Officially. I celebrated the longest day of the year by rising early and going out for a morning of photography. I was accompanied by Bob Bear and our destination for today was Glenbow Provincial Park, near Cochrane, AB. The park is east of the mountains and can best be described as prairie grasslands. It has some forested areas but is primarily rolling hills and verdant fields as far as the eye can see.
I begin with this wide angle view, facing west. In the distance you can see the Rockies if you look carefully. I used a wide angle lens for this shot, so the mountains don’t really stand out given the distance. As you can see, it was a beautiful day, a great way to usher in the summer.
I turned a little further to my right to capture this next scene of the fence line, extending to and over the crest of the hill. That’s the Yodel trail, leading back to the Park Headquarters.
Earlier, we traveled the Tiger Lily Loop, in search of wildflowers. Along the way we passed through a nice, wooded area with the sun breaking through, creating some interesting highlights and shadows.
We were ultimately looking for wildflowers and we had chosen the Tiger Lily Loop as a good prospect for finding them. We did succeed and the first flower we found was a lily. As it turns out, the lovely orange lilies often seen here are in fact Western Wood Lilies, not Tiger Lilies. Here they are:
We found several other wildflowers in the same area and I’ve chosen to share mine with the following slideshow.
For those interested in the technique I used for the floral close-ups, here’s what I did. I used a long lens, a 70-200 mm telephoto, with a 1.4x teleconverter, effectively increasing the magnification to 98-280 mm. I also used three extension tubes (no glass) which enabled me to move in much more closely to the subject flowers to get more intimate close-ups. Without the extenders, the lens will not focus at a distance of less than 1.4 metres (4.5 ft). With the extenders, I was ably to focus easily at a distance of 0.5 meter (~20 inches). These pictures were all taken with focal lengths varying between 190 and 245 mm, from a distance of 0.5 meter.