With the One You Love Honey…

Shoot With the One You're With

I don’t like carrying a camera around when I’m out and about with my better three-quarters. She flies and when she’s home, I’d rather be looking at her than through a viewfinder. Sometimes though there’s an image that’s screaming to be made.

Calgary has a new public library designed by Snøhetta. It’s a wonderful structure and replaces a decaying building across from City Hall. Light and airy, it maintains a sense of intimacy and even with high ceilings and even with an open plan quiet, even when full of people.

We had coffee at Luke’s (not the main floor cafe, but the one right inside the collection area) and spent a wonderful afternoon wandering through the building. We went from top to bottom and then the light went “boink”. I turned to my wife and said: “Sorry love, the light.” and dashed out to the entrance.

The main entrance is an arched tunnel lined with wood and is supposed to connect downtown and the East Village (a formerly rundown area in the midst of redevelopment). The arches reflect the Chinook arches that form here during the winter when the winds from the big ocean tumble down from the Rockies. In reality, the tunnel connects the backside of the Big Blue Playpen (New City Hall), the rail yards and the East Village. Downtown is about 3 blocks away. But hey, as an architect’s statement it’s no more arty bollocks than any any other architect’s statement.

The alignment of the passageway and the sun was right on. It was the golden hour (yes, 4:15 in the afternoon is the golden hour in November): the colour of the wood and the shadows of the passersby was in a word “WOW!”

OH NOES! No camera. Wait, iPhone 6s, 645 Pro app, problem solved. This app is probably the best camera app out there and it’s one of the reasons I’ve stuck with the iPhone ecosystem for as long as I have. If there was an equivalent for Android, I’d have switched a long time ago.

I made these three images. I’ve also posted the monochrome versions that I made using NIK Silver Efex. I do shoot all my cameras as RAW + Monochrome JPEG and 645 Pro is no exception. In this case I didn’t like the render so I used NIK instead. I had to work fast as figured I had about 15 minutes of light and couldn’t be arsed to fiddle fart about. This is one of those cases where “we’ll fix it in post, get the images first!”

Shadows, New Calgary Public Library

Shadows, New Calgary Public Library

Skaters, New Calgary Public Library

Skaters, New Calgary Public Library

Arches, New Calgary Public Library

Arches, New Calgary Public Library

You couldn’t have predicted it, you could have sat there day after day waiting but, with a chinook arch (ironically enough) overhead and the sun sliding behind the mountains flooding the tunnel with light the camera god looked down and smiled.

Not fantastic images, but a very good example of timing, luck and

A Bad Day's Shooting is...

Still better than a day in the office.

I have to admit that I've been not really focused on photography at all this past while. I've been grinding out training materials and I've become convinced that a person only has a finite amount of creative energy to expend and switching that energy from one context to another just doesn't work all that well.

It doesn’t help either that, for whatever reason, I’ve been fighting my camera. On one level I get it. Sometimes you, like a leading scorer, go through a slump: you’re holding the stick to tight, you’re over thinking, the puck isn’t bouncing the way it used to. You make the shot, thinking it’s top shelf and for whatever reason you hear that clank as that certain goal hits the crossbar or the post.

So, soldier on I try, sometimes with success, usually without. Yeah, yeah: there’s no sense beating yourself up but it does begin to wear.

I did have the pleasure last fall of chauffeuring my good friend Ken and his lovely wife Claudia around the Banff area. They were up from Brazil for a conference at the Banff Centre, so we did the usual: Banff, Lake Minnewanka, and the Ice Fields Parkway. No Lake Louise. It was overrun with tour buses. In fact, this was the first time in my memory (and I used to contract IT services to Banff National Park back in the day so I was out there year round) that I have seen that many tour buses to the point that, as a local, I felt unwelcome in my own backyard. As we drove past the overflow parking lot, Ken and I looked at each other and said in unison: “Let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place!”

I did make some images on that trip, and while not what I would call stellar, they were images nonetheless; the first images I had consciously made since late spring. The weather was quite variable. On the drive out from Calgary, we had rain, freezing rain, driving snow, low clouds and then, as we crossed the Kananaskis River by Exshaw, clear skies. Gotta love the weather out this way.

One morning I got up early to go the Vermillion Lakes for that iconic shot of Mt. Rundle: you know the one, flat water, alpen glow and the mountain reflecting in the lake. Alas, the wind was up, the lakes where choppy and Mt. Rundle was wreathed in cloud. After some reconnoitering and trying different angles I made this image.

Vermillion Lakes and Mt. Rundle

Vermillion Lakes and Mt. Rundle

I’m not sure if I like either the colour or the monochrome version. I cleared up the foreground clutter in the monochrome version by applying a blue filter in Nik SilverFX. The rust shows, to be sure, compared to the images I had made a year earlier in the late spring.

The Icefields Parkway (connecting Lake Louise and Jasper) often has some nice opportunities for images. Early spring is my favourite time as the weather is turbulent enough that you can get wonderful cloudscapes mixing with the mountains whose crags and crevasses are still etched with snow. It’s always a hit and miss proposition though and like Forrest Gump said: “It’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” Like Charlie Brown (mixing metaphors), I got a rock. But, the clouds helped and with some post processing I ended up with this.

Crowfoot Glacier at Bow Lake

Crowfoot Glacier at Bow Lake

 I’m not sure about the monochrome version, but it sure looks like it was a different day up on the Crowfoot: cold and blustery. The colour version shows a hope of warmth with the hints of sunlight reflecting off the glacier and the rocks below it.

Get your geology geek on:

• The mountain in the clouds is Mount Crowfoot and shows the Eldon Formation.
• The finger sticking into the glacier from the right is the Cathedral Formation.

Thanks to Ben Gadd and his great book “Canadian Rockies Geology Road Tours” The more you know!

The rest of the images from this trip had no emotion, no power and were, at best, holiday snaps. But hey! I’m lucky! This beautiful landscape is only an hour or two away and for the expenditure of half a tank of gas, I can try again whenever I like, unlike Thomas Heaton who flew from England on a whim and was faced with snow, more snow, low clouds and cold feet.

I did feel some satisfaction with these images. Perhaps a year from now I’ll have another look and some others will jump out at me. Like Slim Dusty sings: