All My Blogs

View from Mount Norquay in Banff.  Kathryn is sitting in the chair on the right. One of the things I tell people in the photo courses I teach is to take pictures with people in them.  The reason is simple enough - the photos you keep will likely be ones that you care about, and those will have people you know in them.  Having said that, I find that landscapes are best done without people in them as they are more marketable that way. This brings up another important point I discuss in those same classes.  When taking photos, consider the purpose and your goals for them.  Are they for memories, sharing, selling, blogging, or just because?  Each reason has its own criteria that should be considered.  For me, I will often take two photos of landscapes, one without people and one with.  The first is done both because I want to see how good I can do it and the second because it has more personal value. Another thought has to do with operations in post....

Photographed in 2018 with my Nikon D750 and 28-300 mm zoom. I can distinctly remember wanting to visit New Zealand.  I was in my early 20's and the desire was palpable.  I don't remember exactly why I wanted to go there - perhaps it was the unique wildlife or some of the remarkable imagery I came across, but there was no doubt that it would happen - sometime. It would be another 35 years before it came to be.  The pull was always there, but things like money, time, and responsibilities prevented that from happening.  It wasn't until I had retired from teaching, my children were independent, and I had a few dollars saved that the opportunity came.  My wife and I left on a 37 day cruise from Vancouver to New Zealand with multiple stops along the way. I took this photo in Akoara, a small town on the southern island.  There are several things about the image that I love.  The use of framing is one, but I love the mechanism here where two distinctly differe...

The opposite shore is West Kelowna, about a ten minute drive from where I shot this image. Taken the year we moved to the Okanagan, this 2021 image of Okanagan lake from the Kelowna shoreline shows a row of Adirondack chairs sporting a rainbow of colours.  I beefed the saturation up on the chairs a bit and enhanced the sky; other than that the image is as I took it. We have been here in Kelowna now for four years and a bit.  The lifestyle is very different from that which we left in the Lower Mainland.  But, for every downside that we face there seems to be two upsides, and we have been very happy with how things have turned out.  We are only four hours away from Maple Ridge and twice that from our Grandchildren near Edmonton.  I love the fact that we seem to have a very long summer and growing season.  I can plant in late April and harvest in mid October. I photographed this using my Nikon Zfc, a cropped-sensor 20 mp camera.  I also used my 24-70 f/4 ...

I have a thing about chairs, benches, and spectacular vistas.  I have taken a good many photos with this theme.  I am doing a series of blogs on photos I have taken, all of them landscapes, portraying them.  I find such images provide a singular perspective on the beauty of our planet.  I have actually sold a number of them, both as cards and enlargements.   Sometimes I photograph these outdoor furnishings with people sitting in them enjoying the view, the very reason they exist.  The person is often my wife, but sometimes I take them with sojourners who don't mind being photographed in the moment.  Admittedly, I have hundreds of such images, many of them are discards never to be looked upon again, but I have 75 good ones that I keep in my collection. The above photo was recently taken while visiting Waterton National Park in Alberta's southwest corner.  I find that many of Canada's national parks use these red bastions of relaxation as a way...

If you follow my posts, you will know that most of my photography is focused on wildlife, mostly birds and insects.  However, one of my favourite areas of photography is doing landscapes.  I have always been fascinated by geomorphology - the shaping of the earth through weathering, erosion, and tectonic processes.  Red rock canyon in Waterton National Park certainly had that kind of appeal for me.  It was a place that I relished visiting. The rock in Red Rock is red - a moniker fitting for the environment - and is made mostly of very old sedimentary deposits called argillite.  Argillite is basically a type of shale.  Its red and light green colours come from the presence of iron - oxidized in the red form and unoxidized in the green.  Like most sedimentary rock, it was laid down as particulates at the bottom of what used to be a sea until uplift occurred creating what we know today as the Rockies. The bands were once horizontal, flat layers but have be...

Main:  Dot-tailed white faced-dragonfly photographed June, 2025 in Creston, BC. Inset:  Same species photographed July, 2020 near Princeton, BC. One of the amazing things about insects is their ability to spread over great distances.  One species, many locations.  Since most insects can fly they have an inherent ability to change locations.  It may take years, decades, or even centauries, but they often manage to spread past their immediate range.  The limiting factors may be competition, geographic isolation, predation, or difficult environments.   This particular dragonfly, scientific name   Leucorrhinia intac ta , has a broad range across much of the northern US and southern Canada.  They tend to stay near the pond/slow stream where they emerged from, but that's not to say that they never travel.  Some dragonflies, such as the common green skimmer, can travel over 2000 km.  All adult dragonflies need to survive is the a...

