Wide angle photography

While in Banff I attempted to take some wide angle shots using composition suggestions that I picked up in a book entitled 'John Shaw's Nature Photography Field Guide'. John Shaw's books are great, they have a clear style without being too technical, and his photos are amazing. His book 'John Shaw's Landscape Photography' will also explain how to take this kind of shot.

This shot requires some planning and setup. First of all, you need a tripod. Because I had the Chickadee with me, and we were traveling, I didn't bring mine with me, which ruined some of my other attempts. The reason you need a tripod is because you must set your aperture as high as it will go, which will result in your shutter speed being too slow to hold your camera in your hand. These shots were taken at F-22. This gives you a great depth of field. In the above photo, that means the rock and the mountain will both be in focus.

Next, you set your lens to the widest angle it will go. I used my 18-70 mm zoom lens and set it at 18 mm.

The next part is the time consuming, body contorting, tripod adjusting act of composing the photo. You need to choose something interesting to place in the foreground. In the above picture I chose a boulder. You will need to get very very close to this subject. I was probably less than 6 inches away from the boulder. Then you work on getting an angle that includes your subject and the background in the distance.

Now you're ready to take the picture. Your shutter speed will probably be slow because the aperature is so small, hence the need for the tripod.

If you're interested in learning how to take this shot, read John Shaw's books, he explains this much better than I did. (His photos are also much better than mine).

The Many Faces of Mount Rundle

I'm back! I've just returned from a two week vacation in Banff National Park. For obvious reasons, I did not want to announce my departure online. I was able to get in a post or two while I was away, although I didn't have access to my photo software and wasn't able to upload photos until the end of my trip when I posted the sneak preview.

The sneak preview photo was a bank of spruce trees growing on a mountainside in Kootenay National Park. I took a drive up the mountain pass from Banff into Kootenay one morning after a fresh snowfall. It was spectacular.

While in Banff I managed to take a whopping 900 images. Banff was so amazing I felt like I could wave my camera wildly around my head while pressing the shutter and I'd have a ton of great photos.

This is Mount Rundle. It is located next to the town of Banff. It took me several days to get over my sense of disorientation and start to figure out which mountain was which. They looked different depending on what side of the mountain you were on and even what time of day it was and whether or not they were covered with clouds.

I became particularly fond of Mount Rundle. On the western side (see the above photo) it was gently sloping and covered with trees.

View of the western side of Mount Rundle from the top of Sulphur Mountain.

In the Bow Valley, near the town of Banff is an area of marsh land called the Vermillion Lakes. Mount Rundle is on the left, and Sulphur Mountain is on the right.

And on the eastern side, it was a face of steep cliffs, striped with layers and layers of sedimentary rock, lifted and exposed for all to see. The Bow River can be seen as the frozen white patches in the foreground.

Mount Rundle (left) is separated from Tunnel Mountain (right) by a U-shaped valley carved by a glacier.

This is a view of the peak from our hotel room early one morning.