Cold Smoke Sunburst

With temperatures in the minus 30's the past few days, I have not felt inspired to spend time outside taking pictures. So I shot this one through a window from the comfort of my livingroom. Smoke from my woodstove chimney was condensing in the cold air into thick clouds that sometimes descended and hung wherever the weak air currents wafted them. The mid-winter sun sat low in the sky where it is usually seen through tree branches and this created a wonderful light show whenever it also shone through the smoke. The sun was behind the tree on the left when I saw the first sunburst and it was magnificent so I grabbed my camera, had to change lenses and ... it was gone. Though the air was quite still, the smoke clouds only occasionally sank low in front of the sun, they settled in different locations, they were fleeting and they were constantly morphing and dissipating. I never was able to capture anything comparable to what I first saw and when the sun moved past the tree into direct view I was doubtful that would present any satisfactory photographic opportunity. Then this scene occurred, not quite what I had in mind but I do like the effect.
Pentax K-1, Pentax HD D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6 ED DC WR @ 40mm, f/8

"I like grouse, but the feathers stick in my teeth."

Pentax K-1, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 500mm, 1/800 s @ f/8, ISO 1600

Lip Smacking Goodness

Pentax K-1, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 500mm, 1/1000 s @ f/8, ISO 2500


The grouse had died two days earlier, after it flew into the glass of one of my house’s windows. It was then scavenged by gray jays, a magpie, a raven and a squirrel, and something had dragged the carcass under the low branches of the nearest tree before the lynx came along. I watched the lynx poke at the pile of feathers that remained under the window and then carry on just past the corner of the house. At that point it suddenly stopped and sniffed the air, turned and headed straight under the tree, bringing the carcass back out into the open to consume it where I had a relatively clear view. I shot these photos from my deck. This lynx has been a regular visitor to my yard and probably is somewhat familiarized to me; it did not seem very bothered by my presence as it feasted. The session lasted about a half hour.

Ice on the Mirror

The onset of winter is always a bit of a melancholy time for me, anticipating the long season of sometimes brutal northern weather that lies ahead, knowing I will not see liquid water on this lake again for about seven months. But I also find it rather calming. My autumns are hectic with getting prepared for winter, always too much to do in too little time. Exacerbating the stress, I never know just how much time I have left, as the snow can come to stay without warning anytime from late September to early November. Once that happens, much of what I haven’t gotten done will not get done. But as long as I have completed the essentials by then, I can relax with the satisfaction that I have accomplished what I needed to do and acceptance that I hadn’t achieved all I had hoped. That is the point where I am now. I shot this photo two weeks ago. Since then, enough snow has fallen that it is very unlikely to melt again before spring. But the yard is all cleaned up, everything stowed away. The garden has been fully harvested and cleaned out, the vegetables that can be stored have been properly processed and packed. The freezer is well stocked with wild berries. I haven’t yet converted my ATV from wood cutting mode to snow plowing mode. With snow on the ground, I can’t haul the trailer on the steep trails of the crown land where I get most of my wood, but for now I am still able to pick away at the scattered dead trees on my own 6 hectares. There are a few other things I have yet to do and the inevitable stuff I have to let slide when winter comes too soon. But the pressure is off, I am ready enough for winter and now I can allow myself more leeway to pause and savour the scenery ... and dedicate more time to my photography.
Pentax K-1, Pentax HD D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6 ED DC WR @ 53mm, f/9, ISO 100

Cloud Frowned on the Eclipse

My northern location was well outside the path of totality for the August 21st solar eclipse. With maximum obscuration just under 50%, it wasn’t much of a spectacle to view and even the dimming effect was unnoticeable when drifting cloud cover was constantly changing light levels anyway. But I thought it was worth trying to capture the event with my camera. The cloud threatened to preempt that and it completely obscured the sun for most of the 2 hour duration, though not having a proper solar filter, I would appreciate the filtering effect when thinner clouds let it shine through. That didn’t happen for a significant period around maximum obscuration, but about 20 minutes after maximum I was able to make the exposures for this image. To properly record the extreme brightness range of the scene, including separation of the sun from the immediately adjacent sky to show its eclipsed shape, widely bracketed exposures were required. Three exposures, shot through a 10 stop B+W neutral density filter, were processed in HDR (high dynamic range) software (Photomatix) to produce this result for the sky. I masked in a fourth exposure, made with the filter removed, to optimally reveal the foreground landscape. Though this image shows the scene in a way that I could not see it with my naked eye, it is nevertheless very real. My photographic tools allowed me to experience this phenomenon when my human vision was not capable. Oh, it may be just me, but when I look at this image a certain way I see a frowning face in the clouds, which was my inspiration for the title.
Pentax K-1, Pentax HD D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6 ED DC WR @ 53mm, f/18, ISO 100