Center: a flycatcher I photographed in Creston, BC this summer. Surrounding:  other flycatchers I have photographed over the years. Identifying birds can have its challenges.  There are a few bird families where the novice birder will have difficulties in coming up with a positive identification.  For me, gulls have always been a bane due to the fact that there are so many plumage variations for each species based upon age, season, and hybridization.  Lately though, the issue has been in identifying a particular flycatcher. I photographed the center image this year in early summer in Creston, BC.  I searched my various bird books for an identification and felt comfortable calling it an Alder's flycatcher.  To verify, I posted the image on the Facebook group British Columbia Birds .  The response I got was a good illustration of the challenge in identifying this varied group. My first response was from someone ((S.L.L) who didn't herself know, but thoug...

I photographed this interesting insect in Cypress Hills, Alberta, in July, 2025. Bee flies are a group of insects that are both good and bad, depending on what part of their development is referred to.  The adults visit flowers obtaining nectar and are pollinators.  However, the larvae are considered parasitic as they live in the brood chamber of solitary bees and consume the food stored for the young Hymenopteran.  In the end, the bee fly larvae kills the hosts through predation after the food supply has been exhausted.  They can adversely affect the population of important pollinators. I thought this Dipteran was a tachinid fly due to the hairy abdomen.  I searched for an identification for the insect to no avail.  It wasn't until I uploaded my image to Google Lens that an ID came back, and not for a tachinid as I supposed.  It was identified as a black banded bee fly to my surprise. Both tachinids and bee flies are members of the order Diptera- flie...

  Black-tailed bumble bee -  Bombus melanopygus - On white clover in Leduc, Alberta How do you know a bumble bee if you see one?  Most will tell you it is a large, furry black and yellow bee.  Sometimes there is orange or an orange-red colour at the back.  And most people would be happy enough to leave it at that.  If you want a better guide to identification, where do you go?  I found the perfect place. Bumble Bee Watch  is a website dedicated to the the preservation of bumble bees in North America (Canada and US).  They have a tremendous field guide that allows you to put in specific data regarding the location and colouration of a bumble bee and provides results relative to the data entered.  Click here just to have a quick look at it - and maybe play a little.  I have a screen shot below. Three of 52 different species of bumble bee found at the Bumble Bee Watch field guide site. It is amazing the variation in patterns you find ...

There are 29 species of bumble bee that are endemic to Alberta.  They all belong to the genus Bombus.  This one appears to be Bombus moderatus , the white-tailed bumble bee.  If you look closely at the bee's hind end, you will see that it is distinctly white. These bees do not make large nests, usually having no more than 200 workers.  I photographed this bee in Leduc; they are fairly abundant in the southern half of Alberta and eastward in to Saskatchewan.   Bumble bee workers feed the queen and support the colony.  As the colony grows into late summer and early fall, the workers produce new queens and drones.  It is the workers that determine which larva will become a queen.  They feed it a special diet of honey and royal jelly.  A fertilized egg produces female worker bees and an unfertilized egg will produce a male bee called a drone. The existing hive will die out come winter.  The drones will mate with the young queens who hav...

Piano keys butterfly,  Heliconius melpomene   Fort Lauderdale Butterfly World I have written a series of 8 blogs on how to photograph butterflies.  You can find them at these links: 1.  Where and when to find butterflies. 2.  Orientation of butterflies to get better shots. 3.  Camera, Lens, and exposure choices for photographing butterflies. 4.  How to get close to butterflies without disturbing them. 5.  Butterfly gardens - a great place to photograph butterflies. 6.  Identifying butterflies. 7.  Photographing moths. 8.  Using flash to get better photographs of butterflies. Other recent blogs on butterflies Essex skipper Margined white butterfly Silvery blue butterfly Admiral butterflies Giant atlas moth I have dozens of posts on butterflies dating back many years.  Search for them on my various blog sites. Thanks for looking. Eric Svendsen      www.ericspix.com

Sulphur butterfly photo taken with 70-200 f/2.8 lens, 1.7x teleconverter, and flash. Flash is one of the best ways to improve an image.  It allows you to shoot when the light is poor, it improves contrast and saturation, it removes or reduces shadows significantly, and it can freeze action in some circumstances. Although flash is not needed for many situations, I think you will find that it makes a difference.  To explore this, take two photos, one with flash and one without.  Compare them to verify things.  It may be as simple as turning a flash on, usually a flash requires a few specific considerations for it to work well and improve a shot to its potential.  Below I list some of those issues. Built-in flashes typically are neither strong enough or located high enough above the camera to adequately expose an image.  A long lens and a close subject will mean that the lens actually blocks some of the light producing a lens silhouette.  And even if the ...

