Last Thursday I posted on Facebook that I had no photographic projects planned for the new year and I wasn’t feeling all that creative or interested in finding things to photograph. Within about 20 minutes, a fellow Central Alberta Photographic Society club member, Lori Gillan, messaged me to invite me along on a search for snowy owls on Sunday. I’ve been feeling way to much of “woe is me” lately and while recognizing that going outside is always a good place for me to start as a fight against depression, motivating myself to go outside has been difficult. So, I didn’t hesitate to agree to go.

Lori picked my up at 6:30 am and we drove to Penhold to meet up with Kim Mortimer and our driver, Terry Mah. I had no idea where we were going to go or what the plan was because, as far as I was concerned; “I was with the band.”

We headed east and south in search of owls, or adventure, whichever came first. We had a quick pitstop in Three Hills and Lori talked to a few locals to see if they knew of any owls in the area. She got some tips but none of them panned out for us. Maybe next time.

We thought we’d try our luck in the Beiseker area and we saw this building Lori liked so we stopped for a few shots.

I liked the close up photo of the building but I don’t like the power lines behind it and I’m not going to Photoshop them out. I liked the lines in the field and tried a lower angle to keep them from showing up. The tops of the fence posts still show but they aren’t as obvious at the wide angle end of the Tamron 150-500mm lens that I borrowed for the trip.

We saw another car driving slowly towards us and wondered if it was another photographer. Turned out to be another photographer from the club, Mel Bolin and her husband, Adam, out doing the same thing we were. Mel had spotted a Great Horned owl early in the day and we headed in that general direction to see if we had any luck. We didn’t.

We drove around for about an hour before we saw the cute carcass of a smiling barn with some interesting lighting behind it.

We drove a bit more and came across a cool, abandoned grain elevator.

Prevailing opinion seemed to be that a white elevator in snow was boring and it would be a good place to revisit after a change of season or two. While I didn’t disagree, I didn’t think the current conditions were boring at all. Granted, the flat light wasn’t doing me any favours in capturing details, but sometimes you just have to shoot for the conditions in front of you.

As I stood there trying to decide if I should check out the inside or not, I could see the sun hitting the hill in the background and guessed it would light up the elevator shortly.

Luckily, I was correct.

Details just popped once the sun hit it. I didn’t even have time to try a shot with a polarizer on to see if I could enhance it even more as the clouds moved in again in less than a minute.

Once the sun was gone, I moved closer to peek inside.

The floor looked solid enough go inside and explore, but I decided to err on the side of caution for a change, and not go inside.

I grabbed a few more shots as I headed towards the car.

Lori doesn’t like having shots of her butt being shown, but she keeps walking into the frame. I think she should be okay with this.

We headed out towards Drumheller and as it was lunch time, we decided to stop for a bite. The top rated place open on a Sunday was Happy Belly Grill & Bar. It was good and filling but they do use pressed and not fresh turkey in their clubhouse sandwich. I’m sure it would have been even better if they did, but it was very good and their fries were seasoned nicely.

We headed east to East Coulee to check out the East Coulee School Museum and the cool bus they have rotting away on the lawn. (Or in the snow as is the case currently.)

I took photos of the bus, knowing it would break my friend, Steve Parkin’s heart to see it in such a condition. My heart doesn’t care so it was easy to document it in it’s dilapidated condition.

East Coulee isn’t very big but I did find something else to photograph.

The other cool building wasn’t overly photogenic in the lighting conditions we were experiencing so we decided to drive to Dorothy as Terry had never been there.

Once we got to Dorothy, we were disappointed to see the roof was gone from the grain elevator and it wasn’t very photogenic itself. So, after a quick “spin” around town, we headed back towards Drumheller.

We drove north from Drumheller towards highway 9 and turned east to see what we could see. We didn’t find much so we headed north to go check out the Springwater School Museum. It’s a cool looking stone building that’s never locked. But, it was when we got there. A local came by to see what was going on and he was surprised it was locked up. It looked like someone had gone inside through a missing basement window and then opened a main floor window to get out. The window was too high to reach to close so the local fellow went off to see if he could find someone to open the door so they could close the window.

It didn’t look like the visitor had damaged the inside.

We drove around for about an hour before we finally found a snowy owl. We saw a male high up on a power pole. We parked the car and walked slowly towards him to see if we could get a decent photo.

Even with a 500mm lens, he was pretty small in the frame. Luckily I have enough resolution to crop the image as, unsurprisingly, 1 pole away was as close as he let us get.

Unlike Lori, he had no problem showing us his butt as he flew straight away from us.

As we spotted the owl, I had noticed how big the moon looked and knew I’d love to get a shot of it while we were there.

I wanted the whole row of bins with the moon in the frame but because I had to shoot them with a much wider angle, the moon was pretty small in the frame. So, I cheated and took a photograph of the moon at 500 mm and used my fairly rudimentary Photoshop skills and put it into the frame shot at 150 mm. I know there are people out there that wouldn’t tell you what they did and let you think it could be done as shown, but I’m not one of those people.

We decided that we’d try to get to Rowley before sunset to see if we could get a nice shot or two so we headed off to see if we could make it.

Technically, we did as we got there just after 4:30 pm and sunset wasn’t until 4:45 pm.

We all ran around like headless chickens in different directions to grab as many photos as we could before the sun was gone.

The colour was fabulous but the light was going away quickly.

With the sun dipping below the horizon, it was time to head in the direction of home.

We stopped in Trochu for fuel and a pit stop before heading to Penhold to get Lori’s car.

It was smooth sailing all the way and we all got our stuff out and thanked Terry for driving headed home.

I got home at around 7:00 pm. It had been a long day. My feet were cold, my hands were cold and I was tired and glad to be home, but I so enjoyed out outing. I saw my first snowy owl in 4 trips out over 3 years so that was successful. I saw some new places and photographed some new things and now have new places to re-visit in the future.

Thanks again for Lori inviting me along, Terry for driving and Kim for being there as well. I still have no clear plans for photography this year, but I’ll endeavour to get my ass out and about more often.