Take your best shot.
Look at Alberta’s Rocky Mountains through a camera lens. You’ll be able to remember it forever and share the experience with others. From Crowsnest Pass in the south to Jasper National Park in the north, abundant scenery will leave you gasping for words and grasping for the camera. Spend a day, a week or a month and leave with images that will last a lifetime.
Technology now gives you powerful, resilient cameras that can easily fit in your pocket while hiking, biking, bird watching or even canoeing. Wowing friends back home is easy to do in this cathedral of granite and ice with lakes of unspeakable blue.
You can take photography holidays with experts who will teach you how to take your best shot, such as a getaway in Jasper National Park entitled Focus on the Rockies II, The Jasper Photography Experience. You can find more Travel Alberta vacation packages like this one, but to discover shooting in the Rockies, read on.
Easy With Photos
Try and explain to those on the far side of the world how the roaring silence and pine-sweet air make you want to screech your car to a halt, jump out and revel in wild freedom. It’s so much easier to show them your pictures.
“You’ve got a bit of everything, the beautiful mountains, lakes and rivers,” says Pam Doyle, a long-time photographer in the Bow Valley west of Calgary. “In winter you’ve got snow and skiing and in summer you’ve got water sports and hiking and climbing. It’s just a grab-bag of photographic opportunities.”
Wild Animals, Wild Festivals
Wild animals are dangerous and unpredictable, making them particularly difficult to capture. It can be equally rewarding to shoot the action at one of the numerous events that unfold in the Rockies every summer.
Be it a folk music festival or one of the many adventure races around and over Alberta’s peaks, all your photographs will feature the stunning backdrops of glaciers, waterfalls, canyons and granite walls.
Enjoy the Animals
If it’s wildlife you’re after, you won’t be disappointed. As the days get longer and the sun warms the landscape, animals become most active in the early morning and early evening.
Few things say Canadian Rockies more than a herd of elk wading in Banff’s Vermilion Lakes with sloping Mount Rundle as a backdrop. Or two wolves sniffing the wind from atop a small hill. Or a moose, his mouth filled with dripping weeds, standing knee deep in a mountain swamp.
Bears too can be found in abundance throughout the mountain parks. They’re particularly fond of mountainsides where the eating is good. This is a difficult animal to capture at the best of times, so be patient and particularly careful and consider yourself lucky if you get a useable shot.
Images of the Past Evolve
A half-century ago, pioneers like Bruno Engler carried cumbersome cameras deep into the mountains west of what are today the international gateway cities of Calgary and Edmonton. They brought out iconic images of misty peaks and gleaming ice, shadowy forests and undaunted wildlife.
Today that eye-popping scenery is located on the doorstep of first-world convenience and old-world luxury, where elegant backcountry lodges are separated from modern services and amenities by rugged wilderness.
Whether you hike above Banff on spectacular Mount Rundle, paddle Jasper’s world-famous Maligne Lake, mountain bike in Kananaskis Country, drive the Icefields Parkway or fly fish the Oldman River in Crowsnest Pass, you can take a camera. The beauty in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains sometimes defies description, but it yields to a lens.
Shoot Landscape, Action and Wildlife
When you’ve worn out your legs, exhausted your shoulders and stretched exhausted your lungs, come and watch some of the best athletes in the world test their bodies and equipment. These days human endurance is routinely pushed to new limits and so is the photography that captures it. Alberta is home to pro sports and annual World Cup events.
“The Rockies have beautiful scenery and all the sports,” says Doyle. “It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Kananaskis Country is the best place for wildlife. You’re pretty much guaranteed to see wildlife like big-horn sheep, coyotes and black and grizzly bears.”
Compare and Improve Your Photos
If you think you have what it takes to shoot National Geographic quality images, check out the competition at The Banff Centre. Each spring this institution, dedicated to teaching and showcasing the arts, selects a jury to choose the best photos for its Mountain Photography Competition. For the rest of us, the centre offers a photography workshop each fall.
The Banff Adventure Photography Workshop runs for a week each September and incorporates intense seminars with field experience under the guidance and tutelage of three award-winning photographers, two of whom shoot for National Geographic.
“National Geographic is the pinnacle of published photography,” says Laura Vanags, assistant photographer at the Banff Centre. “So they have a lot of insight and first-hand knowledge they share with the participants.”
Mountain Photo Workshops
The workshop includes a mountain climbing session in which participants get tips on how to take photos and instruct subjects to get good angles and results. The instructors offer insight into what would be the best angle to photograph a person climbing, says Vanags.
“It’s a pretty good program,” she adds. “I put a lot of value in National Geographic because they are world leaders in visual imagery and to have someone first-hand of that caliber teaching me how to see differently would be invaluable.”
Learning in Luxury
For those who want to improve their photography to show friends and family, without the National Geographic intensity, the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge offers the perfect package. Called Focus on the Rockies II, The Jasper Photography Experience, this course includes three nights of pampered accommodation and service, professional instruction and the chance to hobnob with like-minded photographers from around the world.
The course is geared for novice and intermediate photographers and kicks off early each September, arguably the most spectacular time of year in the Rockies when the leaves are beginning to change color.
“It’s a way to get out in the wilderness and catch the animals before they go to sleep for the winter,” says Lori Grant, regional director of public relations for Fairmont. “There’s the vast spaces, the glorious mountains and you and Mother Nature and all that she has to offer. Participants will walk away with fantastic photography that looks professional and they can say with pride it was them who took it.”