All My Blogs

Female goldeneye duck on Knox Mountain Pond in Kelowna - the ice is starting to melt. There is a pond about 2 km away from where I live.  It is on Knox Mountain; there is a modest gain in elevation when walking there.  It is usually frozen over at this time of year, but with the warm, snowless winter we have had, what little ice there is has begun to disappear. It hasn't been exactly warm.  It was 5° C in the afternoon today, on the 7th of February; it hasn't been below zero for a few weeks.  The odd thing is that it has been freezing back east - Lake Erie has almost completely frozen over.  Not that I am complaining.  It has been nice to go walking without studs attached to the bottom of my boots. Even though spring seems to be in the air, there is little evidence of it regarding migrating birds.  goldeneye ducks and mallards have been overwintering here by the bucketful.  They have been staying along the creeks and rivers here, but are starting ...

Different species of lichen growing on fence boards. One of the strangest relationships on the planet Earth exists between an alga and a fungus.  Together they exhibit obligate mutualism - a form of symbiosis where each partner of the relationship has to be together to survive. There are some 15,000 to 20,000 species of lichen across the planet.  The word species is a bit odd in this circumstance as there are actually 2 distinct species making up the single entity.  For the most part, the fungus is a unicellular variety belonging to the Ascomycetes, the same group that yeast belongs to.  The photosynthetic component of the equation often is a form of green algae, although it may also be a member of the cyanobacteria. Both forms benefit from the presence of the other.  The fungus receives sugars from photosynthesis done by the algal component.  The fungal component provides moisture, other nutrients, and protection for the algae.   Although lichens...

The night sky photographed near Sunshine Valley, BC.  17 min 4 sec exposure. Polaris, also known as the North Star, sits atop the imaginary axis around 450 light years away.  You can see Polaris from almost any place in the Northern Hemisphere at night (without cloud cover or bright city lighting).  I photographed the star field on June 15, which was less than a week away from the Earth's Summer solstice.  The angle of the star in the sky changes as the Earth revolves around the sun due to the tilt in the Earth's axis. Diagram explaining why Polaris is also called the North Star.   Anywhere you stand in the Northern Hemisphere, you can see the North Star.  Finding it, if you are unfamiliar with the trick, is to use the two end ladle stars of the bit dipper and follow them in a line until you come to it.  There is a great website here that shows you how to find Polaris and how the stars around it seem to rotate from one's perspective on the Earth. ...

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 ...

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...

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....