NC State Calendar

In my last blog entry, I mentioned that two of my shots would be in the NC State CVM Behavior Club Calendar. The contest had about 300 submissions, and 20 shots were included. The images for the calendar are now available online, and some of them are extremely good shots (none of those being mine).

I don't like to toot my own horn, but...

TOOT TOOT!!!

I just got word that two of my pictures were chosen for the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine animal calendar (don't tell my dog Riley that his portrait was the one submission that didn't make the cut). Granted, rumors are that they did not have as many submissions this year as in years past, but even so, I'm flattered and encouraged that somebody who knows something about photography liked my shots.

Both shots have already been posted here before, but I'll go ahead and repost them.

Bow River

My opportunities for photography remain few and far between, so here's another one from the archives. This was one the first pictures I took in Banff. We were on the Bow River Parkway, and the picture offers a view of the road's namesake. The only reason this shot is a keeper is the train track. Artisitically, I think that tracks make nice leading lines, but sentimentally, I also like it because we were certainly very aware of the rail traffic in the park. Another interesting feature of the shot is the Bow River itself. The river has the opaque greenish hue of glacial melt.

Meeting my quota

It's been a month since I've been able to get out to photograph anything, which has led to a disappointing stretch of inactivity on this site. While I'm hopeful that I might have time for photography next weekend, I'm less certain whether I'll be able to get anywhere worth photographing. As a result, for now, I'm left to put up a C+ image from our Canada trip.

I took this shot at Emerald Lake in British Columbia's Yoho National Park. It's actually the second shot I've posted from that hike, with the first coming back in July. If the canoe in the foreground had been about a quarter mile closer, it could've been a really nice shot.

Flowers revisisted

When this blog was still in its infancy, I posted what remains one of my favorite shots, a picture of a bee on a flower. About a week ago, as I was going through some old shots, I came across a similar shot, shown here. It's the same flowers, just without the bee. While the bee certainly added something to the shot, the flowers alone were fun to photograph.

Canadian Sky

I took this shot in Jasper, Alberta. The clouds there were beautifully backlit.

One Final Shot from Moraine Lake

I think that this shot concludes the slideshow of our trip to Canada. Because Moraine Lake was the most impressive spot we visited, I thought I'd conclude with this one- it's a little overexposure away from being my favorite shot of the trip. There are also handful of additional photographs that I didn't post here but that are available on our website.

I start medical school tomorrow, and as a result, I suspect that my entries on this blog are likely to become much more sporadic. I have a lot of hobbies, and it's about to become hard to find time for all of them. Even if it requires me to post old shots, I'll try to get something up at least on the 1st and the 15th of each month.

Cheers,

N

Wildlife in the Canadian Rockies II

I took this shot as Stephanie and I were driving down the Bow River Parkway on our way out of the Canadian Rockies. As you can see from the picture, the rack on this elk was incredible.

Ideally, I would've taken a shot in which the elk had it's head raised. However, in Banff and Jasper, park rangers are really trying to crack down on tourists stopping along the side of the road in order to photograph nearby wildlife. There are legitimate concerns about it being unsafe for the animal and the tourist alike.

Just prior to encountering this beautiful animal, Stephanie and I had stopped at a park office to get a reimbursement for an overcharge on our park entry. To get that reimbursement, we'd been required to turn in our pass, which meant that we could no longer drive on any park roads, meaning that we'd have to take the equivalent on the interstate highway immediately out of the park. Disregarding that regulation, we decided to take the Bow River Parkway (officially only open to pass-carrying tourists) out of the park. Midjourney, we encountered this elk, and I stopped to photograph it. Almost immediately, a park ranger arrived to encourage us to get along our way. Normally, I would've stayed long enough to get another shot or two, hopefully capturing an image with the elk's head raised. However, knowing that we weren't even supposed to be on that road any longer, I decided to get back into the car before she could realize I wasn't supposed to be there... and before I could get the shot that I really wanted.