Photography

Lone kayaker

/ edebock / 7 Comments

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Richard has had a back problem for most of his adult life. Usually when it flares up, it settles down again within a few days, but whatever he did in early July appears to be something different. After weeks of rest, he’s still in pain. When the doctor recently told him no more golf and no kayaking for the rest of the season (we hadn’t even been out in the kayak yet), I was very unhappy! I felt sorry for him, of course. Being inactive is very difficult for him, but I was also sorry for myself! Perhaps that sounds selfish. Maybe it was. After all, I could have shrugged and said, “There’ll always be other summers”, couldn’t I? Not really. I don’t have that luxury. I’m hoping that there will be many more summers, but when you’re walking around with two cancers that aren’t being treated, you really can’t count on next year. You have to live for the moment.

I could golf on my own, but our kayak is a tandem and there it hung in the garage gathering dust. Then I remembered the other kayak; the one we’ve been storing in the back corner of the garage for our son for the past couple of years! It’s so lightweight that I can carry it myself. I could go kayaking after all!

We spent the past four days camping at Camp Lake, less than an hour from home, and I spent many hours out on the water. Sometimes I paddled vigorously, sometimes slowly, and sometimes I simply lifted the paddles out of the water and listened to the silence of solitude.

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I spent lots of time playing with my camera too. I especially love to capture reflections on water.

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In some places the fall colours were beginning to show.

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One of the things that I love about kayaking is the chance to see wildlife in their natural habitat. I didn’t see any larger animals this time, but there were many places like this one along the water’s edge where they obviously come down to drink.

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One end of the lake in particular is shallow and edged with reeds and that’s where the action was.

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I have no idea how many muskrats make Camp Lake their home, but clearly there are a lot of them! For every photo that I captured, many were missed. Even the ping of my camera turning on was enough to startle them. I learned to cover the speaker with my thumb to muffle the sound as I drifted close to them. I’m not sure who was the most surprised when one furry fellow popped up and swam beside the kayak for a couple of metres! Before I could grab the camera, he noticed me and dove beneath the surface immediately disappearing from sight. It was easier to capture the ones that were out of the water.

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I’m hoping for at least one more lone kayaker outing this year, and I really hope that we’re both well enough to paddle together again next year, but at least this summer didn’t go by without some time on the water.

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Not picture perfect, but real

/ edebock / 2 Comments

LogoOur culture has long bombarded us with unrealistic, unattainable and deeply problematic images of women. Pornography objectifies women and gives men a warped idea of love, sex, and relationship while advertising aimed at women creates poor self-image and leads to unhealthy behaviours including eating disorders. Sadly, social media has followed suit with online lives portraying unrealistic perfection in all walks of life including body image.

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Last week as I sat in my doctor’s waiting room, I picked up a magazine that reminded me of a post I wrote last year about a company that chose to use real women with “imperfect” bodies, women with visible stretch marks and cellulite, as models. The current issue of popular Canadian women’s magazine, Chatelaine, is a swimsuit edition with a difference. Unlike the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, which could legitimately be classified as soft porn, Chatelaine chose to use only unretouched photos of all the women who appeared in the latest issue, including those shown in the swimsuit feature. I admire the seven “Everywoman” models who were willing to be photographed in swimwear knowing that they would appear in print exactly as they really are.

Unfortunately, there are other women who are part of the problem. I realize that many of those who appear in porn are not there by choice. In fact, many of them are the victims of human trafficking, but that’s not true of those, including supermodels and female athletes, who have appeared in Sports Illustrated. When a male athlete appears on the cover, he’s dressed in performance gear, but a female athlete appears scantily clad. Why is that? Simply because, unlike the other issues of the magazine, the Swimsuit Edition isn’t about celebrating sport and it certainly isn’t about honouring women. It’s about making money. Plain and simple. That issue alone accounts for 10% of Sports Illustrated’s overall revenue. One out of every ten dollars comes from people paying to see nearly naked women. Are their bodies beautiful? Of course, they appear to be, but they aren’t genuine. Just like most of what we see in magazines, they’re taken by professional photographers using strategic lighting and filters and then edited to remove every imperfection. That’s why, according to the Dove Project #ShowUs, 70% of women don’t feel represented in the images that they see every day in media and advertising.

I truly appreciate the fashion bloggers that I follow who take their own photos or recruit friends or husbands to act as their photographers and who don’t then retouch the photos before publishing them. I’m committed to doing the same; to being authentic.

So, here are a couple of my own makeup free and totally unretouched swimsuit photos taken at Banff Upper Hot Springs earlier this week on a special outing with our oldest grandson.

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I know I’m pale, but that’s the real me, especially this summer when we’ve had so little sun!

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Back to school week

/ edebock / 4 Comments

I loved seeing all the back to school photos on Facebook earlier this week. Here are three of our littles.

photos: Melaina Graham

The campground attendant at Camp Lake Park near Kinsella, Alberta was happy to take our “what retired teachers do on the first day of school” photo shortly after we arrived there on Tuesday morning!