Great ash sphynx moth.  Ten lined hawk moth.  Polyphemus moth Elephant hawk moth.  Eyed sphynx moth.  Garden tiger moth. Ok, Ok.  Moths aren't butterflies.  And truthfully, they don't behave like butterflies in a few very important ways.  First of all, they tend to lie with their wings flat against their bodies while butterflies keep them vertical above their bodies.  A lot of this is due to their habits where butterflies are diurnal (during the day) and moths nocturnal (during the night) or even crepuscular (dawn and dusk).  Butterflies keep their wings vertical to help radiate heat while moths keep them pressed against their bodies to help keep heat in.  In both cases it is a form of thermoregulation designed to maintain internal temperatures within an optimal range. Moths also tend to be less conspicuously coloured than butterflies and have patterns and colours to better blend into their surroundings.  They are hard to find durin...

The painted lady butterfly is found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Identifying butterflies can range from very easy to near impossible, and rarely impossible as it ends up being a new species.  Caterpillars can also be identified but tends to be difficult as information on that topic is not always available or reliable.  I intend on sticking with adult identification as this is where I have had success and can make a few relevant suggestions. Field guides are an important source for aiding identification and I have several of them.  Mine tend to be by province (British Columbia) or region (Pacific Northwest), which makes things a bit more difficult if I am out of that area.  Fortunately, many species have a broader range than the limitations of the texts and I find they help even if I am some distance away.  Another issue is that not all species are covered as minor ones may be excluded and there are always the accidentals to contend with....

Giant owl butterfly, Victoria Butterfly Garden, Victoria, BC Butterfly gardens and conservatories are popular tourist attractions and can be found in many cities throughout North America.  In Canada there are four and at least another sixteen in the states.  Then there are the exhibits at zoos.  These are places you can go and walk amongst some of the largest and most beautiful Lepidoptera there are on the planet.  The price is reasonable and there are dozens of species and thousands of butterflies flitting about.  And the best part is that they are used to people - one may even land on you! Some may scoff at the notion of shooting here because you are not in the wild and doing the groundwork required to capture photos of these marvellous creatures.  It's like shooting fish in a barrel, or in this case, butterflies in a room, but isn't that exactly the point?  It is a great place to practice your craft and to play with settings and compositions in real...

Left:  Me with my camera and long lens.  Right:  Western Tiger Swallowtail, 2014, Vancouver Island. Butterflies, like all insects, have two compound eyes, each eye containing thousands of ommatidia, each one ending with a facet at the eye's surface.  Each eye sends a tiny image to the lepidopteran brain and the group of them work together to give the organism some context as to its surroundings.  However, there is no ability to discern objects beyond colour and movement. Although they can see almost completely around them, their perception is limited to motion and colour.  Their colour vision covers a wider gamut than ours does as they can pick up shades of ultraviolet.  Many flowers, appearing white to us, have stunning details when viewed with UV sensitive media.  The colours of many flowers is one of the cues that leads butterflies to the waiting blossoms.  Motion is a different story. Quick motions are picked up immediately, but so are ch...

Queen butterfly in Palm Springs, 2023.  Nikon D7100 with 55-300 mm lens @ 300 mm.   You don't need top end equipment to get good photos of butterflies, and you don't even have to have a lot of knowledge on its settings and use, but it all helps.  Good equipment allows for improved images when cropping or enlarging.  Knowledge of its use improves the chances of getting sharp images devoid of noise, blur, or off-exposures. At the very minimum, I would suggest a DSLR or mirrorless camera as the larger sensors tend to produce better images.  There are those who would say that many a compact or even smartphone camera can create equally good images, and I would agree.  But I have to say that, shot for shot, the former cameras will out perform the latter. Long lenses are a must, but again I have taken a great many good butterfly photos with shorter lenses.  Out of 71 butterfly photos in my "good" collection, 83% were taken with 300 mm (relative) focal le...

