A great way to add color to your holiday photos in big cities is to use store decorations. On this street in Old Quebec, a shopkeeper installed a small shrub filled with tiny white and purple lights.
You simply position your camera through the lights, taking care to focus on the main subject. By limiting the aperture of the camera, you get a decorative blur effect in the foreground.
You don’t need digital processing software to add color to photos. Use existing merchant setups!
End of December 2022. It’s hot in Quebec City. The city was first swept by a storm that left hundreds of thousands of Quebecers without power, some for more than a week. A heat wave then swept through the province of Quebec for several days.
One positive aspect of this warm air is that it melted the thick layer of ice and snow that had accumulated on the roofs of homes during the December 23 storm, resetting the clock for the remaining portion of the winter to come.
But when it comes to winter sports, it’s a different story. One had to walk around town on the last day of 2022 to see the changes in just a few days.
Passing by the public skating rink maintained by the municipality on the Battlefields Park, I took this picture that sums up the situation: a warm rain falling on the snow and accelerating the melting to the point where a thick fog sets in, puddles of water several centimeters thick covering a layer of ice.
I use this water to add the reflections of the skaters in the photographic composition. Fortunately for them, the sportsmen benefit from a mechanically cooled ice rink to continue practicing their favorite activity.
I took this picture of the houses in Old Quebec one day before the great storm of December 23, 2022 that left hundreds of thousands of Quebecers without electricity. At the time the picture was taken, the winds were already blowing pretty hard and the windchill factor was around -20C. The tripod had to be held securely to avoid unnecessary vibrations.
The scene captured during the “blue hour” consists of three photos superimposed in order to obtain an HDR result .
As I finished the shoot, I saw a young couple walking up the snowy slope in the foreground in the photo above. The young man approached me and asked me to make a video of the proposal he was about to make to his girlfriend on his cell phone. She didn’t know anything about it.
He got down on one knee, proposed and she said yes. Then came the ring, the kisses and hugs. Without gloves to hold the cell phone for several minutes, I was hoping for the most concise ceremony possible. A few moments later, half frozen, he came back to get his cell phone. Everything had gone as he had planned. You never know what to expect when you go out for a photo shoot!
There are only a few leaves left in the trees of this clearing in Quebec City, but the scene retains all its charm. The broken tree cuts the landscape diagonally and guides the eye to the center of the photo where a small pond reflects part of the blue sky.
For me, this peaceful place represents the opposite of what we keep seeing as a standardized representation of autumn, without losing interest.
HDR photo of the Château Frontenac and surroundings at dusk 2022
Here is a view at dusk of the Château Frontenac and the surroundings of Old Québec. Even before taking a first shot, you can anticipate that the illuminated tower of the castle will distort the reading of the camera sensor, because it is much brighter than the surroundings.
To correct this frequent error in advance, it is best to look for an HDR (High Dynamic Range) effect by taking five photos with complementary apertures which will then be compiled in an appropriate software.
The most important challenge for this night photography photo was however to avoid taking pictures of too many tourists walking in the foreground. When they are in five close-up photos, people form what are called “ghost images“. You see them in duplicate or triplicate, half decomposed. They are useful when comes the time to add special effects, but this is not the case in the scene above.
The Fall colors are particularly intense in Quebec towards the end of the first week of October. Rather than sticking to pure landscape photography by framing only the trees and mountains, one can choose to include in the foreground the result of the work of one or more people. Far from distracting, the addition of people or objects related to everyday activities often increases the interest of a photo.
In the photo above, an apple grower from Île d’Orléans is spreading out his harvest.
Cyclists turning for côte Gilmour in Quebec City in 2022
An interesting vantage point to photograph the Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec is at the intersection of Grande-Allée and the avenue leading to the famous Gilmour hill. The cyclists are riding at high speed and must brake hard before making a sharp left turn to begin the descent to the portion that will take them along the St. Lawrence River. There are no obstructions for the photographer at this point.
2022 Quebec City Grand Prix Cycliste
To capture the effect of the cyclists’ movement, the shutter speed must not be set too fast, preferably between 1/125 and 1/160. Otherwise, everything looks immobile, even the wheel spokes.
