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Alberta badlands - glaciers, erratics, erosion and hoodoos

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Cap rocks lead to hoodoo formations - but where do the cap rocks come from? Alberta was once the site of a large inland sea (click here for an image).  Over millennia, suspended particles in the water settled to the bottom to form the thick clay deposits found in the interior of the province.  Uplifting through plate tectonics eventually drove the water away, but not before the fine silt caused many a dead prehistoric creature to be entombed and eventually fossilized.  Alberta is a rich source of remarkable fossils, many of which are on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. The flattened, raised seabed would support millions of years of soil development and grasslands that would eventually give rise to the prairies.  A period of cooling led to the development of glaciers that tore through the Canadian Rockies and carried enormous quantities of gravel, rocks, and boulders across the plains.  When the glaciers melted, the rock burden was deposited as ...
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A study in colour - Part 8 -White balance and skin tone

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Small changes in tone/colour produce significant variations in skin tone. Getting the right white balance is important when photographing people.  Small changes in white balance affect skin tones significantly.  There are two standard places where you can correct white balance:  In the camera directly or by editing the photo afterwards.   Picking white balance in camera - your camera comes with a white balance control that is accessed from a button on the camera and/or through a menu.  When shooting jpeg or heif images, the best plan is to set the white balance first before shooting.  It is reasonably easy to do, although if you have never done it before it may take a bit of playing.  You can either white balance from a photo stored on the memory card or you can white balance directly at a scene by taking a photo.   The trick here is to have something truly neutral.  It should be white, black, or grey, and have no hint of any shade...
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Red tailed hawks - Geese are on the menu.

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Red tailed hawk at Munson Pond, Jan 31, 2026. I walked around Kelowna's Munson Pond yesterday.  I found over a dozen feather piles from the carcasses of dispatched geese or maybe ducks on my walkabout.  Clearly, something was catching and eating the birds. I saw two red-tailed hawks, one at a distance (photo below) and one that perched atop a nearby tree (above).  I used a APS-C sensor camera with a 1.4x teleconverter and my 500 mm f/5.6 len, which gave me the equivalent of a little over 1000 mm of focal length.  You can see from the detail on the head (right panel) that I was relatively close - in fact the bird almost filled the frame in my viewfinder. I suspect that the geese may have been too large to haul off to a favoured perch to consume, so it would have been plucked and eaten on the ground.  I did not find much in the way of remains other than feathers, although there was a femur or humerus present that must have been from a goose at one of the sites....
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A study in colour - Part 7 - The colour wheel in photography and white balance

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The three primary colours (RGB) and secondary colours (CMY) make up the colour wheel. The colour wheel in photography involves all the colours you can make with the three primary colours red, green, and blue (RGB).  There is an excellent image showing the relationship between the primary and the secondary colours (YMC) here . If you look at the image above, you can see the colour cast I added to the surrounding images.  Opposite colours are diagonally located (green and magenta are opposites).  Combining two of the primary colours produces a secondary colour.  For example, if you combine red and blue, you get magenta.  The same is true for red and green (yellow) and green and blue (cyan).  If you subtract opposite colours, you get the opposing colour (if you subtract cyan, you get red).  Adding opposite colours cancels them out and produces white (gray). I used the colour wheel all the time when printing photos in the lab I worked in.  Altering th...
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Black swan - a native of Australia

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Photographed in Hobart, Australia, October, 2018. Here, in Canada, we see trumpeter swans, tundra swans, and the invasive mute swan.  Black swans may be kept for exotic purposes, but there are no actively breeding populations at the moment.  Some were released in Ottawa in 1967 as a gift from Queen Elizabeth II, but that population has reduced significantly and the remaining individuals moved to a Safari park in Quebec. They are native to Australia; we saw dozens of them while visiting Hobart as part of our cruise.  They live up to 40 years of age in captivity, making it to only a third of that age in the wild.  Large individuals may weigh as much as 19 pounds, larger than even the biggest bald eagle.   Like all swans, they are monogamous and mate for life.  They both care for the young that are precocial at birth and become independent around the age of nine months.  They become sexually mature at two to three years of age. Swans are remarkable b...
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Canyon Falls & Crawford Falls in Kelowna - Closed forever?

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It looked like it was going to be a wonderful day hiking to the falls.  But then ... It turns out that the trail for Canyon Falls is closed, at least from this end. I was very much looking forward to hiking the trail down to Canyon and Crawford Falls.  I had read about them, seen numerous reviews and photos on them, and was enjoying the 8° C weather that had finally come our way at the end of January, 2026.  The view at the top of the canyon was terrific, there was lots of parking, and there was no rain in the forecast.  This was going to be fun. We saw the sign for the trailhead - it's always appreciated finding a clear marker for where you are or are going.  The anticipation grew; my camera was ready and our dog was relishing a hike with his humans.  All was well, until we descended a little further along the trail.  Then reality hit.   The trail was closed. I talked to some local people who said that some just ignored the warning, jumped t...
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Mill Creek Falls - Super cool - literally.

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I photographed the falls at Mill Creek near Kelowna on January 28, 2026.  We know that water freezes at 0° C.  But it is possible for water to exist in a liquid state when the temperature falls below the freezing point.  Liquid water below 0° C is supercooled and has some very interesting properties. Supercooled water occurs because of the lack of nucleation sites in the liquid.  Generally, this requires pretty clean water with little suspended solids.  You may see this when freezing purified water in your freezer at home - there is a video here showing the effect.  When disturbed, or if nucleation sites become available, the water will instantly freeze. Another form of supercooled water is called frazil ice.  Fast-moving water can become supercooled and form tiny needle-shaped crystals.  Frazil ice can attach to cold rock or an icy surface and become part of the frozen mass.  Waterfalls can build up a substantial layer of ice when supercoole...
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