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We had the campground almost entirely to ourselves and we thoroughly enjoyed the solitude. We spent Tuesday to Friday relaxing, reading, going for walks, and exploring the lake by kayak.

Although the colours of fall aren’t as spectacular here as they are in eastern Canada, I still find them beautiful, especially when they’re reflected on the water.

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While we were out on one of our walks, we came across this critter sunning itself on the grass.

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It barely flinched even when I got up close and personal with my macro lens.

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Thankfully, it was a harmless garter snake, the only kind common to this area!

This little chipmunk was curious enough to stick around while I snapped a quick picture too.

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We saw plenty of wildlife while we were out on the water. The ducks ignored us unless we got too close, but the Canada Geese set up quite a squawk if they spotted our UFO (unidentified floating object) anywhere in their vicinity! The lake was calm on Tuesday and Wednesday, but there was a strong breeze blowing on Thursday so we stayed close to the sheltered edge of the lake and that’s when we saw the most wildlife. The muskrats and beavers didn’t stay still long enough for me to get any pictures, but these three white-tailed deer watched us approach and only started moving toward the bushes when we got quite close.

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Now we’re home and unpacking the trailer as this was the last time we’ll have it out this year. On Monday it goes to Camrose for repairs as a result of the golf ball sized hail that hit while we were camping at Bottrel on August 1st. The insurance adjuster found a bit more damage than we had noticed initially, but thankfully it wasn’t enough to keep us from being able to use it for the rest of the season!

Another photo challenge

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I get very irritated by a lot of stuff that floats around the internet and lands on my Facebook page, especially the “pass it on” posts that are simply a newer version of the age old chain letter. Once in awhile, however, something more interesting comes along.

A couple of years ago, a friend and former student nominated me to take part in a Facebook nature photo challenge which I enjoyed very much. Over the past week, I participated in second photo challenge that was a little more difficult. The idea was to post one black and white photograph every day for seven days and to nominate one other person on each of those days to take up the challenge. The instructions were “Seven black and white photos that describe your life. No humans. No explanations.”

I found the “no humans” part of the exercise more challenging than I would have anticipated, especially given that the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and my “Still alive at 65!” birthday party fell in the middle of it. People and relationships are really what life is all about! I was surrounded by friends and family, but I couldn’t include them in any of the photos.

I also discovered how much colour adds to my life. I rarely convert my photos to black and white. I found that some looked good while others completely lost their impact. For example, here are a couple of photos of the heavily laden Mountain Ash tree in our backyard.

Take away the vibrant green and the brilliant red of the berries and the photos are just plain drab. Needless to say, I didn’t use them in the Facebook photo challenge.

Here are the photos that I did use and since this isn’t part of the challenge, I can even add some explanation!

#1   I love this one… open Bible, laptop, a library book, a steaming cup of green tea, and sunshine streaming through the window. This is where I can typically be found in the morning.

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#2  I love the texture of the grass in this one taken during my last round of golf before the course closed for the season.    

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#3   I spend part of every day in the kitchen where there’s usually a bowl of fruit on the counter and often a fresh loaf of multigrain bread cooling.    

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#4   No, that’s not my house. That’s the view from our front window; the huge, unfinished house across the street. Construction started in the fall of 2008 and almost nothing has been done to it in the past five years or more. The inside is still completely unfinished and no one lives in it.  😦 

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#5   This is the view from our back door with the Mountain Ash on the left. Notice that you really can’t see the berries at all in a black and white photo.    

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#6   When my daughter saw this one, her comment was, “Yes! This is you!” I’m what’s known as an arctophile, a person who collects or is very fond of teddy bears. These are just a few of mine who spend every day sitting on our bed. I’ve had the biggest one since I worked in a toy department one Christmas season while I was a university student in the early 1970s.    

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#7   Travel is very much a part of our life, so this morning our suitcases were packed again!    

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All of these photos were taken with my easy to use Canon point and shoot camera.

Two great hikes in Jasper National Park

/ edebock / 6 Comments

As part of Canada’s 150th anniversary celebration, the country offered free Parks Canada passes to every Canadian and every visitor from around the world who requested one, giving each of us free admission to national parks, national historic sites and national marine conservation areas across the country. We put our pass to good use when we spent a week camping in Jasper and Banff National Parks with our son Matt, daughter-in-law Robin, and grandsons Sam and Nate, who were enjoying their first family vacation in the Beatrice, a newly restored and much loved family heirloom.

Like most mountain parks, both Jasper and Banff abound with hiking trails of varying lengths and degrees of difficulty. While at Jasper, we took advantage of two of these.

