I woke up early that morning with plans to take sunrise photos at Tantalus Lookout on the Sea to Sky Highway. On my drive there, I went past Squamish and saw this sign saying Alice Lake, since I had been to Tantalus Lookout a few times, I decided to change my plans and check out this Alice Lake.
When I got there, there was a film crew just packing up, probably from a TV show or movie. Nobody else was there at that time, I started walking along the lake shore, it was absolutely beautiful with the fog slowly moving on top of the lake and trees over the mountains. Just before the trail head I saw this small log sitting by the shore, I thought that would be a great foreground subject for this photo. Sadly I didn’t have much luck with the clouds, and the sky was a bit bare, but it’s almost impossible for blue hour to not be stunning. I found this angle that would show the stillness of the water with the leaves and log in the foreground, and the mist going over the lake just added to the effect.
After the first photo a couple of people started showing up at the lake, so I started walking along the trail that went further around the lake. I thought I’d be able to get some nice photos of trees in the fog and maybe possibly a photo with a river, but to my surprise all I could see were all the different types of mushrooms all along the trail and up the mountain. This one below was the first one I saw, I wanted to make this photo look very dreamy, so I decided to use my vintage Canon FD 85mm F1.8.
From here on, I started to go up the mountain and like I said before, but all I could see were all these awesome mushrooms!!
So here is the thing, yes I had my camera, yes I had about 3 or 4 lenses in my backpack, I had all kinds of filters and things like that, but the trail was so beautiful and quiet, and I could not stop finding new and different mushrooms, so instead of taking my gear out every 50 steps to take a photo of a mushroom, I decided that it was good enough to get those photos with my phone. Don’t be afraid of using your phone once in a while! It’s a great tool for situations like these, it will be much faster and it will allow you to enjoy the trail a lot more, without any frustration of setting up equipment. Below you can see just a few of the different kinds of mushrooms I found here, this is definitely a place I look forward to going back to.
When I got to the top of the trail, I did find this really cool tree with all this moss drooping from it. It was still mostly in shade when I got there, but I wanted to get a photo anyway, It was really tricky to find a good composition for it, specially because of that broken off trunk on the left side, everything just felt too busy. Luckily a little bit of light started to hit the top of the tree, that helped with the separation of the tree and the background. I think this photo could be improved, but for the amount of light I had available, I think it’s a pretty good result.