John's Photo Stuff

IF you go to Lake Moraine, you will get good photos. All I did was put my 18-35 zoom on my D800, stop down a little for depth of field, and shoot. I composed the shot with the little tree (which is probably about 8 feet tall) in the corner, but any composition would work. If you carry a bid DSLR around, people will approach to take a photo of them. I usually enjoy doing that, but I was a little baffled when a lady handed me a Blackberry. I didn’t know anyone still used those. The display looked kind of square (like a Hasselblad, I guess.)

The Canadian Pacific Railroad is a big deal in Canada. In this photo, it is following the Bow River Valley through the Canadian Rockies.

I went for a walk in the woods. At first I didn’t see anything that would make a good photo. After I got in tune with the woods, I saw possibilities everywhere. Here, the trees are not special, but the interplay of the light in the trees in what interested me. For this kind of a shot to work, the light needs to be diffused a bit so that the shadows are not too deep.

Alpenglow Tips:

• Alpenglow is the last light on the top of a mountain appearing after the sun has set.
• The color of the last sunlight is spectacularly yellow, orange and finally red.
• Watch for it when you are in the mountains in the evening.
• Here, I saw it out my hotel window.  I put the camera lens up against the glass to eliminate reflections.
• The camera’s meter wants to make the shot look like daylight, so I used a lot of negative exposure compensation.

Each tiny green tree in the photo is a giant lodgepole pine towering above the mountainside.

This is the classic view often see on the web of this landmark hotel. I am shooting from a road on the other side of the Bow River. I chose not to include the river because I did not like that composition. You can see the Mont Sulphur gondola faintly in the background if you click on the image to make it bigger. I would like to return in the Winter someday because I think this shot would be great with fresh snow on the trees and the hotel.

 

I went back to the motel room to get my camera to try to take a photo of alpenglow on a spectacular snow-capped mountain.  However, some clouds blocked the alpenglow blocked the illumination of the top of the mountain.  I saw colors in the sky and kept walking to get a clear shot of the sky without motel signs, overhead wires, etc.  I ended up on top of a small hill.  There were two Japanese guys who found the same spot.  We kept shooting (and swatting mosquitos) until the light faded.

 

Tips for shooting skies:

• There is no Photoshop substitute for  a dramatic sky.
• The best skies appear after the sun has set, sometimes quite a while after.
• You usually need to underexpose the shot by 1.5 to 3 stops to keep the detail from washing out.
• You can then tweak the image to bring up the shadows with Photoshop. (Blocked up highlights can’t be fixed.)
• You need an anchor on the ground for your composition.  Just a sky doesn’t look right, but if the anchor is silhouetted, you can make it small as I did here.