A Rose Glows

I produced this image using my camera’s multi-exposure mode. After shooting the wild rose in sharp focus, I threw the lens completely out of focus and progressively tilted the lens downward while adding three more exposures. This placed the pink halo above the flower, with the bright pink dominating over the darker green component in the overall exposure. Decades ago, I used this technique with Kodachrome slide film. It was more challenging back then, with a need to manually calculate exposures and a lack of instant feedback in an LCD to guide me through adjustments to my technique; indeed, by the time the processed film came back and I saw what I got it was too late to re-shoot the subject until next year. And yet, I have to say that I got better out-of-camera results with some of those images than I have been able to achieve so far with digital. In this case, I had to make localized adjustments in post-processing to bring back definition in the rose. While ethereal softness is a virtue of images shot this way, my attempts at this with digital equipment to date have generally come out too soft and mushy. Perhaps I still have to experiment more with my exposures, but I suspect the characteristics of film, especially conrasty film like Kodachrome, may give it an advantage for this purpose by suppressing the contribution of the darker components to the combined exposure. Digital sensors simply record too much information. On the other hand, digital photography does offer great post-processing flexibility that is not possible with slide film development, so I can still produce a satisfying image.
Pentax K-1, Kiron 105mm f/2.8 macro

Eagle and Chick

This eagles’ nest sits in a tree next to the Yukon River, not far outside Whitehorse. The river bank keeps rising higher past the tree, providing a great vantage point from where one can look into the nest. There are actually two eaglets; the other one is just hidden from view in this photo. They were about 3 weeks old when I took the shot on May 30th. The parents take turns sitting on the nest to tend them. I have images with both of the adult birds on the nest at once and many others of them feeding the chicks morsels of a fish they had stowed in the nest. But this one is my favourite, with the warm light after 10 PM and the complementary pose of parent and chick that implies to me a sense of bonding between them.
Pentax K-1, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 500mm, 1/160 sec @ f/8, ISO 800

Goin’ North

These trumpeter swans had just taken off from M’Clintock Bay on Marsh Lake. The appearance of large numbers of swans and other migratory aquatic birds is much celebrated as it heralds the arrival of spring to this part of the world. During their northward migration these birds stage in this location known as Swan Haven, as well as at other places where the ice melts early off shallow water where they can feed on the bottom vegetation.
Pentax K-1, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 310mm, 1/400 sec @ f/10, ISO 400

Trumpeters’ Progression

I multi-exposed 10 times to produce this abstraction of a pair of trumpeter swans as they swam. A cold winter that did not relent until the end of March resulted in there being only this narrow channel of open water. Here, water flows through M’Clintock Bay, which narrows at the north end to become the Yukon River. The previous spring there had been open water right to shore in front of the Swan Haven reception centre, which was quite opportune for photography, but this time the birds were only visible as specks near the opposite side of the bay. It was necessary to walk down to the narrows and out on the ice to get close enough to photograph them.
Pentax K-1, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 500mm, 1/250 sec @ f/9, ISO 400

“This is your brain on drugs.”

Actually, it is a scene from the Aurora Colour War at the annual Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous, held in Whitehorse at the end of February. Participants throw coloured corn starch at one another, in an event that is inspired by India’s Holi Festival of Colours. This year’s Colour War was mostly over within a few minutes of its start, as almost all the packets of colour were dispersed at once. The colours blended into a dense off-white fog that engulfed the mob. After that, there was just an occasional flurry of activity when someone would find a full packet that had been dropped in the scuffle and they would let it fly. I managed to capture one of these occurrences with fortuitous timing in this image.
Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 128mm, 1/200 sec @ f/11, ISO 400

Winter Hues

It has been a generally cold winter in the southern Yukon, though broken up by a few very mild spells. When a stretch of frigid weather began to moderate in early January, I was anxious to get out on my snowshoes and shoot some photos. Conditions didn’t look particularly auspicious for good photography but I wanted to do some testing with my Sigma 150-500mm lens, particularly at the long end of the zoom range, so I set out with that big lens mounted on the K-1. I was pleasantly surprised when the oblique rays of the mid-winter sun snuck under the low cloud to bathe this mountainside with their orangy glow, and the shaded foreground fulfilled the complement of warm and cool hues. Loving how the long lens brought the scene up close, I shot a couple of different compositions without moving it off the 500mm setting. I ended up stitching two images in Lightroom to produce this panorama.
Pentax K-1, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 500mm, f/7.1, ISO 800

