Three days after my encounter with the finicky Red Squirrel, I was able to get back outside with my camera. It was a Wednesday, and a gorgeous sunny Wednesday at that.
I walked the trails around The Hills for a while, breathing the fresh air and enjoying the sunshine. I was headed towards a cabin that had been marked on the trail maps, and after about 45 minutes or so, I got there. |
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During the walk out, I had my telephoto lens on the camera, but I had found no subjects worthy of it, so when I got to the cabin I had changed to my wide-angle.
Wide-angle is good for landscapes, so I went looking for landscape to shoot. Since I was in a wooded area, I naturally ended up with a lot of shots of trees. |
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One thing that I've consistently found, in all of my travels, is that the woods contain a lot of trees.
As you can see in these shots, one of the usual features of wide-angle shots is barrel distortion. This kind of distortion is what is causing the trees on the left to look like they're bending right, and the trees on the right to look like they're bending left. |
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I can always take the distortion out in Photoshop, but I like the effect so I generally leave it in.
On some shots, like the following one, the distortion is not as noticeable—but it's still there. |
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| I didn't take the same route back to the lodge that I had taken coming out. At one point, I was thinking about getting different perspectives and viewpoints on my subjects, and decided to take a few photos from a low vantage. So I held my camera down near my knees and shot a few photos from there. The height of my knees, I thought, was somewhere near the height of a wolf, and wolves are known to inhabit these parts. |
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So if I had been born a wolf (or even a more domesticated canine), then I figure that that is what most of the photojournal would look like. There'd be a lot less variation in the photos, too—it'd be hard to operate all the little fiddly camera controls with just my paws. And I have no idea how I'd change lenses.
Around The Hills, there are several long wooden fences, which I imagine are there to keep grazing cattle from going too far astray. |
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Where the trails crossed the fences, there were big wooden gates. The gates were all in the open position, held there by the snow, and it would've taken a lot of work with a shovel to get one closed.
Here's a view through one of those gates. |
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| And here's some more fence; I really like the way the sun turned out in this shot. |
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| I came back to the main compound by walking up a hill that has several tubing runs on it. The following photo shows the area, from the top of the hill. I came at it from downslope on the left, crossed over to the right (past what you can see) and walked up there. |
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I was a little tired after walking up that hill; the wide-angle distortion makes it look a little less tall and steep than it actually is.
Near where I was standing was the area where they store the innertubes, and I couldn't resist taking many photos of the bright little stacks of them. |
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| And from almost the same spot, here's the view of the ranch buildings. The main building in this photo is the lodge where my room was. The other building, in the background on the right, is the main ranch building. The main building houses the pool, gym, spa, dining area, meeting rooms, and offices. |
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| Here's another shot of the main building, from the sunny side. |
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That's not a real horse, in case you're wondering. They have real horses at The Hills, but that's not one of them.
My last good photo of the afternoon was of the covered wooden walkway that leads from the main building towards my lodge. |
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I took that shot as I was headed to my room for a nap; sadly, I had to cut my nap a bit short because I was scheduled for a massage. Life can be so demanding sometimes.
Roughing it at The Hills,
Tom |
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