Chasing Bronze
September already. Last blog I mentioned an upcoming canoe trip with 4 boys and 4 man-boys 😀 , which I have to say, all things considered, came off rather well. We had enough food by a razor thin margin, we stayed dry, and everybody found something different to dislike in every meal 😁 so everything balanced out nicely. Seriously, it was a lot of fun, with a lot of swimming and lounging and whatnot. The weather cooperated, even tossing a couple of exciting thunderstorms our way, but these passed without incident.
I’m usually first to bed, so usually first to rise. Good thing I have this hobby, or I’d be puttering around camp and waking everyone else up. Each dawn was a slow glorious event, entirely calm with a bit of mist:
The first morning I also made a time-lapse using a GoPro, which came out a lot better than expected. It’s surprising how much activity there is on the water. I lot of accidental positives conspired to make it work, including a completely lucky placement of the camera which caught both the sunrise and its reflection through the trees. It’s only about 1.5 minutes, and you can view it here (best viewed full screen):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mi4rn9gjnxs73yg/ELA-2020-08-21-straightened.mov?dl=0
(I may eventually have to remove it, if you are viewing this in the far future…but for now the link should work)
Most mornings a couple of loons cruised past:
…and greeted the morning sun with enthusiasm:
First light on our swimming rock:
Hardly a breath of wind granted some great reflections:
The morning after the thunderstorms offered a dramatic sky:
There were a lot of closer scenes at hand, but I’ll limit it to my favourites. I liked these raindrops:
I know abstracts aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I do like this one…maybe because it took a lot of trial and error to get everything arranged and balanced, between light and dark, harsh lines and soft. Not sure that was achieved in the end, but here you go:
There wasn’t much in the way of wildlife, though one of the boys managed to dive in and grab a turtle. A large frog also tolerated us, allowing me to get both a portrait, and funny enough, a self-portrait in the frog’s eye:
I see you…
No really, I SEE you…
I will say I was lucky enough to be able to bring my entire kit along, having a waterproof camera bag is a godsend. We had so much gear one of the canoes was basically a barge, and what’s one more bag? Next year we might get a little more serious and go further, so I may have to cut down.
I took a bit of hiatus after that trip, only heading out once the week after for a brief evening foray west of town. The sky was promising but kept changing quickly, with streams of wispy clouds:
Eventually this gave way to less colour and more gray, until B&W was the only option:
However, in the last couple of weeks I’ve been busier out in the field. I only have a couple of shots from two weeks ago, where I spent an inordinate amount of time just trying to get a twisty oak tree to cooperate:
This is the standard challenge here, where the scrubby busy background makes it hard to find some kind of natural separation…a different kind of separation anxiety! This shot would not have worked at all in high summer, but now that some of the ground cover is yellowing I think there’s enough contrast to make it viable. Anyway, I probably have blinders on, but this is my favourite attempt of this type of shot so far. I feel like I managed to find the right balance of elements and lighting, the lines go where I want them, and in post processing I managed to get the right levels of contrast with the varying types of vegetation. In the end I just dig the shape of that damn tree!
I guess while I’m at it, one more from just outside my house, I’ve often looked up at the elm trees on my street and admired one particular shape in the canopy above. Maybe it’s been too close to home so I never snapped the shutter, but, finally…:
Last weekend provided a completely different sky experience. Saturday looked bright and sunny, and the last bees were busy among the asters:
But there was a creeping haze on the horizon, probably the first smoke to reach us from the west coast. A panorama tells it best, little did I know this had nothing on what was to come:
The next day I got in the car intending to go to Pinawa and hike a ways, but as I drove the sky just got weirder and weirder: silver white clouds with an almost bronze backdrop. Dilemma: ahead was Pinawa, boring blue skies and puffy clouds, but a great hike; south was strange light and a lot of driving. In the end the photographer won, and I turned south. I ended up spending most of the day in the car, heading south and east, trying to keep the sun just out of the haze and in the blue, while making sure the scenes (mostly facing west) were dominated by the bronze.
The first shot I ended up please with was a small pond where a herd of cows had chosen to drink:
Then this little vignette presented itself:
Finally a long shot of another herd of cows really showcases the surreal tones in the sky:
Once I’d travelled this far, I figured I could go a bit further. Last month I took a long shot from the highway at the top of the Lake Agassiz escarpment, and by this time I was so close I had to just go the extra distance and revisit that location, in the hopes that some elevation (what little we have here) would give me a better view. It did, but by then the lower clouds were thinning out:
I will say setting up a tripod at the top of a hill on a highway just past a blind corner with a strong north-west wind in my ears probably wasn’t the wisest thing I’ve done, but the hum of tires is pretty distinctive, and nobody had to swerve :-D
And now the first frost has arrived, the first deep one is tonight (-4C) so that should hasten the fall colours along. Our autumns are brief, and rarely glorious, so I’ll have to be vigilant.
Until next time, cheers!
