The End of the Rainbow

Somewhere over northern Ontario, the highway leads directly to a pot of gold.

New Horizons

The Great Plains compose roughly 20% of Canada's geography. This prairie expanse stretches all the way from the Rocky Mountains in Alberta to the Canadian Shield in northern Ontario. In the middle of all of that flatness is the province of Saskatchewan, from border to border, horizon to horizon, east to west, and as far as the eye can see lie dirt roads and highways beckoning forward, large green fields, train tracks, silos, and miles and miles of earth meeting sky on the horizon. 

These horizons were brand new to me. I'd only been to Saskatchewan once on land, and that was just for the sake of saying I'd been there. Now, I had 9 hours of driving to take it all in and enjoy the simple beauty that was all around me.

Black and white...

glorious colour...

...and all the new horizons that came with them.

Before and After

 We all have events in our lives that define our chapters. Life is different before and after that moment or that event or that person: the death of a loved one, making a new friend, graduating, moving from the east coast to the west. Sometimes these pages are turned without our even realizing, or they sneak up and knock us off our feet in the middle of living our lives. Sometimes, though, they're meticulously planned: the culmination of months of focus, the acclimation of a goal we set and strive toward with every bit of our being.

The latter was the case in July of 2020. 

In the midst of a global pandemic, my time had come. My life needed change, and I was finally ready to make it. 
But first, one last 'before that happened' mission: show me the Alberta prairie. Show me canola fields and abandoned farm houses, and show me that big. blue. sky.

She happily obliged.

There are things in life you never expected before they happened, and things that you never expected to miss after they're gone. But I've learned that life is not about expectations at all, but about the now, and that the only thing that exists in the past and future are the categories: the before and the after.

This Is Alberta.

When Canadians think of Alberta, they each have their own expectation: Prairie. Dinosaurs. The Rockies. The oil fields. With an area of 661,848 square kilometres, Alberta is all of these. Prairie in the east, the oil fields in the north, badlands in the south and in the west: the Canadian Rocky Mountains. 

This.

Is.

Alberta.

Specifically, this is Maligne Canyon in Jasper National Park.

This is the deepest canyon in the Rockies.

This is a massive boulder suspended between two cliff faces.
And tiny sprouts rising from the shelter of solid rock.

This is a vertigo-inducing views straight down.

And this... is paradise.

This is home for some magnificent wildlife.

And this

is a photographer's paradise.

This is one of my favourite views in Jasper: 
Off the side of highway 16 just leaving the park.

It took me 5 years to get this shot just right, and I still don't believe I've done it justice.

This was a long overdue trip to Jasper. I still hadn't come close to capturing everything about this place that I'd wanted to see. But in the summer of 2020, there was somewhere else I had to be. 

And at that point of my life, that was even more beautiful than this.

T7i

 I was miraculously called back to work in May, courtesy of nothing short of another natural disaster in Fort McMurray. The Athabasca River had grossly overflooded its banks, and flood victims and the homeless were being moved from town into the camps until the water subsided. Cue 28 straight 12-hour nightshifts for me, and a brand new camera as a reward to myself for 336 hours of work in under a month.

After much consideration, I decided on the Canon T7i - the descendant of the T1i I had used diligently for over a decade. I was excited to get home and find it waiting on my doorstep, and even more excited to get out and play around.

I scanned a map for a place I'd never been and made my way to Alberta Beach, just northwest of Edmonton. I parked on the water's edge and walked up the wharf to where a number of folks were launching boats and fishing off the shore. I took a few shots to test out the new camera, but wasn't overly thrilled with the location or the weather that looked like it was coming in, so I didn't stay long. I was itching to get home and load the pics onto my computer to have a look.

Well.

As it turns out, I forgot to turn on the RAW format for shooting. I had taken straight JPEGs which, while mildly useful, are not ideal for post-processing or detailed editing. Afterward, I learned that even if I had shot in RAW, my version of Photoshop is too out-dated to read the new camera's format. 

But.

It wasn't a completely lost cause.
I managed to capture these two, looking oddly posed and picturesque...

...and this little marvel in so much detail you can count the fuzzes on the seeds one by one. 

So the camera itself was definitely a chalk up in the W column. 

Though my day as a whole, maybe not so much!