Sunrise at Vermillion Lakes #1 - October 9th 2010

We went to Banff for the Thanksgiving weekend and stayed at the Douglas Fir resort. I was hoping to shoot  some spectacular mountain scenery.

Just before we got to the hotel, there was a herd of Elk on the side of the road Conor and I got out and took a look at them. There was one male and a bunch of other female and young elk in the herd.

The male had a real nice rack :-) we watched him for a while and I was hoping he'd move off into the trees so that it didn't look like he was standing on the road, but for the most part he stayed on the road. We had to be careful though because the Elk were rutting ( if thats the way to say it ) and they can be quite aggressive.

I missed the sunset that evening. The sky lit up before I could go anywhere that had a view. My goal was to go out each morning and evening and try to catch the light.. the next morning I got up around 5:30am thinking that I'd be able to see something. After getting all my stuff together and packed into the van. I made my way to downtown Banff and tried to stop off at Starbucks for a coffee. It wasn`t open at 6:10am so I drove off to Vermillion lakes in search of the light.

I wasn`t too sure where I wanted to go so I drove around in the dark trying to guess a little bit as to what kind of image each location might bring. There are about three different areas where you can park and get down to the water along Vermillion lakes. After finally settling on the third location, I got my stuff out of the van and setup the camera and I waited for the sun to rise.

The weather wasn`t too cold and I could see that the clouds were going to let some of the morning light in.  As the sky started to lighten in the east, I started taking some pictures. The first ones being around 6:45am. The sky was starting to show some blue and other colours were just starting to show through. I moved around a lot trying to find some interesting compositions.

Then all of a sudden at about 7:43am, everything exploded.. The shot from 7:41 was dull.. then this:

The colour came and everything was on fire.. it was amazing. The transitions as the sun burned its way into the new day was truly impressive. The explosion lasted about 15 minutes before it faded back into normal daylight. I frantically tried to get something into the camera before it all went away.

I was glad that I got up to see it.

On the way back to the hotel, I stopped at Starbucks and got my coffee ;-)

Thanks for looking
brad