7/2/2004 Well, the beginning of my vacation has come and gone. Dory and I spent the first week of my summer vacation hiking around the Canadian Rockies. It's a really nice area and quite spectacular by almost all accounts. I was a little surprised with the way that trees grow up there...but I will spare you all the boring details. If you care to see a few more photos of some trees you can check out this link.
The top image on this page is actually a collage of about fifteen images. When I bought the lenses that I have for my camera I was using a film camera...when I bought the digital camera I found that it was much harder to get wide angle shots because the camera has a sensor that is smaller than a piece of 35mm film, making all the lenses effectively longer...anyway, rather than spending money on a lense I have opted to just take multiple images and collage them together in photoshop. It seemed like a good idea until it came time to actually put them all together...the glue-up process takes forever. And as you can see it's not perfect. The cool thing about it is that there is enough information in all those photos to make a poster size image if I cared to. The photo is of Angel Glacier on Mt. Edith Cavell. Personally I think the glacier looks much more like the back of an eagle that has its wings spread...but apparently when it was named it looked a lot different. The photo doesn't really convey the scale very well. Dory is in the middle foreground. The mountain's peak is a vertical mile above the water at the base.
The second image is obviously me...although I don't place myself on the site very often so some of you might have forgotten what I look like. Funny thing is that the first person I showed this photo to (as I talked about the tree that I am kneeling next to) was looking at my feet. Yes those are hiking boots in case you have the same question. Hiking boots are good for times when you are hiking...imagine.
I have found in the course of studying trees that it is very difficult to get good photos of them. My solution has been to turn to sketching them instead. Sketching isn't always better but it often lets me embellish the tree, making it a little closer to the way I think it should look. The third image is a sketch I did from memory of a tree growing off the side of a canyon over a waterfall. I went back later to take photos and found that I couldn't get a photo of it with a background that allowed it to be seen very well. See the above link for a couple photos. Needless to say, my memory of the tree is rather different from the reality.
We had a great time hiking and hanging around in Canada. All the expensive dinners were a bit more reasonable when I looked at the conversions on my credit card statement. We brought back some maple cookies which are apparently not available in the states...for no real reason. I will say that they have some really good seafood up north. We had lobster pot pie one night; it was fantastic.
7/2/2004 Well, the beginning of my vacation has come and gone. Dory and I spent the first week of my summer vacation hiking around the Canadian Rockies. It's a really nice area and quite spectacular by almost all accounts. I was a little surprised with the way that trees grow up there...but I will spare you all the boring details. If you care to see a few more photos of some trees you can check out