WC Bean Photography

Can the weather ever be too nice? In the wonderful world of photography the answer is unequivocal: YES. Sightseers, picnickers, golfers, all of them revel in nice weather. But clear blue skies and bright sunshine are the bane of a landscape photographer's existence. We long for cloudy skies, partly cloudy to be specific, anything that can lend some atmosphere and interest to the skies in our photos.

Usually when I take a photo trip and spend 4 or 5 days shooting I come back with dozens if not hundreds of images to sort through and post with the essay. On my recent trip to Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada I had to struggle to come up with a dozen images because the midday weather was just too darned nice, limiting most of my shooting to sunrise and sunset when the light is much better. On this trip I did shoot some things outside the magic hours but mostly that was for documentation to remind me that I need to spend a lot more time here. For the most part I didn't even take the camera out of the bag between 8:00 am and 6:30 pm. The sun was simply too bright and the shadows it cast were too dense and contrasty for good photography.

I live in a pretty spectacular part of the world here in Colorado, purple mountains' majesty and all that. Heck, the song America the Beautiful was written about the view from Pikes Peak out across the plains. But I have to tell you, the Canadian Rockies are amazing. They are much steeper than the Colorado Mountains, illustrating the difference in their origins. The Canadian Rockies were created by glaciers advancing and retreating. They are very steep and precipitous with wide flat river valleys at their bases. The Colorado Rockies are much rounder and not so sharply defined, evidence of volcanic activity that created them. Whatever the case, the differences are dramatic. Imagine the Grand Tetons, which are the most dramatic peaks in the US, to the power of 10.

Two of the photos accompanying this journal are of Mount Edith Cavell near Jasper and Mount Robson which is west of Jasper in British Columbia. These are two of my new favorite mountains and I'm eager to have many more opportunities to photograph them in the future. They are two of the most spectacular peaks I've ever seen. Mount Robson is the tallest mountain in Canada and I remember reading that while it's not the tallest in North America, from base to peak it actually has more vertical relief than Mount McKinley in Alaska. Whether that's true or not, it's a damn big hill.

Also included is a composite image of Moraine Lake near Lake Louise in Banff National Park. It's a composite because the thing is just too massive to fit my moderate wied angle lens. When I first saw it on a scouting trip the day before shooting the sunrise there, I thought "this is never going to fit my field of view..it's simply too big." So I knew as I was shooting that there would be some Photoshop work in my future for this image. I composed and exposed the images accordingly and stitched 3 of them together in the computer to make up the image you see. Again, the conditions were less than ideal even at sunrise. I would have given anything for a few clouds in the sky but this time it was not to be.

Mostly what I realized about this trip, though, is that 4 days is just not enough time to photograph this area even if the conditions had been ideal. I saw a few of the things on my shooting list compiled before the trip but there are dozens of things I didn't get to. Conclusion: I gotta go back…SOON.