The picture above was taken on Grande-Allée in Quebec City during the 2017 Quebec City Carnival. I used a full-frame Canon 5DSR camera equipped with a Canon 14mm f/2.8 L wide-angle lens. There was enough light to be able to set the focus on « automatic ». I had to slightly correct the exposure to improve the visibility of the blue light reflecting on the sidewalk.
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The Quebec Islamic community has just lost six of its members. I want to offer them my sincere condolances as a Quebecer from Quebec City and as a Canadian.
It is hard for me to realize that in my city, which is so beautiful and peaceful, such a tragedy can happen. But all the citizens who have lived the same tragedy in their city tell themselves the same thing. Talk about it to the French or the Berliners. Quebec is not different.
The Quebec City mayor, Régis Labeaume, was recently mentioning how good the statistics were in Quebec when it came to violent acts : there had been only one homicide in twenty-one months. And now, in full Quebec Carnival period, at a time where the City invites its citizens and tourists to get out and be together enjoying the winter season, one Quebecer attacks his peaceful compatriots.
The word « terrorism »
I do not know why exactly but it seems that the Sainte-Foy, January 29th 2017 murders that have just been commited will be classified as a « terrorist » act. Possibly because it targeted a specific community that has a different religion than the shooter. Or because the act is aimed at terrorizing people. Or both.
The word « terrorism » is popular. In United States, the Donald Trump government has just closed its boundaries to selected countries, in case a potential « terrorist » would arrive in USA.
It is easy to forget that there are American citizens already living in United States that are even more dangerous, those who kill tens of thousands of Americans yearly with all kinds of guns that they have the right to possess according to a Constitution that did not anticipate the consequences.
In spite of the blooshed that includes tens of children in schools, it is not « terrorism » so there are no drastic actions taken. Politicians talk and hesitate for weeks after a tragedy and then everything comes back to normal. The « terrorist » murder has obviously a much stronger social impact than any other murder. And it allows to disregard the widespread « laisser-faire » when it comes to the right of everybody in United States to acquire almost whatever he desires when it comes to guns and to use them at will. But if you come from Irak, now that’s dangerous!
A few nice Quebec City photos
I take the opportunity to post a few nice pictures of Quebec City, as I did for France after the terrorist acts. They have been taken with a Canon 5DSR. This is another way of saying to local citizens and tourists that Québec, as for Paris, Nice or Berlin, is a beautiful city, normally very peaceful and filled with happy people. And that we are not going to be told how to behave or think by the most violent and often mentally fragile individuals of our societies.
Night photography is not always planned and the photo above, taken late in the evening, was certainly not one I would have been able to take when I started as a photographer.
There was a superb sunset on the strait of Georgia, in British Columbia, and I had taken multiple pictures until late in the evening with my Canon 5DSR full-frame camera. The photography session was almost over.
Once I decided that it was time to pack-up for the night, I heard a flock of Canada Geese. They were flying in formation over the mountains to the west and were heading north in the darkness. In order to photograph those fast moving birds in the remaining light, drastically different settings would have to be made on the camera, and this, very rapidly.
The camera was equipped with a Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS II USM telephoto lens mounted on a tripod and facing west. It was on manual focus, the stabilizer was inactive and the ISO setting was very low. A ND graduated filter was already mounted on an adapter which was installed on the lens.
That meant dismantling the camera from the tripod, activating the automatic focus as well as the stabilizer, increasing the ISO, removing the ND graduated filter, limiting the aperture to insure sufficient shutter speed, composing the photo and taking few rapid shots before the geese were too far away.
Few seconds later, those birds and the landscape were becoming another souvenir of a beautiful summer holiday spent in British Columbia.
For more articles in the category « Photos of Canada », click on the following link : Photos of Canada
Photographers know that the most interesting hours of the day are either early in the morning or late at night, but before nighttime. These periods are ideal for subtle colors and very atmospheric shots.
The Vancouver Island coast offers absolutely everything to attract many categories of photographers: the wildlife, the mist over water bodies in the morning or late at night and the mountains that are visible almost everywhere.
