Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Botany Bay

Still working my way through the images we shot on our trip to the west coast of Vancouver Island, but here's one from our first morning, at Botany Bay near Port Renfrew.

Botany Bay

Monday, October 12, 2015

Terrace Beach Sunset

The view from our cabin on Terrace Beach in Ucluelet, looking out over the secluded beach where we were married back in 2002.  A very magical place...


Terrace Beach Sunset, Ucluelet

This image was taken with a Sony A7R II camera, with an adapted Canon EF 16-35mm f4L IS lens.  This is a single image, shot hand-held, and the shadows were opened up by increasing the exposure in Adobe Lightroom.  The dynamic range of the Sony camera is quite remarkable, as is the sharpness of the Canon lens.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

California Quail

While we were home visiting my Mom last weekend, she was having some large trees on the property cut down.  We spent a day cutting up one of the large pines, and piling up all of the limbs to be hauled away.  Early the next morning, we found a family of California quail (an introduced species in southern BC) had moved in and made the pile of limbs their new home.

The longest lens I had with my was my 70-300mm f4-5.6L IS, but it did a nice job capturing this male standing guard on top of the brush pile.

California Quail (Callipepla californica)

California Quail (Callipepla californica)

California Quail (Callipepla californica)

California Quail (Callipepla californica)

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Summer Solstice at the Majorville Medicine Wheel

Time for another "better late than never" blog post, with one of my favourite subjects... the Majorville Medicine Wheel, this time at the summer solstice.  Trust me, it's much easier getting to this location in the summertime.


Majorville Medicine Wheel, June 2015
The weather was fairly cooperative this year, with no clouds to obstruct our view of the sunset (although I was hoping for a slightly more interesting sky but I guess you can't have it both ways...)

Sunset on the Summer Solstice, Majorville Medicine Wheel
There were a number of other visitors to the site this year, most of who said they had heard about the site thanks to the article in the August 2012 edition of Alberta Views magazine, which featured a number of my photos.  In years past, we'e always had this hilltop all to ourselves.

Watching the Sunset, Majorville Medicine Wheel

These images were captured with the remarkable new Canon EOS 5DsR, the world's highest-resolution 35mm DSLR camera.  Although it's not apparent in these heavily-compressed and downsized web images, the amount of detail this camera captures is simply staggering.  Here's a crop from the last image above:

(cropped from image above)

Mushroom Season on the West Coast

When the rains arrive in the autumn, mushroom season erupts on the west coast and Vancouver Island.  The following is a collection of my rec...