Saturday, November 19, 2011

Sundogs and Snowy Owls - November 19th, 2011


Sun rises late now - after 8:00am. I was having a coffee and asked Google if anyone had seen any owls near Calgary. This eventually led me to a birding site where someone had claimed to have seen a Snowy Owl a couple of days ago. I figured I should go look because it wasn`t far from my house.

I drove out east to Highway 9 then south towards Langdon. I didn't really see much and was getting a bit discouraged. The car was telling me that I was running low on gas so I started to head back towards home. I still kept to the back roads - looking for owls - when the air started to fog up with ice crystals. I noticed a pretty nice sundog around the sun so I stopped to take a few shots. It was pretty chilly out at -22degC so I wasn`t out of the car for long.

I like how the trees make shadows on the road and the texture of the dirt and the snow. I used a two stop hard graduated filter and a three stop soft grad to help darken the sky so there would still be some detail on the road.

Sundogs