squamish

Upper Squamish

My friends and I were talking about maybe camping somewhere near Vancouver, one of them mentioned going towards near Upper Squamish. I really wanted to go scout the area before I went camping there, and I saw it was going to be raining a few days later, so I decided to go then. I left home in the morning looking forward to getting some rain, it wasn’t happening. As I got near Squamish I decided to stop at Shannon Falls, which for whatever reason I had never been to in the 10 years since I’ve lived in Vancouver. I know, crazy!! I never realized it was a 2 minute walk from the parking lot to the falls!

It was mostly empty, really quiet also, with all the clouds dampening the sounds, all you could hear were the falls. Most people would get a photo of the entire fall to show scale. But as I looked around, I loved the rock formation near the middle of the falls. I have to say, it did remind me of the Lion King rock. So I decided to make them my main focus, and since they were the focus I only gave a little bit of space for the water, but enough to show the movement, it was a good first photo for the day. I highly recommend a stop here, Everyone reading this has probably been here, but you never know!

After getting a breakfast in Squamish I drove near Alice Lake, and kept going on this single lane road towards who knows where. I was passing by some houses and small farms, and saw these horses hanging out eating some grass and just chilling, like horses do. I had to stop to get a photo of them, I tried being very quiet, but they noticed me very easily. I had my Zeiss 24-70mm at first, but I couldn’t get close enough to them so I went back to the car and grabbed my Tamron 70-150mm F3.5, I love this lens, but I’d love an upgrade to something closer to 100-300mm. The Tamron is from 1980, it has beautiful swirly bokeh, but it lacks in sharpness and zoom, it does have an awesome macro mode, but I’ll talk about this some other time.

I got back to my spot and luckily they were still in the same place, only when I stopped to look, I saw there were a bunch of little birds on the white horse’s back. I tried to use the trees and bushes as a frame for the horses. I wish the white horse had his head facing towards me, but at least I got him to look at me with the corner of his eye. I was expecting to get a few shots of them, but as soon as my shutter clicked, they heard it and bolted away, all birds flew away and I just ended up holding my shutter down to get them running away, but that was my first and last chance to get a photo of them, since they ended up going further away from me and looking the other way. New cameras have silent shutters, but with my original Sony A7 I don’t have that luxury. Another upgrade in the plans.

After losing any other chance of getting photos of the horses, I got back in my car and continued to drive down the road. I actually drove past this green truck, because I didn’t really think I could get a good photo of it. After exploring this other area of Upper Squamish, on my way back home I decided to stop by that truck and try to get a photo of it.

I tried many angles, many compositions, it was really tricky to get something to work, because of the flat lighting that day. After a good 10 minutes walking around the truck I noticed the big side mirror and tried finding a composition with it. I wanted to show the windshield crack and somehow show the back of the truck, I have to admit, I did move the mirror to get the shot I wanted, this was an abandoned truck using the mirror, so I didn’t mind doing that. I went with this horizontal composition, it showed more of the layers in the photo, there are so many things to look at.

The second photo was to show the state of the truck in the wild, with plants and moss growing all over it, it really shows how long that truck has been there, it is now part of nature.

And to close things off, this one was actually taken between when I saw the horses and when I took photos of the truck. After driving for 20 minutes on that single lane road, I reached a point where the road turned into a dirt road. My car isn’t made for that kind of road, but the holes weren’t too big so I decided to go for it. I got to a bridge that went over the Squamish River. The dirt road kept going straight ahead, but I decided to check out what was on the other side of the river. I drove on the other dirt road past the bridge for another 10-15 minutes, and found this spot with a couple of other cars but no people in sight. As I was driving down the second dirt road I saw signs saying I was in Grizzly Country! Good thing I had just bought some bear spray a few days before, so I didn’t have to worry much.

I stopped my car near another section of the river and started walking around to explore. The area was beautiful, the sound of the river was overwhelming any other sounds, that for some reason gave me a small sense that I was being watched because I wasn’t able to hear anything else around me, it was most likely my brain playing tricks on me, after seeing the signs saying I was in grizzly country, and also seeing a camera trap set by animal researchers.

