Monday, October 15, 2007

Prairie Light

I recently returned from a couple of weeks of shooting in the Canadian Rockies. To say I had a great trip would be an understatement, but then again, getting out of town to shoot is always fun. Trips like these are always too short. I always seem to feel like I'm just getting into the groove and it's time to head home.

I thought I'd share a few images with you from a part of the country I hadn't been to before, and a few thoughts about pre-visualizing photos.

Pincher Creek is a small rural community in southwest Alberta, and is home to some of the largest wind farms in Canada. I had done some research on the area before the trip and wanted to head there to photograph some of the turbines. I shoot a lot of stock photography (for those of you that don't know what stock photography is, see this Wikipedia Article) and had drawn up a few ideas of concepts I'd like to shoot. I was thinking of ways to show our dependance on energy, and it's relationship to things we use in our everyday lives. Usually tying in things from pop culture adds to the saleability of an image, so I was going to shoot a model (my lovely wife, of course) using a laptop, listening to an iPod, etc around these turbines. Alas, Mother Nature must have thought that there were already enough images of iPods around and made other plans. As we drove south from our campsite at Chain Lakes Provincial Park, the sky got progressively darker until we got to Pincher Creek.

The results? Nothing short of pure Prairie drama. This is the kind of light You just don't get on the coast...




Here are a few images of the wind turbines I originally came to photograph:




The lesson here? While it is great to plan ahead and have some ideas of what you want to shoot, don't let it get you down when it doesn't work out. These images are some of my favourite from the trip, and I certainly hadn't thought I'd get anything like them before I left.

And then came the rain...



Cheers, Josh



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