It began as a study of isolation.Amongst the tens of thousands of snow geese there stood, one, lone sandhill crane. There were hundreds of other cranes on the pond but most were grouped together along the edge of the sea of geese.Somehow this gal got stranded in the middle. The sandhills were already on the pond when the geese flew in. And when the geese come they arrive all at once and blanket the pond in a matter of seconds. So it’s likely that this crane was just caught off guard and when the feathers settled she found herself surrounded.It was an interesting juxtaposition. I shot a single frame with the crane centered and then recorded a few frames on either side imagining I would combine them into a panorama. Then she slowly began to move, picking her way through and high stepping over the congestion of geese. Gradually she broke into a trot, which became a run, and turned into a take-off as I merrily tracked along with her.It became a study in motion.
One moment I was shooting a mountain peak poking through the clouds against a predawn sky and the next it was shrouded over by a bank of clouds. Then the clouds swept past the summit and dropped down towards the lake, threatening to obscure the entire view. Suddenly the sun broke over the eastern ridge and slipped under the cloudbank, lighting a path across the lower face of the mountain. I had to remind myself to close my gaping mouth and shoot before it was gone. Sometimes when I'm shooting panoramas such as this one that requires several images stitched together to create the whole, by the time I finish my panning across the vista, the weather and lighting will look completely different than it did at the start. The weather changes so quickly in the mountains, I think you could classify shooting them as action photography rather than landscape photography. This photo was taken from Num Te Ja Lodge on Bow Lake in early October. I woke to -10 C temps and a beautiful blanket of snow from an overnight storm.
dragonfly darting about in the last rays of the sunlight, feeding on insects that look like bright sparks of light. With the backlight, the dark shadows, and the arc of the lens flare, the dragonflies appeared to be floating in space above a ringed planet against a star-studded sky.
