This year I have searched for new sites to capture autumn colours. I drove by Val-Bélair and stopped by a house that looked abandoned. The colour of the chair and the yellow background allowed me to compose my first shot.
Multicolored trees near Val-Bélair.
There are superb trees between Val-Bélair and L’ Ancienne-Lorette. The picture above represents only a section of the forest.
Val-Bélair in Autumn.
Val-Bélair is a region with both agricultural and city life. It was natural to compose a picture that would include a car and a tractor. The colored leaves are used as a natural frame around the vehicles. The Canon 5DSR full frame camera’s aperture was adjusted to have only the middle ground in focus.
Traditional house with flowers in Victoria, British Columbia.
The houses and buildings of Victoria and Vancouver are really stylish and deserve some attention. The nice Victoria weather allows for the rapid growth of the vegetation and the house owners generally try to have flowers in front of their property. Oak Bay and Uplands are two sectors where a visitor is sure to find very interesting houses.
A modern house in Victoria, British Columbia.
During wintertime, the grass is green in Victoria. During summertime, it is yellow unless watered daily. The microclimate is due to the proximity of the Olympic Mountains. The air that slopes down the east side of the mountains warms up and dries, favoring a more stable weather than in the rest of Canada.
Old buildings of Vancouver.
Condominiums in the highrise towers of Vancouver.
The picture above shows the view that an Airbnb rental can afford. In fact, it was the view from our room on a recent trip to Vancouver.
A Harbour Air floatplane is rapidly approaching the Victoria Clipper in the Victoria harbour.
Arriving and departing floatplanes in Victoria Harbour must deal daily with ships that cross their path on landing and take-off. The staff on the Victoria Clipper is so used to this kind of traffic that it does not look in the direction of the incoming aircraft!
This young man found a quiet spot on the St-Jean Gate in Old Quebec. On the other side of the wall, at Place d’Youville, a band plays during the Quebec Summer Festival.
The container ship Hapag_Lloyd Quebec Express and the container ship MSC Paola are sailing around Île d’Orléans near Quebec City.
Those two container ships that sailed near Quebec City in July 2019 reminded me of recent news regarding the Port of Quebec‘s installations and the will to receive always bigger container ships.
To take the picture, I waited that the Quebec Express had completed his turn west of Île d’Orléans. From that moment, the photographic distance between the two container ships started to diminish. The MSC Paola’s bow became an artificial frame that included part of the Quebec Express.
This photo was taken near the Quebec City Townhall in Old Quebec with a handheld Canon 5DSR full frame camera equipped with a Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM lens.
Ephemeral creations are part of the constantly changing portrait of Old Quebec. The public art installations are visible only for a few weeks at a time. The photography lover must stroll through numerous areas of the city in order to find and immortalize an installation before it definitely disappears!
An outside exhibition presenting metal office furniture installed in a glass cage allowed me to show Montreal under an unusual angle. The picture was then digitally treated to give it the desired look.
The main subject, in the picture above, can either be the Canada Goose or the bright psychedelic pattern of colours surrounding the bird.
Moments before three geese swam near Victoria’s Fishermen’s Wharf, in British Columbia, the multicolored houses built along the piers were perfectly reflected in the water.
As the geese swam through the reflections, waves and patterns of multiple colours were suddenly created. I chose to take a picture of the last Canada Goose as she benefitted the most from the interesting shapes and colours in the water.
The very bright colours were due to the paint chosen for the houses as well as the direct sunrays striking the houses since the sun that was approching the horizon. The goose is positioned according to the rule of thirds, but this is never mandatory. The small waves in the lower left quadrant gradually lead the eye to the main subject.
A view of Château Lac Louise and the surrounding mountains.
The picture above shows Château Lake Louise and, in the background, Mount Richardson. Lake Louise is in Alberta but only a few kilometers from British Columbia.
This picture was taken during summer 2018 while several forest fires were raging in western Canada. Luckily for us, the smoke had not yet reached Lake Louise when the picture was taken. A few days later, the visibilty worsened and the air quality in the area degraded considerably.
At the time of the picture, the sky was cloudy and I had to wait for the sky to clear in order for more intense sunrays to light part of Château Lake Louise. This provided a greater contrast between the hotel and the mountains in the background.
I thought it was appropriate to keep the canoe with its passengers to add dynamism to the scenery. The photographic composition was planned so as to include the reflection of the bright part of the hotel on the lake.
In order to make an acceptable picture at this time of the day while sitting in a canoe, I used a Canon EF85mm f/1.2L II USM lens mounted on a Canon 5DSR camera. The outstanding performance of the lens in low light allowed me to keep the ISO at 200, thus limiting the photographic grain.
The shutter speed was adjusted to 1/5000 to compensate for the movement of my canoe and the effect of the wind. It seemed to me that for this particular landscape picture, a 16 x 9 format was better suited than the traditional 3X2 associated with full frame sensors.
Click on the following links for other pictures of Quebec and Canada on my blog.