Several photos of two fritillary butterfly species I recently photographed. Who doesn't love butterflies?  I have hundreds of butterfly photos.  I have them enlarged in my home, I have sold them, and I love taking them.  Over the years I have developed a bit of a knack for getting good photos - none perfect, but enough to satisfy me.  I also enjoy figuring out the species and reading up on their life habits.  I hope to be able to convey some of what I have learned to you. Butterflies tend to stand with their wings closed, unlike moths that, when grounded, keep their wings pressed flat against their bodies.  This can make it difficult to get a good shot of the upper wing surface.  However, butterflies also use their wings to both gain heat through solar radiation and to lose heat if their body temperatures get too high.  They do this by spreading their wings to let the sun warm them up (basking) or by gently fanning them to allow air currents to co...

Silvery blue butterfly on Common Blanketflower. I love photographing butterflies.  Interesting insects with often spectacular colours and patterns intermingling with equally colourful flowers.  But where are they?  If you live in an urban jungle, or even in the suburbs, chances are that you only ever see the ubiquitous cabbage white.  There are usually better places to go than your backyard or neighbourhood park. Time of year and day also makes a difference.  Butterflies usually pupate in the spring or early summer and mate to lay eggs.  The eggs are laid on plants that the larvae can eat.  The caterpillars feed voraciously and moult 4 or 5 times until they are ready to pupate.  Where the pupae are highly depends on the species as some will burry themselves in the soil before pupating while others will form a chrysalis attached to a branch to wait out the coming winter.  The best time to see the adults after they emerge. The difference betwee...

Essex skipper photographed in Leduc, Alberta. There are about 70 species of skipper across Canada.  Alberta showcases around 48 of them.  A skipper is a Lepidopteran, but is slightly different from both moths and butterflies.  It has a few characteristics common to both such as clubbed antennae and vertically held wings (butterflies) and small head with a shortened body (moths).  Unlike moths though, the skippers do not have a connection between fore and hind wings (called a frenulum - how's that for the word of the day?).  This they have in common with butterflies. I photographed the Esses skipper yesterday in Leduc.  While visiting Cypress Hills, I photographed two other species of the same family.  You can see them below. Two skipper species I photographed in Cypress Hills, Alberta. Most skippers have a pair of hooked antennae as shown in the image below.  I have photographed skippers in the Lower Mainland, Cypress Hills, Leduc, and Edmonton....

Margined wite butterfly taking nectar from thistle flower Normally, at least for my experience, an adult butterfly is going to look a certain way.  However, the margined white species seems to have an odd characteristic.  They tend to look a little different depending upon what time of year they pupate. The summer form, shown above, is the pure white variety.  No spots, no black tips, just white.  In fact, this is the whitist butterfly I have ever seen.  Its like it took a similarly sized sulphur butterfly and bleached the entire thing to be devoid of colour.  In the spring time, should the butterfly emerge then, it has black tips on the forewing.   Another interesting variation is that butterflies from higher elevations tend to be darker.  Humidity also seems to play a bit of a role.  Then, of course, there is the difference between males and females. Males are more likely to be pure white while females tend to have the aforementioned b...

Silvery blue butterfly taking nectar from a Blanketflower. I have seen a lot of butterflies this last week.  Yesterday, I was out photographing butterflies with my long lens and managed to get at least 5 species, possibly more if some of the fritillaries were not the same species.  A sulphur, a few whites, many fritillaries, a blue, and a few skippers.  I have included a photo of the others below. Some of the butterflies I photographed yesterday. Today, out for a walk with my wife on our anniversary (37 years), I saw another 4 species of butterfly I did not see yesterday.  Today it was a police car moth (yes, that's its name), a wood nymph, a mustard white, and another skipper.  This time, though, I didn't have my camera.   If you think that is all a little much, there is no way you can see 10 or so different species of butterfly in just two days, think again.  There are some 310 species of Lepidoptera found in just Alberta alone.  An excelle...

This is the best photo of a yellow-bellied sapsucker I have taken so far. It's always nice seeing a bird with lots of colour.  Often, though, it is just a flash of brilliant hues that are witnessed and then the moment is gone.  Ethereal.  And often enough not everyone in a group can witness the juncture.  It is difficult to appreciate the beauty of nature when it is seldom seen.  This is where having a camera comes in handy. My friends, Ron and Judy in Lloydminster, have an amazing number of birds flying about their farm.  I had been awoken several morning by the sharp burst of sound coming from a woodpecker drumming away at a log or piece of metal.  I have looked for the culprit to no avail and my hosts were similarly stymied.  And then, one afternoon, a flash of colour and the familiar rat-a-tat-tat on pole everything came into place. My camera at the ready, I took two dozen or more photos of the birds.  Yes, birds; there was more than one....