Winter Woods Waltz

This stand of aspen trees near my home is a favourite photographic subject of mine. It sits as a narrow band at the base of a grassy hillside, where I can shoot down at it with the dark spruce forest providing a contrasting, largely distraction free background. Perfect for the abstraction technique I used here, making a multiple exposure (10 exposures) while panning vertically. I photographed this last November, when the grasses still stood tall above an unseasonably shallow snow cover. The sun had set and the deepening dusk produced suitably even lighting and a black backdrop of the forest in deep shadow.
Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 98mm, 1/25 sec @ f/5, ISO 3200

Exposed from the Shadows

One last Feature Photo to finally put my prolific month of September 2016 into the rear view mirror. I captured this one closer to home, at the Yukon Wildlife Preserve just outside Whitehorse. This lynx was lying at the edge of its enclosure, hiding stealthily in the shadows under dense vegetation as is their nature, when the sun moved to a position where a beam shone through to spotlight the creature. I had to shoot through a chainlink fence and tried several positions before I found a clear path through the undergrowth. The cat commenced a low growl as I finished lining up the composition but it stayed put until I made my exposure and moved back to review the image. It then got up and slinked off into the interior of the large enclosure, so this was my only exposure, but I got the shot I wanted.
Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 250mm, 1/500 sec @ f/4, ISO 200

A Fish By the Tail

Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM, 1/320 s @ f/6.3, ISO 1000

“You’re in my Space!”

Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM, 1/250 s @ f/6.3, ISO 1000


The Chilkoot River is a very short waterway that drains from Chilkoot Lake into salt water at Lutak Inlet about 2 kms away. It is a rich salmon stream, so of course it attracts bears. That is a big concern for park rangers, with the campground located adjacently on the lake and the location heavily used by fishermen, tourists and Haines locals alike. This sow (top photo) with a pair of two year old cubs has been habituating the area for some time apparently. They clearly are very accustomed to the hordes of spectators that crowd disturbingly close to them and mama seems too preoccupied with fishing to pay much notice. But the cub in the lower photo reacted with a threatening glare when an overly daring videographer pushed his luck with a recklessly close approach. I shot this image as the videographer retreated. Somehow, I barely noticed that the bear had turned its gaze on me, perhaps because the menacing quality seemed to have left its expression. Though the separation felt very uncomfortably small, my distance from the bears still was enough that, with the 250mm reach of my lens, I had to crop these images heavily to frame them as you see here. The K-1’s high resolution and high pixel quality came through for me while my Sigma 150-500mm was off at the distributor for a mount replacement.

Chilkoot Forest

Trees grow tall and straight in the lush coastal forest. I aimed to represent that in this image I shot in the Chilkoot state park campground near Haines. Under the forest canopy on a dull, drizzly day, I did not need a neutral density filter to achieve a slow enough shutter speed to produce some vertical motion blur and create the somewhat impressionistic image that I wanted.
Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 140mm, 1.3 sec @ f/11, ISO 100

Reclaimed by the Forest

Beached, broken and abandoned boats are common sights along the coastal coves. So is lush vegetation in this wet, temperate environment. This thriving thicket of saplings appears to be consuming the cracked and weathered hull that seems to have been left to rot and feed the new forest.
Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 60mm, f/10

Crags Over the Chilkat

Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 80mm, f/9

Craggy Peaks

Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 250mm, f/9


This is the view across the Chilkat River, just before entering the town of Haines, Alaska. Once again, unsettled weather enhanced the photographic appeal of the scene, though such conditions are quite typical of the coastal mountains. It was a gift that the layers and wisps of cloud worked into this composition as they did, but the alpine scenery was largely obscured for much of the rest of our visit to the area.

Showers at Dezadeash

Dezadeash Lake is a bit further down the Haines Road from Kathleen Lake. At its south end we encountered the first of the unsettled weather that would come to dominate the rest of this trip. But unsettled weather can create beauty in a landscape and, in a case like this, be a photographer’s dream. I merged two images to create this panorama.
Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 153mm, f/11

Kathleen and the Waves

Kathleen Lake lies at the eastern edge of Kluane Park, south of the village of Haines Junction. It is not a particularly large body of water but whitecaps are a common sight on it. On windy days this is likely the most tempestuous place around, as katabatic winds descending from the ice fields to the west are funneled by the lay of the land onto the lake. On this day, it was blowing hard enough to make walking difficult. I shot this last mid-September near the start of a second trip I took with my visiting friends, this time just heading for a couple of days’ stay at Haines, Alaska, one of my favourite area destinations. Yes, it is January as I post it and I am anxious to move on to newer stuff, but I haven't quite finished working through all my photos from that prolific month of September.
Pentax K-1, Pentax HD D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6 ED DC WR @ 63mm, 1/125 sec @ f/11