Travelling through British Columbia, I noticed the great number of merchant navy vessels passing through the Juan de Fuca Strait. But to try to photograph them during daytime would only have given average pictures. Waking up early to get the right picture is never easy, but it always gives interesting results.
The only problem with regards to ship photography is that the latter often navigate quite far from the photographer, thus becoming tiny uninteresting dots on a picture. However, the Canon 5DSR camera and its 50.6 megapixels full-frame sensor solve that problem: new experiments are then possible
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The scenery above was shot from a beach in Victoria, very early in the morning. It was mandatory to ensure of the total immobility of the camera since some serious cropping would be needed later on in order to significantly enlarge the ship. The slightest vibration would have been amplified through enlargment and the picture would have been useless.
Here is the method that was used: the ISO was set on 250, the tripod planted on the beach (but not in the soft sand part where the tripod could have moved a little during the photo session). Moreover, the remote trigger was used, as well as the mirror lock-up function. In order to achieve an optimal focus, the latter was done manually using Liveview with a 16X enlargment.
A Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS II USM telephoto lens was installed on the camera, with a 200mm focal setting. A ND graduated filter was installed to compensate for the rising sun’s brighter light behind the mountains. Being early on the beach also allowed for a minimal wind speed, limiting even more any tripod vibrations. I tried several shots and decided to keep the one with a bird in the scenery, so as to add a touch of life to the scenery.
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For more articles in the category « Photos of Canada », click on the following link : Photos of Canada
The German Christmas market is back again this year in Quebec City, for the ninth consecutive year. The market is located near the City Hall and the activity is an initiative of the German community of Quebec. European German Christmas markets have existed for centuries and have kept virtually the same formula throughout the years.
Amateur of delicacies and handicrafts always find something interesting when stopping by the sixty little wooden houses located in the City Hall’s gardens.
My family and I always stop for an evening meal at the heated chalet where we find an excellent white beer and many choices of meals. The site is ideal for photography enthousiasts and the thousands of multicolored lights add a very special atmosphere. If you visit the market when there is a snow shower, this will add even more interest to your pictures.
The photos shown here have been taken with a Canon 5DSR full-frame camera equipped with a Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM fixed lens, which allowed me to walk around the site without carrying a tripod.
I would like to offer my condolances to the German people with regards to the terrible challenge they went through in December 2016 when many citizens visiting the Berlin Christmas market were killed or hurt by a madman from Daesh.
For other photos on the province of Quebec and also Quebec City, click on the following links from my blog:
The picture above was taken in December 2016 at Cap-au-Diable, in Quebec City, with a Canon 5DSR full-frame camera equipped with a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L US telephoto lens. A polarizing filter was not really needed here due to the soft light and the sun being in line with the lens. The exposure was still corrected by +1/3.
At this time of the year, the temperature is not too cold for the photographer’s bare hands and the light intensity is ideal throughout the day. The temperature hovering around 0 °C favors wet snow showers. This snow lightly sticks to the tree branches and, as long as the wind does not increase too much, it is possible to take interesting winter pictures. But it is necessary to act quickly
For the photo above, I was able to profit from a St-Lawrence Seaway that was still unfrozen, which allowed to capture the winter sun reflection. I had to proceed rapidly since there were clouds moving from the west, visible to the right of the picture. One minute later, the sun and its reflection were no longer visible.
The photos below were taken during in the same park.
For other photos on the province of Quebec and also Quebec City, click on the following links from my blog:
The photo above portrays a Beaver floatplane belonging to Harbour Air. It is seen here a few minutes after its take-off from the Vancouver Harbour floatplane base in British Columbia. The picture was taken with a Canon 5DSR full-frame camera equipped with a Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS II USM telephoto lens.
The aircraft, quite small in the photo, could have been enlarged using the Canon 5DSR’ s 50 megapixel full-frame sensor. The image would still have been of excellent quality but I would have lost the effect I was initially looking for.
As opposed to what seems obvious at first sight, the scenery was not captured sitting in another plane but from the ground, while I was standing near the Harbour Air seaplane base. The morning’s constant precipitation saturated the air with moisture and helped create a low level cloud base.
