Cameron Lake, Waterton National Park

Cameron Lake Canoes - June 26, 2025

It was a cold day in Waterton.  The wind gave the chill added bite, and if that wasn't enough reason to cover up, the mosquitos added incentive.  We had packed a lunch, the four of us, and were hoping for a warm sunny day at the lake.  It was not to be.  Undeterred, we walked the paths and enjoyed the scenery that the mountain vista had to offer.  The lake, a remnant of a glacier, 

Like the more famous Lake Louise, Cameron Lake is a cirque.  During the last ice age (which ended ~15,000 years ago), falling snow piled up to great heights. Mounting pressure from the above pack turned the underlying snow into ice.  Like water, ice flows downhill, albeit slowly.  Under pressure, it becomes plastic and deforms.  It picks up rocks as it erodes the bedrock, scouring the landscape as it moves.  This is called abrasion.  Ice water underneath the glacier fills in gaps and refreezes.  As the glacier moves forward, it tears out sections of rock in a process known as plucking.  Between the plucking and abrasion, enormous amounts of material are eroded away from the substrate leaving a large pocket.  With moraine formation damming the exit at the end of the ice age and meltwater filling the void, a large glacial lake was formed.

I quite like the above shot; I used an ultrawide zoom lens set at 14 mm on a full-frame camera to get the shot.  The valley sides produce a framing effect and the canoes and docks act as pointers towards the far mountain.  I removed some of the people along the pier to make it more about the scene and less about who was there.

All my photos are taken in raw file mode to extract as much detail as possible from shadows and highlights.  The exposure was f/10 at 1/200th of a second, ISO 200.  I focused past the canoes but not too far past in order to get the depth of field I needed (hyper focal focusing).  Most of my exposures are done in manual exposure mode; I alter shutter speed, aperture, and ISO depending on the situation and use matrix metering combined with live histograms to determine the desired values.  This method has served me well for many years.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com 

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