There’s always a photograph to be made…

Pyramid Lake, Alberta, Canada

I have recently returned from attending an organised photographic tour in the Canadian Rockies where lakes, mountains and water-features of all types were (rather obviously) the predominant subject-matter. We were blessed (or rather, from a purely photographic perspective, cursed) with sunny, warm weather and blue, mostly cloudless, skies and this made for challenging and at times frustrating conditions for landscape photography. I will try and find the time to write a trip report later but for now I just want to make the point that there is always a photograph to be made, despite unpromising weather and a location that I did not find particularly inspiring.

The location is Pyramid Lake just outside Jasper from where Pyramid Mountain can be seen reflected in the still waters. It sounds perfect but the shoreline was unattractive and mostly devoid of interesting foreground and the dawn glow failed to materialise on the morning we chose to visit. In short, I was struggling to make a composition. I walked along the shoreline in both directions vainly searching for an interesting viewpoint and I had pretty much given up when I saw this relative of the European dandelion. ‘Finally!’, I thought and proceeded to explore the compositional possibilities with my digital compact.

The result is what you see here, possibly my favourite image of the trip. I liked the perfect sphere of the seedhead with its tiny droplets of dew and played this off against the reflections, thrown impressionistically out of focus by the closeness of the lens to my main subject.

So the moral is, when inspiration is lacking, don’t give up! There is always something to shoot even if it wasn’t what you originally intended.