works of wanderlust

Category: photography

  • Glacial Stares

    Sometimes things just click.

    Sometimes you need to do a hike up the side of a mountain to an interesting place, lay on the bare ground and get the moment just right for things to work out how you want.

    Describe the best picture
    you took in 2021.

    We had booked a week in the mountains during the lull in the pandemic, checking into a hotel we wouldn’t have sprung for if the borders had been wider open and tourists were filling them for higher prices than we were paying.

    We spent our days exploring, day trips mostly, driving from short hike trailhead to short hike trailhead, snacking in the car on the way between and keeping the dog calm on one of her first (of many) family adventures.

    Mount Edith Cavell is a short drive from Jasper, Alberta, and for the price of forty five minutes of hiking up a steep-ish but well-worn stoney trail one can sit beside a glacial lake in August and overlook the remains of the Angel Glacier and her various small bergs afloat in the freezing cold water.

    We did just that.

    And among the small crowds of other tourists we found a quiet spot to sit and look out at the view and admire the natural beauty of this place, pausing for a moment in the (then) nearly year-and-a-half long frustration epic that had been lockdown.

    I did what every good father and camera guy should do. I laid down on the rocky beach and tried to get at least one epic photo of my family.

    A photo from this short series, one where my daughter’s face is far more identifiable in the shot that would be suitable for a public blog, is the picture we sent out on the front of our Christmas card this year. It seemed appropriate and poignant and pretty much summed up the mood of our year.

  • How to be a Photographer.

    Three dSLRs

    Four GoPro action cams.

    Two tripods.

    One flash.

    Nine lenses.

    A fistful of memory cards.

    Drawers packed with gadgets, clips, hooks, meters, caps, filters, batteries, microfibre cloths, and a random assortment of other camera accessories.

    And in 2021 I took a lot of photos like this… on my iPhone.

    What do you wish
    you’d done more of
    this past year?

    There was a time I would have told you that my dream job was being a photographer. I worked to make money so that I could buy camera equipment and travel.

    Heck, when I was a teenager I built my own camera. I exposed a roll of film, brought it to the local photo store, told the guys what I had done and that I wasn’t sure how the photos would turn out. They developed the roll for free and gave me some advice for my next attempt. It seemed for a moment that I was on some kind of destiny course to be the guy behind the lens.

    It didn’t work out that way.

    But I’ve clung to the dream and … well until this past couple years … spent my life filling hard drives with experimental photos, adventure pics, travel images, and family portraits.

    … until this past couple years.

    Yup.

    Until this past couple years, when I stopped traveling, focused on some other creative projects, and rarely left the neighbourhood save to do masked expeditions to the grocery store or socially distanced runs with my cohort.

    I wish this past year had been a bit different. I wish it had been different in that I neither had an excuse to stick so close to home nor had the inclination to allow myself to stop carrying a camera with me everywhere.

  • Fall Colours

    During my exhausting trail half marathon this past weekend I may have tired myself out good and proper, but I managed to keep enough mental focus to nab some photos of my adventures through the autumn foliage.

    Of course when one is running an epic wilderness race carrying proper camera equipment is out of the question.

    I did have my smartphone, tho.

    And when opportunity permitted I tugged it from the side pocket of my hydration vest and paused for a moment to nab some photos.

    Enjoy.

  • Picture Perfect

    The nice thing about scaling back on my posting commitments for a couple months is that I’ve been able to comb through the site I’ve built this past year and tweak what’s here, refine how it’s displayed or add completely new things.

    An orange hazy sun sets over a river.

    Most of this is “under the hood” so to speak, but regular readers may notice a few minor changes I’ve made to castironguy.ca over the last week or so.

    One of the big things is photo galleries.

    I hastily added a photo gallery plugin at the end of June as a means to do some light updates to the site in between my sporadic summer posting schedule. If you haven’t seen that I’ve been updating a Summer 2021 gallery of random photos a few times per week.

    I’ve been fascinated by online photo sharing for a long time now. Fascinated? Well, intrigued and captured by the potential of sharing a medium that I love in a fluid and barrier-free way, I guess would be the better explanation.

    For years, in fact, I maintained an online gallery that had thousands of photos grouped into hundreds of albums, ranging the gamut from kid-pics to be shared with the family, all the way through to a kind of semi-professional portfolio of my better, high quality images. The effort got dated, of course, content and software-wise. It was lightly hacked. I took it down, archived it and never tried to replace it.

    I did replace it with social media, I guess. Over the last couple years I’ve been active on Instagram sharing photos to various curated accounts, one private for people I know IRL and a couple public themed accounts for everyone else. Yet, social media has lately become something of a tangled mess of paywalls and advertising and fake content and frustrations, so I’ve leaned away from that and other platforms in recent months and chosen to put more effort into private website content like this site.

    So having added that gallery plugin I’ve been getting some photos into it, deciding how I want it to look and act, and posting some updated collections. It makes me excited to have a place to post more photos again. Stay tuned.

  • Backyard: Macro Photography

    Being all-but-stuck in my own backyard for the better part of two weeks during a health crisis has provided me with ample time to enjoy my own small bit of nature.

    It has also reminded me —what with the bumble bees, wasps, ants, ladybugs, butterflies, spiders, flies, and so on — that there is a lot of critter life to be found in a couple hundred square meters of suburban backyard.

    Photographing backyard bugs was one of the big — ahem, small — reasons I bought myself a macro lens a decade back and really got into taking pictures of little fauna crawling around the variety of flora I’d nurtured.

    As of this afternoon the blossoms are just appearing on the trees and the population of dandelions seems to be doubling daily. The sky might be a bit cloudy, but that doesn’t seem to have much sway on the action of the various insects crawling and flying around me little backyard workspace.

    Capturing photos of those critters takes a particular set of skills.

    Right Gear

    Macro photography is more than a purpose-built lens. A macro lens is a great addition to any photographer’s kit bag, but that alone won’t get you awesome insect snaps. Setting up a shot that is in focus in in the narrow confines of a shallow depth of field on a subject that is measured in millimeters means the stability that comes from a tripod and the light enhanced by a source or reflector will do wonders for the final results.

    Good Timing

    Back in University I took a laundry list of coursework in both botany and entomology. All that study of plants and bugs certainly didn’t hurt my backyard photography skills, but I’d be hard pressed to say how it helped. Figuring out when the flower are open at their peak and picking the right moment on the right day to encounter the kinds of insects worth photographing is still as much luck as it is skill. It’s a good idea to keep your camera charged up as spring warms up and summer approaches, though.

    Long Patience

    Anyone who has ever said photographing puppies and babies is the hardest gig obviously has never tried to get a really nice photo of a butterfly. I’ve found that there are really just two approaches to taking macro photo of an insect in the wild: chase, click and hope for the best, or set up your gear, focus, and wait. I’ve lucked out with the first method, but I’ve taken some amazing pics with the latter. It does mean sitting in the grass with your finger on the shutter for the better part of an afternoon, but I’m sure the instagram likes were worth it.