This past week I made another short drive, this time to a church that first opened back in 1926 and used to be in regular use, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much use now. For me it has always been a nice quiet, and somewhat lonely place to carefully take my time doing photography.
After this week’s snow I knew it would be a perfect place to spend some time. I brought my IR Nikon D7000 with the 20-40mm Sigma lens, but after a couple shots I decided that photographing the sparkling sunlight with it’s defining shadows in the natural light was making more interesting photos of the fresh snow around the church buildings and used my Nikon D850 with a 24-70mm instead. The D850 is full frame and I wanted the wide angle so I could bring in the trees and fence.
There is another building near the church. I’m not sure what it was used for, some kind of government building I guess because there is a Canadian Flag flying near it. The sun was hitting it directly and with the wide-angle I could include the snow-covered hills in the distance.
I am rarely in a hurry when I wander with my camera and it was warm enough to even kneel or sit in the snow for a few shots. I was also careful to keep my distance so there wouldn’t be footprints in the snow.
I have photographed that church many times in the past 40 years that I have lived here. I don’t remember the first time, but I expect it was some time in the late 1970s and I probably was using a Pentax MX at that time. I also remember putting a roll of infrared film in a Nikon F3 and adding a deep red filter to the lens. At that time one just had to pull off the road and climb over a hill to get to the church. Now there is a four-lane highway and no place to stop. I had to drive almost a mile past and take a turn-off, then double back, go under the highway, and take a frontage road along the river to the gate that blocks vehicle access to the church parking lot. That’s all the better for a lone photographer like me that doesn’t want lots of people tramping down the landscape.
I found the above quote by Ansel Adams some time ago and wanted to include it in one of my articles. As I reread it this morning I thought about how easy it now is to take reasonably good photos. However, I also looked at some excellent photographs on a Facebook photographer’s group I recently joined late last evening and I thought about how many of them captured or set the mood of the landscape each photographer presented and Adams’ quote describes them so very well.
Stay safe and be creative. These are my thoughts for this week.
Contact me at www.enmanscamera.com or emcam@telus.net.
