A Few Signs of Spring Along Three Sisters Creek

On By GeoKsIn Out and About - Canadian Rockies

Over the Victoria Day weekend we enjoyed a relatively short bike ride from Three Sisters down to the Canmore town site, along the paths following the Bow River (with a short detour to find a geocache), back up to the Hydroline trail and finally along Frank’s trail back home. We also went for another walk along Three Sisters Creek, up past the old dam to the larger waterfall. For the first time this year, we saw a few wildflowers in bloom – a good sign that spring is finally arriving in Canmore.

As always, we were each carrying a camera. Mr. GeoK is starting to get familiar with his new Olympus OM-D E-M5 and Mrs. GeoK is flailing away trying to master the new-to-her Olympus E-P3. In case you haven’t guessed, we are a micro four-thirds family, primarily because the weight and form factor make this format a great choice for hiking.

“Macro Monday” – A fair number of photo-bloggers regularly post Macro Monday shots and Mr. GeoK managed a couple of good entries for this category from our Monday morning walk.

Calypso orchids
All last spring we spotted only 2 patches of Calypso orchids. We must not have been looking in all the right spots, because on Victoria Day we saw at least 7 little patches of these beautiful flowers. Mr. GeoK managed to capture this image of multiple flowers.
Calypso Orchid
And this single blossom. So many places to focus – the petals, the lip, the column, the sepal, the hood…
Cow parsley seed pod
Although not quite as close-up, this cow parsley seed pod from the fall of 2011 caught Mrs. GeoK’s eye.

Mr. GeoK’s E-M5 features a new in-camera art filter called Key Line and he tried it out on some of the old wooden pipe sections near the dam. There is considerable potential for using images taken with the Key Line art filter as the starting point for some new Pathtag designs. The same effect can probably be achieved through Lightroom or some other processing, but we do very limited processing at this point, so the in camera art filters provide an avenue to have a little fun in the field.

Wooden pipe
Auto shot with no art effect.
Wooden pipe
Same shot using Key Line art filter.

Wooden pipe
A closer view of the wooden pipe, wrapped in reinforcing wire with purpose specific connectors for the wire sections, taken with the Key Line art filter.

Loose wires
The Key Line art filter turned this shot of the reinforcing wire tangled around a disintegrated section of wooden pipe into a fairly abstract image.




















Finally, inspired by the current Long Exposure collaboration project described here, Mrs. GeoK spent some time trying to improve her skill at photographing flowing water. Stay tuned for another post on her attempts to achieve success on the “Long Exposure” front, but for now, here’s one of her better efforts of the day…a cascade on Three Sisters Creek…

A cascade on Three Sisters Creek

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