Taken on the Hayburger trail in Elk Island National Park while standing in snow above my waist. It was powdery snow, but still – hard to move. Makes me wonder how the animals survive the winter. It must take an incredible amount of energy to move anywhere at all, and food looks like it would be pretty scarce.
(For full effect, please read in the voice of David Attenborough)
In the plains and woodlands of central Alberta, a most curious animal dwells. This animal swims through frozen water, easily powering its impressive bulk forward. At over 1 metric ton, it is ironically scared of most other animals, preferring either to be alone or to be in groups of its own kind. Behold the bisonshark. While almost impossible to detect when submerged, the bisonshark rises from the snow to move more quickly.
Taken yesterday in Elk Island National Park. The bison were only sometimes completely submerged, usually showing most of their top half. But yes, we do have a LOT of snow.
Another night shot from Lake Louise. You can see the constellation of Orion right above Fairview Mountain and the Pleiades star cluster a little higher and to the right. The brightest star you can see right at the bottom is Sirius – the brightest star (besides our sun of course). That’s pretty much the extent of my constellation knowledge (for this part of the sky anyway). If there are any astonomy or mythology buffs out there, feel free to chime in.
Ice in Johnston Canyon close to the upper falls.
Ice and frost near the Bow River in Banff.
For this trip I tried out an interesting new (well, actually almost 2 years old) camera. Panasonic’s GH1 is actually a very capable camera. In good light the image quality is very close to my Canon 5D (mark I – more than 5 years old, but with a larger sensor). The battery lasts a very long time (I lost 1 tick on the battery meter on a 5 hour hike in -25 weather while taking 332 photos). I had problems with my 5d battery dying, although, to be fair I have an old third party battery for my Canon. The 100-300 lens for the GH1 is a very sharp lens with good image stabilization. For a small light telephoto setup, it is great.
The one area where is fails completely is at night. The previous night photo I took with my 5d turned out pretty well, while it was impossible to get anything with the panasonic. I might have been able to get something if I had a lens for it with a focus distance indicator, but with the 14-140 lens there is no way to focus a night shot. The screen was completely black, and of course autofocus would not work on any camera. The photos are also much more grainy than my 5d when long exposures are used.
Here’s one area where the GH1 does better than anything else around – telephoto (at a reasonable cost and weight). Flowing water and ice in Johnston Canyon. Taken with a 600mm equivalent lens.
I pick the worst times for vacations. The roads were as bad as they’ve been in recent memory and in Banff it was either close to -30 or snowing the whole time. I think I got some good shots though – this was from yesterday, a frigid night on Lake Louise.
A strange storm on a very cold January day in southern Saskatchewan.
I’ve often seen the alphabet photo people spelling out “love” or “joy” at craft fairs, and always thought the letters are kind of interesting and a little cheesy at the same time. But our minds often see random shapes and interpret them as symbols we recognize.
Anyway, I’m sure this photo says something, not quite sure what.
Taken in Lois Hole Centennial Provincial Park.
Another shot from the same day (as the last pic of the day). It was a warm December day and a fresh snowfall was melting and re-freezing into ice on the Tamarack trees (Larix Laricina).
The background is a completely natural artifact of having a large telephoto lens, leaving the aperture as open as possible, and having a fairly low quality lens. The telephoto focal length along with the wide open aperture (f5.6 in this case) made the background completely blurred out. The bright highlights become circles. If I had a much nicer lens, they might be softer-edged and not as distracting. I kind of like the way they turned out though. I suspect the little specks in them mean I had a lot of dust on the end of my lens.
