Banff / Canmore Field Trip

Trip to the Rocky Mountains

As I said in the previous blog, I have given myself one day a week for photography/design assignments. This last Monday September 9, I took a day trip to Canmore and Banff. My ultimate goal for the day was to get a "classic" photo of Mt. Rundle with Vermillion Lake in the foreground. There are hundreds, if not thousands of such photos as Rundle is probably one of the most photographed mountains on the planet. However, I wanted MY version!

I started by doing some Google Maps research to plan my day. Google Maps is a marvellous research tool for planning photo tours. With the street view, you can "scope out" photo locations in advance. In addition, Google Maps has little rectangles on the detailed maps where people have taken photos and uploaded them for inclusion on the map in this location. Of course, this will not help with remote locations, but for finding the location of the classic view of Mt. Rundle, it was invaluable.

Rundle was my final destination of the day because I wanted the light to be on the western slope of the mountain which meant taking the photo in the afternoon. I decided to spend the morning in and around Canmore in the area of "Goat Pond". Having "travelled" virtually down the Google highway, I found some interesting photographic areas to explore. 

My New Photographic Equipment

This seems like a good moment to detail my new photography kit. I had sold the previous kit in the mid '90's when digital cameras first came out. I had little time for photography in any event and the lightweight digital cameras were easier to take the kind of photos I was taking at the time; theatre production photos.

I selected the Nikon D7100 and purchased it as a kit with an 18-105mm Nikon zoom lens and a 70-300mm Nikon zoom lens. I added skylight filters as lens protectors and a polarizing filter to enhance skies and kill glare in reflected surfaces. I also added a wireless device that connects to the iPhone to use the iPhone as a remote through the lens viewer and shutter trigger. 

The D7100 has M, S and A (Manual, Shutter and Aperture) priority modes not unlike my old Minolta XD-11. It has extra modes for effects, full auto and full auto without flash. The plethora of settings is truly bewildering but with the aid of D7100 for Dummies. 

I have mostly figured out how to operate the thing. In S and A modes (my most used) it is rather simple to dial in the shutter speed or aperture I want and then let the camera deal with the other.
Exposure control is rather complicated but once I figured out "spot" mode, it is easy to put the spot where I want the exposure read, lock it in and shoot. The same goes for auto focus. Spot mode allows me to centre the reticle on the part of the frame I wish to focus and let the camera do its thing.

The camera allows the saving of images to JPG and RAW formats; either or both. The RAW format is not an image until it is processed through software. This is the format that most serious digital photographers use to have the most control over the final image. The RAW file is simply digital data. The JPG format creates an image by interpolating the data and assigning colour and brightness values, in addition to compressing the image to make the file smaller. I have a large enough SD card in the camera to allow for saving images in both JPG and RAW format. That way I get to preview the image on the camera as well as have full control over it once downloaded to the computer.

Trip to Canmore and Goat Pond

I followed my iPhone's Google Map to Canmore and the road up to Goat Pond. I discovered the road that leads to that pond was closed. So I parked nearby and walked to a small pond that was closer to the road. I was able to get to the water's edge.

Spray Lakes Trail

Although the polarizing filter captured the deep blue sky, I enhanced the photo in Photoshop CS6 using a series of filters from the OnOne Perfect Photo Suite 7. I created a slight glow and added a very subtle graduated filter to give the sky just above the mountain a rosy cast. The photo was finished with a couple of framing "actions" that give the blurred matte and the black frame.

From here I drove back around the pond and found a small tourist area with a small mountain pond and a large field. There were lots of people there but I wandered off into the fields above Canmore to see what I could find. In this field I shot a "selfie" of me "Outstanding in my Field"!

Outstanding in My Field!

After shooting 100 or so photos in the field, took the three minute drive into the town of Canmore and had some lunch. How great is that? You can be in the mountain wilderness, by a pristine mountain lake one moment and then three minutes later having a Teen Burger! 

Once I had finished my hamburger, the drive into Banff was only another fifteen minutes. I found the small road that rings Vermillion Lake and pulled off to walk the perimeter of the lake. There is a dock built just for photographers that juts out into the lake a bit and there were a number of tourists taking photos. The water in the lake was low and I ventured out into the reeds and walked along the bank away from the dock to get the best angle I could of the lake and the mountain. There were a number of clouds and the area was shrouded in a bit of a haze so the light on the mountain was not quite right. I took a number of shots while I waited for the blue sky to the west to arrive. Just at the the moment the light broke through and illuminated the west slope of Rundle, I took a number of shots with various exposures, over and under and various shutter speeds and apertures. 

Mount Rundle and Vermillion Lake

Once I got home, I ran all my 100's of images through Adobe Lightroom and picked out a number of favourites. The one above was the best of them and I processed it in Photoshop using a variety of filters to bring out the blue sky, the contrasting white clouds and enhance the green of the trees. This is the shot around which I had planned the entire day!