Alberta Winter

I had the good fortune to get outdoors for some photography this week. Today I’m sharing a few pictures from each of those two excursions.

Sunday morning, five of us who often photograph together met at the Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park, near Cochrane, just west of Calgary. Glenbow Ranch is 3,200 acres of native fescue grassland and an active cattle ranch.

Both pictures were taken in a working area of the park, a penned area used presumably for marshalling the livestock. First a closer view.

I then moved back for a wider angle shot which captures the essence of the terrain on a very wintry morning. Our primary purpose for the day was to take images which contained negative space. Most often, negative space is used as a neutral or contrasting background to draw attention to the main subject, which then is referred to as the positive space. In this picture, the mainly white foreground is the negative space.

The next series of pictures were taken on Tuesday with two friends from the Canmore Camera Club. It wasn’t looking good as we left Canmore, traveling south on the Smith-Dorrien Trail into Kananaskis Country. As we continued south, it only got worse. Snowfall was heavier and it was windy, certainly not great for photography. We chose to return home. Fortune was with us and as we motored homeward, the snow stopped falling and the skies cleared a little. We were left with mostly cloudy and turbulent sky with sunlight poking through, casting light intermittently on the mountains and the snow.

The first picture from this series features a favourite scene of mine, the view looking northwest up the Spray Valley. The conditions were favourable with windblown clouds, mottled with dark shadows and bright sunlight and the occasional patch of sunlight on the flank of the Rimwall, the peak on the right.

Further along, I spotted this snowbank, smoothly sculpted by the wind. I couldn’t resist.

We stopped near the bridge crossing the aquaduct, conducting water from the Spray Lake to Canmore. I took this picture of Goatview Peak, during our stop there.

This was my capture of the day, a beautiful scene looking down the aquaduct toward the Ehagay Nakoda massif, a multi-peaked mountain located immediately south of the town of Canmore.

At the far end of the aquaduct, just before descending Whiteman’s Pass to Canmore is Whiteman’s Pond, clearly frozen at this time of the year. The mountain you see on the opposite side of the Bow Valley is Grotto Mountain, a Canmore landmark.

What initally did not look promising, proved to be a good day. You just never know. I think my friends would tell me “It is what you make of it!”