…that I’m a little preoccupied lately? I suppose that might be evident from the blog. I haven’t posted in three weeks! While I’ve had the camera out a bit, it has almost entirely been either for work purposes (teaching photo workshops at my daughter’s school), practical purposes (photographing many of my worldly possessions so I can post them online and sell them), or documentary purposes (photographing graduation and going away parties). I have not shot for fun at all in these past three weeks.

Instead of photography, I’ve been downsizing our household, sorting out plane tickets, and organising movers because we’re moving again. If you’ve followed this blog for a long time, you’d know that we’re a bit nomadic. We’ve lived in several cities in Canada including Ottawa, Fredericton, Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton. We’ve also lived in New Zealand and in Australia. We’ve never tried the same city twice until now. In three days, we’re putting our lives in a shipping container and sending it back down under.

Before we go, we’re going to do a bit of a cross-country tour going as far west as Vancouver and Salt Spring Island and as far east as Ottawa with lots of stops in between. When we’re well and truly exhausted, we’ll board our flight to Melbourne on August 17.

With us flipping our lives upside down this summer, you’re not going to hear from me very often, but hopefully, I’ll have lots of stories and lots of pictures to share once we get settled in late August.

 

Sorry folks, but I’ve been off skiing at Sunshine Village in Banff National Park where they’ve had 9m(!) of snow this year. I even took a break from photography and left my camera at home.

For my first day back from vacation, rather than working on this blog, I worked on a post for Digital Darkroom Techniques (DDT). If you’re curious how I do textures in my images (like the one above), pop on over to DDT for a look. If you have suggestions on how to approach textures differently, I’d love to hear from you.

Since I have no new pictures (did I mention I’ve been skiing without my camera?), I’ve pulled an image from my Salt Spring Island archives to do a little texture work. While the base image is old, the textures are new and I’m sharing if you’re interested. When I was recently in Arizona, we visited the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix. At the MIM, they have an extraordinary collection of drums and I shot almost every one of them for my texture collection. I’ve shared nine of them in my post on DDT just in case you want to add them to your collection.

It’s time I bid farewell to Upper Antelope Canyon. It was good while it lasted, but I think I’ve posted enough (unless, of course, I change my mind and post some more later). Moving on from Page and heading south back toward Phoenix, we take a little turn off Hwy 89 before Flagstaff to check out some pueblos in Wupatki National Monument.

Wupatki National Monument was established to protect ancient dwellings of puebloan people. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll actually post an example of one of these ancient dwellings, but before I do, I wanted to first share this portrait of a desert tree. Something about trees in the desert really work for me. I don’t know if it’s the isolation, the determination, the shape of the branches, or something else, but when I see one, I’m almost immediately lying in the dirt with my camera down low grabbing a shot against the desert sky.

While much of the rim and the lookouts are sealed off with fences to keep the unwary traveller from toppling off the side to experience a rather precipitous drop, there is still much of it that is wide open leaving only common sense between you and the bottom of the canyon. If you take the kiddies to the canyon, make sure you hold their hands!

On arriving at the canyon on Sunday night, we made a brief stop to watch the remains of the sunset. It had been snowing and raining that day and it was now comfortably below freezing. The parking lot and the foot paths were all coated in a thin, shiny, very slippery coat of ice. Over the next day or two, we saw more than one person being carried out on stretchers after they’d slipped and cracked their heads. While the rangers did take care to sand the roads, no one seemed to think to sand the paths! That was especially alarming considering that precipitous drop I mentioned above.

Braving the slippery trails, we made our way carefully to the lookout at Yavapai to take in the view. We were making our way down the very icy stairs when I belatedly noticed that the railing (protecting us from that drop) topped out about three steps down. That is, right at the side of the first couple of steps was a 100 meter drop straight down! I held my kids hands all the tighter as I imagined how easy it would be to slip right off the side.

 

Despite heading south to Arizona for a week’s vacation away from winter, I found snow anyway. It seems that at 7000 feet (average elevation of the south rim of the Grand Canyon), it can get pretty cold in the winter. For the two days we were at the Canyon, the temperatures were exactly the same as they were back here in Edmonton.

I capture this image around sunset at Hopi Point. For sunsets, I really like Hopi Point because you get a great view to the east and west and because there’s lots of room for all the people. With all the room, you don’t have to just stake out a spot at the railing and stay there the whole time. You can move around and get different angles.

For this image, I really wanted this scrubby little bush in the foreground, but there was a sign in the way and two photographers with tripods, one on either side of this sign totally blocking my access. Thankfully, I’m not too concerned about what people think so I got down on my hands and knees and crawled under the sign. I sat on the ground with my tripod splayed out to get down really low. With my camera lens sticking out through the railing I managed this unobstructed view of the canyon.

I think I might be on a reflections theme…

We’re finally enjoying winter here in Edmonton. The cold blast has passed and we’re hovering just below 0C. The camera is sitting quietly on the desk and we’re out having fun in the snow. Yesterday, it was sledding at a local hill. Today, it was downhill skiing. I hope you’re having fun too!

A little fun with reflections.

I was reading a wise post over at FATman Photos today about photographing landscapes and how maybe, just maybe, we didn’t always need to shoot our landscapes tack sharp from front to back. Luckily, I had prepared this image, from Joshua Tree National Park, earlier.

The 789,745 acres of Joshua Tree National Park overlap into two deserts, the Mojave and the Colorado. The Colorado covers the lower elevations to the east with the upper elevations in the Mojave Desert. The park is an easy one-hour drive from Palm Springs. It costs $15/car and that gets you a seven-day pass. With a seven-day pass, you can’t go just once. I managed to drag my family up twice!

While the many, many palm trees that line the streets of Palm Springs are clearly cultivated, these palms occur naturally in Indian Canyons wherever a good source of water can be found. Find a natural spring and the smallest of creeks running down a canyon and you’ll find a line of palms running alongside it.