Rocky Mountain High

I have to say that Banff National Park is always a favorite place of mine to shoot. Whether its revisting places I've shot before or finding something new I am always generally pleased with the shots I take there.

I have to thank my sister-in-law Holly and her boyfriend Daniel for inviting me along with them on their trip. I played tour guide to a certain extent but in a lot of ways the day kinda unfolded on its own.

We stopped at McDougall Church on the way out before we stopped at Johnston Canyon.

I've never been to the canyon in winter and it was absolutely breathtaking. We only made it to the lower falls but it was definitely worth the trip.

Lake Louise is another place I've been to in the past but always in the summer. We finished our trip just outside the Banff town site at Vermilion Lakes.

Check out the rest of the pictures here

Merry Christmas!

So with it being the eve of Christmas Eve, this will probably be my last post for a few days. I wanted to keep my mini-streak alive by posting and what better way to say Merry Christmas AND post something photography related than to post a picture of my favorite dog in the whole world. That's right...Hudson has come to the blog!

Hudson will normally ignore the TV entirely. That is until we ask him where the puppies are then he'll look at it to see if there are puppies. If there are? He goes a little nuts. He was barking at the TV just after I shot this.

So from Hudson, me and my wife -

Merry Christmas!

Revisting images

Have you ever had an image that was pretty good, did your processing on it and then left it for months? Have you come back to that photograph and tried new processing techniques out on it? That's one of the things I love about Lightroom. I can create a snapshot of an image and start my processing over again from scratch and compare the two images to decide which I like more. And revisiting your shots is always a lot of fun.

Take this image I shot this summer in Banff National Park. When I first looked at after getting home there were a few problem areas. I was shooting into the sun somewhat and it was hard to keep the highlights from blowing out. I did try bracketing and then using Photomatix to create an HDR image but I didn't really care for the results.

Tonight I tried good old fashioned dodging and burning. I've also download a bunch of camera profiles for Lightroom and the Camera Landscape profile really punches up the colors.