Category: Photography

While I never had a great dawn or dusk view of the Tetons from Oxbow Bend in three days of trying, Oxbow Bend did provide good opportunity for viewing wildlife: while there, I saw beaver, wapiti (bulls and cows), a bear, pelicans, and more commons ducks and ravens. This particular pelican stood out due to the colorful reflections on the water behind it.

While I am sorting through my recent trip for photos to post here, I thought I would post an older photo that remains a favorite of mine. After wandering around Butchart Gardens in bad light, I was rather disappointed (definitely spectacular gardens, but I had somehow imagined more) and on my way out. I saw this dragonfly on a bird-bath, and its color struck me. I recall being surprised at how very tolerant of my 50mm macro lens the subject was–to focus this close, I had to be only an inch or two away, and it was still there when I left. The flowers, a bit past their peak when sharp, look great out of focus, and this shot shows a lot more color than my usual photos–something I have been trying to think about more as I am out shooting.

I carried that lens (sigma 50mm f/2.8 Macro EX) with me everywhere I went–itwas a real gem, and my favorite . . . up until the time it was stolen. Moral of the story: kids, don’t carry your expensive camera and lens with you everywhere you go . . .

I am back in Toronto after a vacation which included visits with family and many national parks in the Western United States. I am looking forward to editing more of the 5,ooo frames I took on this trip, but unfortunately, I have a lot of work to do in Toronto as well, so it may be slow going.

I had visited the main valley of Zion before, but was not aware that there is another area of the park to the North and West of the valley which is also open. The Lava Point campground (dry) overlooks the valley at a distance, allowing one to see the top of the features which most visitors only see as huge cliffs from the bottom. There is also a trail that starts at Lava Point and goes all the way down into the valley; a fine idea if you can convince someone with a car to pick you up in the valley or at the visitor centre (accessible by shuttle)–I would not want to hike back up it.

The dawn light on the day I was camped there was unexceptional, but the overlook was alive with least chipmunks going about their business; this is my favorite capture of their activity.

As the image suggests, I am on the road, and will not be posting often. Hopefully, I will produce some images worth posting. I was fooling around with the ultra-wide-angle lens while driving on Highway 50 through Nevada to Great Basin National Park when I produced this image. I was lying down on the road at the time, as it was clear in both directions as far as the eye could see–might be something to that whole ‘loneliest road’ thing after all.

Next time, though, I do it in a camera with movements…

Last weekend I was down in the Boston area for the first wedding I have attended since I was small enough to be the ring-bearer. Cal, a friend from my high school years whom I have kept in touch with since. The ceremony, short and touching, was officiated by Cal’s mother, a judge, and concluded with the exchange of bands of mottled titaniam (mokume gane). It was held near sunset outdoors in front of blooming rhododendrons at a botanic gardens; the reception was in the nearby conservatory. It went off as well as could be hoped, and all the guests I talked to thought it was an amazing wedding.

The wedding photographer was unobtrusive, very competent, and had better gear, so, while I would not venture to compete with him, I did get a handful of photos that I would venture to share. I have tried selective saturation to get something of a dreamy effect in this shot and a couple others. There was no formal division, but the two sides split by age, and I chose to sit with the other twenty-somethings on what conventionally would have been the groom’s side, so, despite coming as a friend of the groom, I ended up in a much better position to capture the bride (something I will keep in mind next time).

A peak along the Trans-Canada Highway peeks out from low morning clouds in Jasper National Park of Canada. The low clouds and fog that would pour over the mountains in Jasper were one of my favorite attributes of the park.

My Black & White technique could perhaps use some work–I am not sure this is as alive as it could be, but this is a technical achievement that will take some more time.

I leave tomorrow for my friend Cal’s wedding, outside Boston, and hope to get a few interesting shots at the wedding.

I told this story elsewhere, but I think it worth repeating:

I spent two or three hours shooting a pair of marmots in Yoho NP (Canada), not because I particularly wanted to shoot them for that long, but because the rock the marmots were sunning themselves on was very near the road, and I, with a tripod and long (70-300mm) lens, was conspicuous as someone shooting wildlife. For someone who has never been to the Rocky Mountain National Parks, any wildlife spotted on the road will lead to a long lineup of stopped cars and people crowding around the animals, ussually with stupid little digicams lacking appropriate zoom capabilities to get reasonable shots. While this should excite the elk and cause them to charge, the local elk sseem remarkably inured to such treatment, contrary to the much more aggressive elk I have seen in other places.

After spotting the marmots grazing somewhat near the roadside, I had parked down the road and approached quietly, waiting for them to reappear from the underbrush and go onto their rock, standing very still for stretches of time. This behavior was essentially unique, though: mostpeople, upon noticing me, pulled off right there, including a whole busload of Japanese tourists. One couple insisted on walking up to try to get a shot of them with their P&S, and couldn’t be argued out of it, despite the fact that they had to be so close to them they had to essentially be standing on the same rock, with the predictable result that the marmots ran away and hid (it had to be a 20mme lens…).

I took up deliberately misleading people by pointing my camera at the nearby mountain vista whenever I heard a car coming. This worked for the most part (but not on that last couple). The result was that I could never coax both the marmots into a good position on the rock before they would be scared off. When I got home, I noticed that the mountain vista was actually quite an attractive subject in its own right, though I didn’t make anything good with it, and I have seen the same peak featured in sevveral photos since.

This is my favorite of the one-marmot photos I managed to get. It is perhaps oversharpened in post-processing, and may have acquired a slight yellow tint–I need to work on that.

I am trying to spend some time wandering about the Stanford campus and taking some photographs each time I go home to visit my parents. It is odd to walk around Stanford: as a graduate student, I have spent some seven years in higher education so far, with three different universities becoming intimately familiar to me. I am quite familiar with Stanford, but as a local of the Palo Alto area, not as a student, and I have no sense of ownership, no areas of emotional significance associated with events in my education, nor any real sense that I might chance upon a friend while walking across campus (though I am acquainted with at least a half-dozen people who might regularly be found there). I have a very real sense of being an outsider, a sense that is not helped by the difference in status between Stanford and my undergraduate campus, UCSC.

The Stanford campus is much neater and more organized than the Toronto campus–which isn’t surprising, given that it is an actual semi-planned campus, as opposed to a semi-coherent tangle of city properties that are affiliated in some way with a university governing body in the heart of a big city. In fact, the city thing is something of a sore point for Stanford: so long as I can recall, they have been trying to secede from Palo Alto, an issue that is periodiccally exacerbated by disputes over housing ddevelopment on Sand Hill Road (though that may have been resolved by now–I am more than a bit out of touch).

I took this on Swiftcurrent Lake at the very beginning of an 11-mile, all-day hike up to the Grinell Glacier and back. As dawn was just breaking, the clouds and fog were constantly on the move, making it a wonderful time to shoot. I had intended to shoot the reflections on Lake Josephine with the 4×5 Speedgraphic, but I was so taken with shooting the morning light, clouds, and fog with the Digital Rebel that I did not get it out. In fact, I started out with a pack with three cameras (4×5, Elan, and Digital Rebel), and used none but the Rebel all day, regretting the extra weight of the other two on the 5.5 mile climb to the Glacier itself.

This is my favorite shot of my entire 24-day trip from California to Toronto, on which trip I visited Glacier/Waterton NP, Banff NP, Jasper NP, Yoho NP, Kootenay NP, Mount Robson PP, Glacier NP (Canada), Mt. Revelstoke NP, Elk Island NP, Prince Albert NP, Riding Mountain NP, and various small stops in-between. It needs some work before it is printed, but I am looking forward to the result.