Valley of the Five Lakes

We chose this trail on the recommendation of my aunt who has lived in Jasper since 1953 and who continued to hike into her late 80s. The 4.5 km loop, located about 9 km south of Jasper, was an excellent choice. With only 66 m elevation change it was an easy hike for all of us.

The loop takes in all five small lakes, each a different shade of blue or green, but all strikingly beautiful.

First Lake

First Lake

Second Lake

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Second Lake

Third Lake (and in my opinion, the most beautiful)

Third Lake

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Isn’t that just stunning?

Fourth Lake

Fourth Lake

Fifth Lake

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While bears are known to frequent the Five Lakes area, especially in berry season, we saw only this frisky little chipmunk who was happy to pose for a photo.

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Maligne Canyon

With a depth of more than 50 metres at some points, Maligne Canyon is one of the deepest in the Canadian Rockies and certainly one of the most spectacular. For our second hike in the Jasper area, we started at the 5th bridge and hiked up the canyon trail to the teahouse at the upper end.

When I first looked at my photos, I was disappointed. Somehow they just didn’t capture the magnitude of what we’d seen. Then I realized that it was the thunderous sound of the water churning through the deep, rocky canyon that was missing! Use your imagination as you follow us up the trail and try to imagine what it sounded like as the canyon walls narrowed and the rushing water echoed below.

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Where does all that water come from? Located in the Maligne valley, Medicine Lake is formed by the Maligne River. One of the interpretive signs along the hiking trail compares Medicine Lake to a “giant leaky bathtub.” Water from the lake drains into what is thought to be the largest inaccessible cave system in the world and resurfaces downstream through springs along the canyon walls.

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The power of the moving water becomes evident when you look at the shapes of the rocky canyon walls that have been whittled away over eons.

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In some places, rocks and sand swirling around in the turbulent water wear potholes in the canyon floor or walls. Over time, as the canyon wears deeper these potholes, or bowls as we called them, are left above the water level, reminders of a previous time. You can see a pothole still being formed near the centre of this picture.

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Another interesting feature is the chockstone. Chockstones are giant boulders that have become wedged across portions of the canyon which narrows to only two metres at the top in some places. Over time, erosion slowly reduces the size of the chockstones until they eventually tumble to the canyon floor. There is a chockstone with moss and trees growing on it near the top of this photo.

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The promise of dozens of fossils preserved in the rock beneath our feet was an incentive to keep our young grandsons going as we climbed the last portion of the trail which is a bit steep. They became very good at spotting these reminders that this was once a very different looking world and enjoyed making rubbings of several of them.

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Though this hike isn’t a long one, if you go, allow yourself lots of time as there are so many interesting things to see and photos to take!

There are many trails in the canyon area and rather than retracing our steps the entire distance, we took a higher trail from the 4th bridge back to the 5th. Though we were above the canyon walls and further from the thundering water, the views were beautiful.

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Nature photo challenge

/ edebock / 6 Comments

A week ago, a friend and former student of mine nominated me to take part in a Facebook nature photo challenge. The idea was to post one nature or wildlife photograph every day for seven days and to nominate one other person on each of those days to take up the challenge.

I am very much an amateur photographer. In fact if there was a word for less than amateur, that would probably be me, but I love playing with my camera and once in awhile I even manage to take a really great photo. I’m quite certain that that’s because I’m fortunate enough to live in the age of digital photography and cameras that make all the tough choices for me!

Accepting the challenge sent me out into that bright, sunny January morning with my brand new camera in hand. At -5ºC, it was unseasonably warm, and since I live on the edge of a very tiny town, a few minutes of crunching over the newly fallen snow took me to an area where it was easy to snap several nature shots. Next, the challenge sent me searching through my older photos for some of my favourites.

For those of you who aren’t my friends on Facebook, here are my seven selections:

#1   This is my favourite shot from that sunny winter walk. The seeds against the brilliant blue sky hold hope of spring and new life to come. 

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#2   This one was taken on a hike in the hills near Hardisty, Alberta in late September.

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#3   I’ve always said that you can take the girl away from the ocean, but you can’t take the sea salt out of her blood! A series of nature photos from me wouldn’t be complete without at least one ocean scene. This one was taken at Porteau Cove Provincial Park on Howe Sound, just a short drive north of Vancouver, BC.

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#4   This is probably my all time favourite macro photo.

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#5   I love the colours of fall. Though they’re more subdued here on the prairie than in some other parts of Canada, there’s still much beauty to be found at that time of year. This one was taken on a hike near Gwynne, Alberta.

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#6   I wanted to include at least one photo from our international travels in this series, so here’s The Old Man By The Sea on the Pacific island of Saipan.

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#7   Choosing the final picture for this seven day challenge was difficult as there were so many possibilities! I finally chose this one because nature isn’t always beautiful scenery. Sometimes it’s weird & wacky creatures like this mantis that  I also photographed on the island of Saipan!

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All of these photos were taken with easy to use Canon point and shoot cameras.