An image editing software was then used to crop the scene. I used a non standard photo format to show the kind of flight the pilot was dealing with, between two cloud layers and with a mountain range on his right. It seems to me that a photographer does not have to feel obliged to follow an arbitrary format if the latter has a negative impact on the intended result.
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This picture of a crow in flight over the Georgia Strait in British Columbia was taken with a Canon 5DSR full-frame camera. The aperture was set around 4.0. This allowed for a faster shutter speed. A reasonable ISO setting also kept the digital noise to a minimum.
In order to increase my chances of getting a precise photo of the crow, and to ensure that the background was blurred to limit distractions, I decided to follow as much as possible the exact speed of the bird with the camera. This is always risky as one can lose unique photo opportunities. But when it works, the picture is always interesting.
A significant cropping was then necessary to increase the size of the crow in the photo but this had no negative impact on the image’s quality since the initial ISO setting was quite low and I had access to the Canon 5DSR’s 50 megapixel full-frame sensor. Such a huge number of megapixels makes it easier when comes the time to enlarge pictures.
A bit of patience was necessary in order to capture an interesting subject but the wait was worth it. The specimen above landed about fifty feet from me on a Parksville beach. It started to look for small pieces of wood and, when satisfied of its finding, took-off for its nest.
For more articles in the category « Photos of Canada », click on the following link : Photos of Canada
The Air Canada Terminal installations at the Toronto Lester B. Pearson international airport are such that a voyager intending to do a flight from Toronto to Quebec has to walk outside the building to catch his plane. This has some advantages, especially when it is an evening flight and there is, at the time of boarding, a superb sunset.
But to directly photograph the sunset colors without any filter or tripod, while hand holding the camera, is a recipe for disaster. And a photographer cannot stay immobile for very long in that restricted area where security agents and passengers walking towards the DHC-8-400 demand that everyone move with the flow.
A practical method that offers very good results is to indirectly photograph the beautiful sunset colors by using the aircraft as a reflector.
First, it is better to use a camera lens that requires very little light. This will limit the grain size while allowing a shutter speed that is high enough to avoid a blurred picture. The scenery was thus captured with a Canon 5DSR full-frame camera equipped with a Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens.
Secondly, the photographer must crop the photography using an image editing software so that all useless details are absent from the final shot. There are two objectives: 1) it is obviously necessary to keep the aircraft parts that will best show the sunset colors and 2) do the best possible use of the elements presenting graphic interests for the viewer.
If I had kept only several oversized windows in order to show the superb sunset colours, there would have been only clear bright colours, without contrasts. That would have given an uninteresting photo. The advantages of protecting the shadowy top of the aircraft are that it adds a strong luminosity contrast, allows the inclusion of the Q-400 diagonal lines (1-2-3-4-5) and a reflection of the reflections themselves (6) under the aircraft’s wing. All this is highlighted in the photo below.
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The Queen Mary 2 comes twice a year in the Quebec Harbour during the autumn. It obviously always attracts a lot of onlookers. The vessel carries 2620 passengers who are prompt to visit Old Quebec upon arrival.
In order to take a picture of this superb ship and the architecture of Old Quebec’s houses, it was worth waiting until evening, when the colours were more subtle. I could have chosen to do a close-up of the Queen Mary 2, but by doing so the photo would have lost some of its dynamism since the quartier Petit-Champlain’s alleys and its pedestrians would have been absent from the scene.
There is only a small portion of the sky visible in the picture and this is voluntarily since it does not present any interesting details, especially when compared with the rest of the scenery. The front of the Queen Mary 2 has wilfully been located in the superior right corner of the photo since it is toward this part of the image that the eye ends its initial inspection.
There were quite a number of viewers installed on the Dufferin Terrace, most with a portable camera, trying to capture the scene. All those onlookers and photographers constantly moving on the wooden terrace were nevertheless creating vibrations: a tripod, usually the perfect tool to prevent any shaking of the camera, was only useful here providing that there was a shorter exposure time. The ISO had to be increased accordingly to respect the shorter exposure and avoid a blurred picture at low speed.
Still, the photo taken with a Canon 5DSR full-frame camera successfully portrays the mood in Old Quebec on that evening of autumn 2016.
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For other photos on the province of Quebec and also Quebec City, click on the following links from my blog: