Canmore Winter Morning

Sunday morning was the beginning of beautiful weather in Canmore. The temperature was moderate, about -5 deg C (21 deg F) with no wind and some fresh snow from the night before. I decided to go out in search of some winter scenes, walking into town and back and taking photos as I went along.

I chose to limit my shooting to the use of a telephoto lens only (a 70-200 mm, f/2.8) on the advice of an article I’d read on it. The author enthusiastically recommended trying it, promising I’d be pleasantly surprised by the results achieveable. So everything you see today was done with a long lens, with the exception of the following scene taken on a pathway into town with the Fairholm Range in the background. In this one case, I deployed my FujiFilm X100F camera with a single focal length of 35 mm. Consider this one a comparison.

A little further along the path, I crossed Canmore Creek on this bridge. Before crossing I took this picture using my telephoto lens on a Canon DSLR camera, at a focal length of 70mm.

I took this picture from the bridge, the reflection of a house and some trees in the creek.

Looking in the opposite direction, up the creek I took this picture because the I liked the almost sinusoidal protrusions of ice and snow into the creek. Nice pattern.

This picture was taken looking eastward along a path parallel to the Bow River. The mountains in the background are two of the Three Sisters, Canmore’s landmark.

I didn’t pursue this path any further, rather I reversed course and walked upstream toward the town centre. En route, I captured this picture along the Bow River with Cascade Moutain in the background.

When I arrived in the town centre, I took a couple of pictures along the main street, this one toward the east with Grotto Mountain in the background. In this instance, I used the full magnification of the lens, a focal length of 200 mm.

Looking in the opposite direction, I included Mount Rundle in the background. These mountains on either side of the town look very close. They are but that impression is amplified by a phenomenon common with the use of a telephoto lens, referred to as perspective compression or lens compression.

For this picture, I widened the angle to a focal length to 85 mm to include most of the height of the mountain in the picture.

I concluded my day’s photography with this image of an old coal car used when Canmore was a coal mining town. Those days are long gone but these mementos of the town’s history are commonplace. Fittingly, this one is found next to the coal miners’ Union Hall, still in use today as a meeting place.

Even though I was very close to this subject, I zoomed in to 100 mm focal length to better capture the detail of this relic.

Using a long lens almost exclusively was easier than I thought. I found that I could get the compositions I liked at 70 mm (limited a little compared to a wider angle lens). The benefit is to have the magnification of a telephoto lens for those occasions that require it, without having to carry a second lens. This works well with a lower range lens, like the 70-200 mm. It would be more difficult with a 100-400 mm lens where the widest angle available is at 100 mm.