I’ve been enjoying the warmer weather lately and, despite the lack of ice to photograph, I’ve enjoyed coming up with compositions of what is available. Being able to go out in a t-shirt is just a bonus.

On June 25th from 6:30 – 8:30pm in St. Albert, I’ll be teaching a composition class. This is open to anyone — whether you only use your cell phone or you regularly haul around multiple SLRs. The class will cover a wide variety of techniques for composition and should be enlightening and fun. Although I mostly show nature photography professionally, I’ll have examples of everything from studio sessions and weddings to wildlife and of course lots of nature as well. So if you want a painless way to drastically improve your photos, come join me! You can sign up at St. Albert Photo Classes. You’ll notice I’m also teaching a “Mastering Your SLR” course, which is very helpful for the technical side of photography, but composition is my favorite subject—learning to compose thoughtfully is an easy way for anyone to set their photos apart.

The photo is a grass curl over a burnt log near Landslide Lake in a forest fire affected area.
90mm, f2.5, 1/1000 of a second

Thursday from 6:00pm – 8:00pm at the Daffodil Gallery

Philip Jagger and I will have a piece on display that we collaborated on over the last month or so. There are a bunch of other collaborations there as well — should be fascinating! Hope to see you there!

And, completely unrelated to Symbiotica, here’s a shot from Vancouver Island last fall.

300mm, f8, 1/250 of a second

I’m making some final tweaks to the slides for the class on Saturday, and I thought I’d take a break to put up a photo and let you know about the Draw for Free Stuff. You’ll get entered if you share the post on facebook, like the St Albert Photo Classes page, or blog about it and post the link there.

So like or share this: St Albert Photo Classes Facebook Page and you could win an 8×10 print or a pendant!

Also, if you want to learn all about photography and how to use your camera (it must have interchangeable lenses for this class) sign up at http://stalbertphotoclasses.com.

The photo is from Jasper. 300mm, f5.6, 1/125 of a second on a tripod.

A burnt log in a mountain forest. Taken in Banff National Park.

100mm, f5.6, 1/1600 of a second

http://stalbertphotoclasses.com

And because you’re probably expecting a photo of one sort or another, I won’t disappoint. Spring is coming, and I can’t wait till all the new greenery appears!

Taken in pouring rain near Abraham Lake. 150mm, f2.8, 1/400 of a second.

From a recent trip to Jasper.

300mm, 1/2000 of a second, f5.6

On my latest trip to the Rockies, Eric and I found some pretty great ice. This is where we found it — under snow.

Ice may not have the same movement as water, but it still causes the light to dance.

A couple weeks ago I posted a shot of icicles forming against the sky – it was a pretty high key shot (composed mostly of light tones). This last week I went back to the same place and caught the same scene from a different angle with very different lighting. Instead of the icicles being backlit by a bright sky, they were front-lit with a dark overhang behind them. With this contrast in lighting it was fairly easy to get lots of detail in the ice while completely getting rid of the small amount of ambient light behind the waterfall.

300mm, f5.6, 1/800 of a second

The ridge around those spruce trees is called a “lateral moraine” and was left behind by the Athabasca Glacier as it receded. I took this photo at the Columbia Ice Fields on a dark and cloudy day. I get the sense that this moraine is protecting the trees — like they’re sitting safe in their own fortress. And then I notice the mountain behind, which, by it’s comparative mass, renders the trees and moraine almost insignificant.

If you’re not interested in lenses, feel free to ignore the next bit. The photo is taken with the Panasonic 100-300 lens on my Olympus OM-D. When I got this lens, I was worried about it not being very sharp. I have looked up many reviews, but a lot of the photos in the reviews had shutter speeds under 1/1000 of a second with image stabilization turned on. It seems to me that this comments on the effectiveness of the IS, but says nothing about how sharp the lens is. Even using the lens on a tripod I find to be questionable because the center of balance is far infront of the tripod. So I ordered a lens collar with a tripod foot from Rudolf Rösch Feinmechanik. It didn’t get here in time for my trip to the mountains, so I don’t have a definitive review on the sharpness of the lens, but my initial impressions are that, while not being razor sharp, it is fairly good. The lens collar itself is beautiful — I’m thoroughly impressed. I will be using it a lot in the next while, and I’ll report back on its effectiveness.

1/4000 of a second, f7.1, 140mm

A very small ice formation I found along the Sunwapta River.

f8, 1/1000 of a second, 90mm