Fall Photo Weekend - Day 2

On the second day I was up early, had a shower, and headed over to the hotel restaurant for breakfast.  A couple of the others headed over with me.  After breakfast we hit the road with our camera gear.

The clouds were hanging low in the valley and it looked really cool as some of them swept around and over the peaks.  We rushed down the valley to try to find a good vantage point, before they burned off.  As it turned out the clouds hung low for pretty much the entire day.  Our first stop was at the bridge where the Icefields Parkway crosses the Athabasca River, just south of town.  I attempted to shoot the morning sun burning through some of that low cloud.  I also found a spot where some water have frozen overnight and made for some really cool ice patterns among some beach pebbles.  It was very cold at this point in the morning, at least by recent standards.  My fingers were painfully sore from the cold and I was reminded that winter photographer would soon become the norm for the coming months.

Once we finished up here we continued south down the parkway.  We made a stop at on of the higher vantage points along the highway and shot the clouds and peaks near Athabasca Pass.  Here we met up with Michael Chesworth, who saw us along the road and stopped.  Michael is an Edmonton photographer and friend to many of us, but he shoots digital and is not active with film and darkroom printing.  He was out visiting the park with his son.

Later still we moved on to Athabasca Falls and shot there for a while.  It was moderately busy, but nothing like it is in the summer.  After a couple of hours here we moved on to Horseshoe Lake.  It was beautiful, as it always is, and the water was still fully open.  We shot here until the light faded at the end of the day.

Once the light dropped off we packed it in for the day and headed back into town.  The gang all wanted to go for Japanese food, and I reluctantly joined them.  Japanese is not a favorite of mine, and I don't do well with chopsticks, but I played along.  It turns out that most of them were not overly impressed with the quality of the food that they ordered.  Mine was OK... some sort of thick noodles with chicken and a few vegetables... I think it was called Yakiudon, or somthing like that.  But I stuggled with the chopsticks.  After dinner we went back to the rooms and visited for a while.  We had a few drinks and did a print viewing session of the work that many of us had brought along.  It was a fun evening that capped off a great day.