Last weekend, I visited Kananaskis Lakes with neighbour and fellow photographer, Stewart Hamilton. This location is about one hour’s drive from Canmore at the southern end of the Kananaskis Valley. There are two large lakes that offer some very good scenery. We arrived at about sunrise and were able to take advantage of the great light at that time of the day.
This first picture features the Upper Kananaskis Lake, looking toward the southwest. That is Mount Sarrail, catching the first rays of the morning sun. The slight ripple on the lake’s surface precluded a perfect reflection but I do like the effect, nonetheless. The ripples cause an interesting, stippled effect, reflecting highlights which blend nicely with the orange colour reflected from the mountain.
We moved to another location to get this next picture of the Lower Kananaskis Lake. This time I’m facing northeast in the direction of the rising sun which is obscured by the cloud cover. No interesting sunlight, but the cloud patterns are very appealing. You can also see the Elk Range of mountains, bordering the lake on the east side.
Looking to the southeast, the sky colour was quite sombre but the cloud patterns were hard to resist. This next picture also shows the Lower Kananaskis Lake, but it’s all about the clouds!
Before we left the Kananaskis Lakes, we explored the beachfront . The water’s edge of the Upper Lake is littered with driftwood which offers all sorts of interesting photo opportunities. I’m including one of many pieces I photographed, one that I particularly liked. Given the light conditions at this time and the nature of the subject itself, there wasn’t much colour in the image, so I went the rest of the way and converted it to black and white.
The goal here is to capture the texture of the wood and emphasize the shades and highlights. Black and white is the best medium to do that. I used a large aperture, f4.0 to decrease the depth of field, making the background blurry to further highlight the subject.
We moved on from Kananaskis Lakes to some other locations in Kananaskis that morning. I’ll post some photos from those stops in a later blog.
Nice shots, on a somewhat cloudy day. Very nice photo of the driftwood in black and white; light variances well-captured.