Quebec City Grand Prix Cycliste in 2022
Positioning yourself immediately after the curve allows you to capture a long line of bicycles. You can focus on the cyclists on the right in the viewfinder and leave the line of cyclists around the curve out of focus. To do this, make sure that the chosen aperture will blur the background. It is also important to follow the movement of the cyclists with the camera. If you stand still, all the riders will be out of focus, as the shutter speed is too slow for the high speed of these riders.
Cyclists racing on Grande-Allée in Quebec City 2022
An occasional close-up obtained through cropping allows us to see details that we would otherwise miss. In the case of the photo above, it is clear that not only is the rider in the front relaxed, but he has also recently crashed, with his right arm still in recovery. Sometimes we also see the result of deformities in the knees of cyclists following numerous surgeries.
Quebec City Grand Prix Cycliste 2022
The cyclists want to maintain their position in this tightly packed group that must maneuver in a small space. With a telephoto lens, one can see the facial expressions change as they approach the turn for the Gilmour hill. Note the concentration on the faces of the cyclists in the foreground…
Grand Prix Cycliste in Quebec City in 2022
Following moving cyclists with a camera remains a difficult art to master. Several pictures are taken before a successful one is achieved. Fortunately, film photography is behind us and we don’t worry as much about missed shots. The important thing is to have fun and try to get a little better with each photo session!
Fontaine de Tourny and the Quebec National Assembly building.
The fontaine de Tourny and the parliament building in Quebec City are often photographed separately. This can give very good results. However, the visual impact can be increased by combining the two architectural styles in close proximity in the same photo.
By paying attention to the photographic composition, I sought a balance while creating a tension between the two works. In the scene above, the fountain and the Parliament building appear to be of similar height. The vertical axis of the center of the Parliament tower is about the same distance from the right side of the photo as the vertical axis of the fountain is from the left side. This is close to the rule of thirds, but not dogmatically so. Both works are deliberately framed tightly.
Other elements contribute to the interest of the scene. First of all, each architectural work has a specific color that is well marked and luckily the colors are almost complementary. Still on the subject of color, I chose to take the photo during the “blue hour”, that time of day just before dark when a very soft light illuminates the landscape for a few more minutes.
Finally, the water jets and the people in the background add a little dynamism to an essentially static subject.
Saint-Nicolas is full of quality blueberry fields. While the family is having fun picking the delicious berries, I take the opportunity to do a little photography and try to create something other than a traditional photo of a blueberry plant. The right light and a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM macro lens are a good start to maximize the chances of success.
Arriving at the time of the season when the blueberries are not all mature makes it possible to capture several colors. The next step is to choose a plant with healthy flowers and fruit, because in macro photography a damaged plant is magnified several times and the defects become distracting.
Finally, it is necessary to take several pictures with different apertures. We must find the right balance. A bush with too much detail may become conventional, while too many blurred areas lose interest because the eye does not know where and what to look at.
On his knees he could have carried on more box in the grocery store.
The deliveryman above avoids unnecessary trips by carrying a stack of boxes so high that he can barely fit through the door of the St-Olivier grocery store in the St-Jean-Baptiste neighborhood in Quebec City. He could have added another box to the pile, but he would have had to enter the establishment on his knees. We don’t ask for that much…
Scenes like this feed street photography, which requires the photographer to be ready to capture ephemeral situations. The time allowed to camera settings is reduced to a minimum. Sometimes a photo is taken without looking through the viewfinder, hoping to have captured the essential.
This is the case of the scene above. I had just parked in the area and was getting out of the car with the camera still in the bottom of my backpack. Across the street, a delivery man was walking with a stack of boxes taller than him. In a few seconds he would be in the establishment, if the stack didn’t collapse after catching the top of the door frame.
To capture the scene and gain speed, I pulled the camera out of the bag with its preset settings adjusted for street photography and shoot without taking the time to make sure the subject was captured.
Just looking through the viewfinder to frame perfectly would have taken a few extra seconds and been enough to ruin the scene, as in the absence of the delivery man, only the man holding the door would have appeared in the photo. And it is obvious that he is not the main subject. He is very kind to hold the door (it’s the least he can do), but apart from the fact that he seems to have a white support stocking on his left leg (because of the sun), he was the secondary subject from the beginning…
