Quarry Lake

Last evening, I went with Bob Bear to nearby Quarry Lake to capture some shots of the sunset. Quarry Lake is a recreational area in Canmore and one of its attributes is 360 degrees of splendid scenery. You can point your camera in any direction and find a pleasing subject to photograph.

We spent about 2 hours at the lake and took shots in a number of directions. The following pictures are a few of the many I took and I think they give a good sense of the variety of scenery and light conditions available without moving very far at all. The pictures are in the order I took them.

One of the Three Sisters, Canmore’s landmark.  I was facing eastward and enjoyed the benefit of the sun’s light directly on the scene, just before it dipped behind the Rundle Range to the west. Photographed at roughly 8:15 PM.

A challenging shot because of the extreme contrast between the bright sky and the shadowed mountain range. A nice silhouette of the Rundle Range reflected in Quarry Lake and I was happy to capture the clouds and the colour in the sky. This was taken at 9:00 PM. The sun has not yet set despite disappearing behind these mountains.

Bob spotted these elk grazing behind us atop this rise in the meadow. This shot was taken at 9:12 PM, almost 15 minutes later than the previous one. There is direct sunlight on the opposite side of the valley because the sun has not yet set and is not obscured by any nearby mountains.

A similar shot to the second one. Taken at about 9:30 PM, the sun is lower in the sky, the sky is less bright and the contrast between the sky and mountains is much less. This enabled me to capture the detail of the mountains and the foreground without them being in silhouette. I used a 9 f-stop neutral density filter to blur the clouds and their reflection in the water.

I turned about 90 degrees toward the south for this picture across Quarry Lake. It shows the pass between the East End of Rundle on the right and Ha Ling Peak on the left. The Spray Lakes road traverses this pass and leads southward into Kananaskis Country. The picture was taken at about 9:45 PM, just a little before sunset. Again, I used the 9 f-stop ND filter

By now a familiar scene. I like this one because of the cloud patterns. Taken at 9:48 PM, the bright spots in the sky all but gone as sunset approaches. It did set at 9:59 PM. We had all the different shots we could imagine, so we went home.