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: