Cumulus Clouds at Sunset

Last evening, I went on a a photo excursion with two friends, Bob Bear and Hugh Williamson into Kananaskis Country. We were equipped with lenses for some landscape photography and for some wildlife. It proved to be a brilliant evening for photographing scenery. Wildlife was scarce; we spotted a single wolf crossing the road but he wasn’t interested in being photographed.

We did get some good shots around  Spillway Lake in the lower Kananaskis area. Surprisingly, some good opportunities came on the ride home, at sunset. The sky and the clouds were particularly striking and I was fortunate to capture a few good shots along the way. Here’s a brief slideshow featuring some of those photographs. Click on the right side of the photos to advance the slideshow; on the left to reverse direction.

I chose to underexpose all the photos, 1 to 1-1/3 f-stops. I did that for a couple of reasons; to capture the intensity of the colours and to heighten the contrast with lots of black. The dark tone emphasizes the colour and texture of the cumulus clouds and focuses attention on them. Foreground is in silhouette and serves entirely as context. These pictures were all taken with a telephoto lens,  100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 with a focal lengths of 100-300 mm. I set the ISO at 800 and succeeded in getting good shutter speeds, in the range of 1/50 to 1/1000 sec. All pictures were taken hand held, hence the need for a fast shutter speeds.

As we approached Canmore on the Trans Canada Highway, I captured one more nice image, this one a mountain silhouette without the towering cumulus clouds. The sky colour is very intense recently, aided by the presence of smoke particles in the atmosphere, resulting from forest fires in Alberta, British Columbia and Washington state. It’s not the best for day time photograph (very hazy) but it works in the late evening!

I’ll post the photos from earlier in the evening in a next blog, to follow soon.