Even after all the years I’ve been taking photographs, I’m always amazed at how a landscape changes with the light. But you only notice this when you have the most important virtue of a landscape photographer: patience. Landscape photography is not for hectics and photographic hot spurs. The landscape photographer spends most of his time waiting. Waiting for the best light.
Mount Rundle and Vermillion Lakes
The Vermillion Lakes are located on the western edge of the small town of Banff in the national park of the same name in Alberta, Canada. Via a small road that runs parallel to the Trans-Canada Highway, one gets to different points at the small lakes with a beautiful view of Mount Rundle in the background.
On a beautiful day in September we were there well in time before sunset to catch the last rays of sunlight that fall on Mount Rundle and make the mountain peaks glow red in the photo. That worked very well. But we stayed quite a while after sunset. And that was especially worth it, because the landscape underwent an amazing transformation after the sun had long since fallen below the horizon. A whole series of pictures was created. In the following you can see a selection of them showing the capture time. See for yourself.
06:06 pm
06:38 pm
06:51 pm
07:06 pm
In the last photo, however, we cheated a little bit. By using a gradient ND filter (ND 0,6) the sky got a more intensive color than was naturally the case.
The patience paid off from our point of view. Even though the alpenglow in the Canadian Rockies is always worth seeing, the last shot is our clear favourite of the series. The mood after sunset is so wonderfully calm and balanced that you can literally feel the silence of the evening.
Apropos silence: The Trans-Canada Highway is just about 100 meters away from our location. So it wasn’t that quiet.
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