One of the core inspirations for this site, something I (surprisingly) haven’t written much about in the last few months since launching it, is photography. In fact, arguably, one of the reasons I paid for hosting on this site rather than taking the approach I’ve taken with other sites of self-hosting on a home server, is that I wanted the larger bandwidth of a hosting package to post more photos. (I avoid that on my other sites so that I don’t overwhelm my home connection!)
Of course, insert pandemic lifestyle changes here… and I haven’t taken many photos lately. In fact, when I pulled my camera out to prepare it for the short (local…ish) vacation we took last weekend, I still had pics from last summer’s European trip to remove, a small repair to one of the dials to make, and the camera clock was still set to whatever timezone Dublin is in.
Needless to say, I dusted the dSLR off and took it to the mountains for a long-long weekend vacation.
I’ll post a small handful of pictures over the coming days, themed into collections, starting with this small set from part of a day-trip we took from the hotel-base.
Our trip was set in the mountain resort area around Kananaskis. The lake pictured is actually a dam reservoir, and many of the lakes in this area are … well … the result of human intervention that took place a generation or two ago. I used to visit this place as a kid, and it hasn’t changed much since the early 90s. So, despite our changed societal appreciation for reshaping the landscape of these beautiful mountain parks and how we think of that today, years ago that was not the sentiment. It is what it is, and now they are protected areas with abundant beauty and wildlife.
These photos, unedited from my camera, were snapped at a picnic stop along a 60km gravel back-road route connecting Peter Lougheed Park with the town of Canmore. A little roadside stop, a two minute hike, and a beautiful day. The reflection on the water was nearly perfect and the colour and symmetry that I was able to capture was only spoiled by the fact I didn’t bring a tripod and was manually levelling my camera through the viewfinder against a jagged horizon line.
One of these pics is also now the desktop wallpaper on my iPad.