I kept walking along the river anyway, and saw these two tree logs that had fallen from the cliff, most likely from a storm. To my luck there was only one small area that was low enough for me to get the shot I wanted and that area was right in front of the logs. I tried a couple different things here, first I tried a horizontal panorama of that section of the river, trying to show the movement in the water, then I tried a vertical panorama to try and show the scale of the tree logs. Those didn’t work as I planned when I got home and started editing the photos. I had taken a single shot of the logs though, it was this vertical shot of them, I love how the logs fell on those rocks below, it added to the strength of the composition. I thought I’d need to use my ND filter for this shot, to get the movement in the water, but I just ended up going with an aperture of F11 to get everything in focus, and a shutter speed of 1/10th of a second worked really well here, it was enough to show movement but not too long where the water would just become a big blur.

As I said at the start, I came here to scout for a place to camp, yes it is grizzly country, but if you come prepared and know what to do in those situations you will be fine. I’ll definitely be coming back here very soon, and probably explore the areas I didn’t end up going to that day. It is a very close area to Vancouver, very easily accessible in a day trip.

Medley 1 - Britannia Beach/Porteau Cove/East Van/Deep Cove

This will be the first post on the Medley series. The series will be for images that don’t fit well with other photo day stories, or they were the only images taken that day.

The first image was taken at Britannia Beach. That weekend had been very rainy, but the sky started opening up in the late afternoon, there was still a few hours left in the day, so my girlfriend and I decided to head there and try to get a photo of this spot that I had been wanting to get for a while. It’s a pretty easy spot to get to, you can park anywhere near the beach, you will see this abandoned hangar, and if you look around you will see all these old structures in the water near it. Just find your way to the beach and you are gold.

I chose this composition because I wanted to show the snowy mountains on the BG, the clouds and the structures on the FG. I had to find a way to lead your eye from the structure all the way to the mountains, I found this angle that had the main structure right in the FG, including its reflection on the water, and a second smaller structure to be the MG layer. From there the mountain lines all lead to the snowy area with the brightest part of the sun behind the clouds. The scene was beautiful in person, but it was tricky to get what I visualized in my head, in the camera. I decided I needed a 10 stop ND filer, to reduce the specular highlights on the water and to add motion to the clouds. I had to take a 3 min exposure to accomplish that.

I honestly don’t have much to say about this one, the image kind of speaks for itself. On our way back from Britannia Beach Trail, we stopped at Porteau Cove to see the last few minutes of sunset. It was absolutely stunning! I had to grab my camera to take this last photo, the way the mountain was silhouetted in front of those clouds was amazing. This was a 1min exposure to be able to capture the movement of the clouds. I didn’t have to do much on the color grading side of it, it’s just one of those images that you cant get twice.

Let’s jump to another day. It was a rainy Saturday morning, I didn’t have much to do, girlfriend was still asleep, so I grabbed my stuff and the car and started driving around. I drove around the east van area, near Hastings street, I wanted to find some industrial looking buildings and things of that nature. Took a few photos, but nothing worth sharing. On this calm suburban street near PNE were these views towards the ocean and below and the industrial area. I chose this photo because of the way those buildings reflected the light around them, the chrome look really appealed to me, and with the clouds above it gave the scene a very gritty feel.

To close off this medley, I have this photo I took the same day as the one above, but in a different location. After driving around for a bit, I decided to go to Deep Cove, it’s always super nice and quiet there when it rains, not that sunny days aren’t relaxing there, but the rain just helps dampen everything down.

I’ve been trying to get more into minimalist photography, I saw this boat far in the distance, it was all alone in the fog. I used my TAMRON ZOOM MACRO, it’s a really weird vintage lens, 70-150mm F3.5 with a macro range. I can’t say enough good things about this lens, the bokeh is from another world. I wanted a very calm feeling when you looked at this image. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to leave the cable lines in the photo or not, but I decided against removing them in post. For some reason I thought leaving them there added a very weird feeling of not knowing where they were coming from or how far the boat was from land and it added to that serene lonely feel.

Alice Lake

 

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.