Canoe Trip 2026
Hello and welcome back.
Before beginning, I would like to acknowledge the passing of a former work colleague. I don’t really get personal on this blog, but this is quite sad. I’ve been away from work for a year and a half, but when you spend 20 years working with someone you admire and respect, a year and a half is an eye blink. She was a great role model, always insightful, knowledgeable, and very often comedy gold. My deepest condolences to her family, friends, and work colleagues. She will be greatly missed.
The highlight of the summer was a 7 day canoe trip in the Experimental Lakes Area in northern Ontario. I wasn’t as active photographically in the weeks leading up to the trip, doing a lot of meal prep, dehydrating food, and testing recipes seemed to give me an excuse to not go out. It’s procrastination at a professional level! That said, the food did end up being pretty good, and was worth the effort…and now I know how to do it, so next year should be a cinch.
I did get out for some iconic “Manitoba” scenes, of farmland and recovering prairie:
Birds and Beetles
While out in the farmlands, the bird and bug life was abundant. My favourites were the terns fishing, like this little angel:
Terns are acrobatic and hard to track, but occasionally I get lucky, with the first here practically flipped over tracking a fish, and the second…well, I’m just glad there is a pond in there:
This young tern kept coming up empty. He finally perched on a dead limb to rest and ponder his failures:
Two of these four tern shots are black and white, and I get questions as to why I do this, especially for nature shots. These days it’s usually a choice I’ve made in the field, and the purpose is simplicity. Colour can be a distraction from the point, and depending on the light can even be unappealing and way too “busy”. In the case of the “angel” I’m trying to convey a sense of the ethereal, while the resting tern is supposed to be “contemplative”. Whether that was successful is up to you…
This section promised “beetles”, so here are a couple. The aerial battle was a lucky shot, as two (bees?wasps?) seemed to be having a standoff over flower rights.
A little gear talk: if you are using OM Systems cameras, the new 50-200mm lens is outstanding for this kind of thing. You can get really close (almost macro level) and the “bird AI” focussing tracks pretty much anything with wings.
Canoe Trip
As anyone who’s been on a canoe trip knows, between cooking, putting up and tearing down, never mind paddling, there’s not a lot of extra time. However, I did manage to get some moments I’m pretty happy with. Here are some taken with my iPhone, which does a pretty good job:
However for more “intentional” work, I still prefer the real camera. The first is this fish jaw at sunrise, which seems kind of monstrous, even though in actual size it was maybe 3cm long (about an inch). My guess is a pickerel/walleye:
Later I had fun trying to track the hyperactive water striders and the ripples they make. It took a while to get this, but they have a timing to their kicks if the path is clear, and once I’d figured that out it was easier:
Once again, the 50-200mm worked great here. Now I just have to get lower, if I can find a very shallow granite slope to the water’s edge.
Sometimes a scene is “pretty” but isn’t “interesting”, so I had fun with some ICM (intentional camera movement), one horizontal, one vertical:
The highlight of the trip was a day when we had “all the weather”. It started off bright and warm, then a heavy mist rolled in, followed by breezy during which we departed from the camp site, when after an hour of paddling we got absolutely dumped on (as seen in the iPhone collection above).
The mist was particularly glorious, and it felt like we were in another world. Just before the mist overwhelmed the lake:
As the mist rolled in, our chief navigator surveyed the scene:
Transported into another world:
From several shots I stitched together a pano:
Since I mentioned black and white above, I’ll continue that thought here: as opposed to nature shots, these misty scenes could be “perfect” for black and white. But in this case I kept the colour, because what would be missing is the yellow warmth of the sun, and the blue chill of the shadows. You can colour grade highlights and shadows on a black and white image, and I have certainly done this, but this was a case where nature did it for me…as they say, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!
A Mouse Tale
I’ll end with a humorous anecdote from the trip: I was up early walking a trail to the lake, and thought I saw something skitter in front of me. I looked around but found nothing. I assumed it was floaters in my eye 😁 so carried on. Later on my way back, I saw it again, and this time I was sure it was something. Finally, under a couple of leaves, I saw it: a mouse tale. My icy heart melted, and I slowly bent down to check it out, all while making “soothing sounds” as best I could. Sure enough a little mouse was hiding in a tuft of grass under some leaves. I took a few shots, but the angle and foliage in the way made it almost impossible to get something good, plus technically I was at ISO 3200, which is kind of an upper limit for good shots. I moved away, and the little guy jumped out in front of me, like a puppy wanting to play! I bent down with more “soothing sounds” and he kind of wandered around and back to his tuft. This repeated a couple more times, until he finally disappeared under his tuft of grass for good. Very odd, made us wonder if people fed him.
Anyway, here is the “tail” shot, which isn’t good, just amusing; and then the “best” shot, which unfortunately has a blade of grass running right through it:
And that is all for this blog. Hug your loved ones, and take care!