I felt like I was barely home long enough to get the laundry from our anniversary getaway done and I was back on the road, heading to Pincher Creek on Thursday, May 22nd, for the Lightchasers Nature Photography Conferences. McBain has been a title sponsor since it started 4 years ago and this is will be my 3rd year working it.

The plan was for me to meet our Outings and Workshop coordinator, Jileane Harsch, and General Manager, Rene Rodrique, at the Pincher Creek Community Hall to set up our booth to be ready for go time Friday morning. They beat me there and had it pretty much done when I arrived, so we finished up and headed to the Heritage Inn Hotel & Convention Centre to check in to our rooms.

Check in was smooth and after a bit of a rest, we headed out for supper and found The Hut Café (Resto Bar & Patio). We enjoyed a good meal, then went in search of a photo or two before we had to retire for the night. Usually, we go for a drive in search of adventure but Rene and I decided it would be an early night so we walked downtown to see what we could find.

I didn’t feel overly inspired but driving days often go that way. Hopefully, tomorrow will offer up more things that catch my eye.

After a pretty decent sleep and the breakfast buffet at the hotel, it was time to get ready for the masses at the convention.

This year’s set up is the best one I’ve seen so far. The convention centre has plenty of room for attendees and us vendors with room to spare. This bodes well going forward.

The day zoomed by alternating between fantastic presenters and people coming to the booth to shop, lunch, repeat the morning’s order and suddenly, it was 5 o’clock. Time to pack up for the evening, relax for a bit, and then grab some supper. Tonight, the destination is the Twin Butte Country General Store for some fabulous Mexican food. Our Sigma rep, Danny Lee, met us there as he had never tried it. We were not disappointed.

We headed south and east for a change of pace and found some stuff that caught our eyes.

We were starting to lose our nice light as we headed back but manage to make 1 more stop.

I saw a couple of places that would have been nice to stop at but the light wasn’t favourable so perhaps another time.

With Rene, heading into Lethbridge to pick up stock from our store there, Jileane and I were free to avoid yet another hotel breakfast, so we decided to try Seeds. They are supplying the lunches for the convention and yesterday’s was pretty good. Their breakfast was pretty good as well and we headed to the hall to set up for today’s festivities.

It was another hectic day of taking and filling orders and listening to some pretty good presenters and seeing some outstanding photography.

Spookie_Bugz enjoyed it as well.

After a bit of rest time, Rene picked us up some pizza and wings for supper. We enjoyed it outside on a pretty sketchy picnic table at the hotel before joining Fujifilm at their breakout session – Limber Pine Ridge Sunset. I was pretty happy with this outing as I had borrowed a Fujifilm GFX-100SII medium format digital camera and a 45-100 f/4 lens from them and was looking for an opportunity to use it.

100 megapixel camera with a large sensor, I’ll probably hate it.

The downside of doing a sunset shoot on a ridge is it’s all up hill. It looks like a big hill but when you have a camera there’s lots of excuses to stop and take a photo and not look like it’s a rest stop.

Still had a lot of hill to climb, oh look, pretty yellow flowers.

Not at the top yet, but getting closer.

I finally made it to the top of the ridge. There are some pretty nice views to behold from up there.

I liked the character some of the trees had.

I found evidence other photographers were about.

I thought I’d try a couple of photos at opposite ends of my zoom lens.

The light was so nice and I photographed as many different angles as I could.

The light was still nice and as much as sunset probably would have been fantastic, we decided we didn’t want to walk down the hill in the dark so we said our goodbyes and started back down to the car.

I wish I could say that shooting with the Fuji sucked, but the weight wasn’t at all bad and I really, really liked the files. I’d have to sell all my Sony stuff to get one. Hmmmm.

One more long day tomorrow and the conferences will be over.

Jileane and I had breakfast in at the hotel with some of the reps and the boys from The Camera Store as Rene was once again heading to Lethbridge to restock us. Yesterday’s breakfast was way better.

We set up for the day and enjoyed more great speakers between spurts of being really busy.

And suddenly, it was all over and we were packing up. Shane Turgeon and his crew did a phenomenal job with the conferences. It looked like attendees got their monies worth and it sounds like most are planning on attending again next year.

We dropped off our stuff at the hotel and hit DQ for a quick supper before heading down to Waterton Lakes National Park of Canada. We saw a brown phase, black bear not far from the townsite but had no place to stop for a photo so we carried on our way towards Cameron Lake.

We didn’t get very far when Rene like the look of the landscape so we pulled over to see what was what.

I had my Zeiss Batis 135 f/2.8 lens on my camera as I got out to scope out some photos.

As I looked around I decided my 40mm lens is what I wanted to switch to. But, since Rene had locked the car and wandered up the hill and I wasn’t doing any climbing 2 days in a row, I set about to use what I got.

My 40mm is a lot better as a macro lens but I thought I’d try a few flower photos anyway.

I went back to the area Jileane and Rene went to to sit and wait for them. I manage to fit them both into a photo.

Because they were both down in the gully, they didn’t see the wildlife I could. Since I had my biggest lens on, it was a cinch to get a photo. Well. cinch is not exactly correct but I thought it made for a nice environmental portrait of the bighorn ram.

The ram had already laid down when Jileane and Rene came back so I don’t think they saw him.

We headed a bit further up the road to see what else we could find to photograph.

We decided it was time to head back to the hotel for the night so it wouldn’t be too late getting in.

I saw some moose and a couple of coyotes on the way back but it’s not like the lens I had would have done the job to photograph them so I never pointed them out. Some other places caught my eye to revisit at some point. Hopefully, I’ll remember some of them.

After we got all our stuff packed into the vehicles and checked out we decided to have breakfast together before we got on the road. I had liked the coffee at The Hut Café and wanted to try their breakfast. We all had a power bowl and it was pretty darn good.

I had decided I would take the scenic route home as I had never been to Lundbreck Falls Provincial Recreation Area in all my visits to the area.

It was a nice stop and I headed up highway 22. There was bridge construction in a few spots so I had a few delays along the way but since I wasn’t in any hurry, it was kind of nice.

As I drove along, I thought it ironic that as a photographer, I often capture images in fractions of a second, but I was really enjoying the scenery slowly changing as I drove.

Since I was on highway 22, I was really close to my happy place – Big Hill Springs Provincial Park. It makes for a convenient pit stop and since the park itself wasn’t very busy, a good excuse to photograph some waterfalls.

Feeling refreshed, it was time to make the final drive home. I got home around 5:20pm. It had been a long day and that had been my choice but it was nice to be home.

Lightchasers was a good experience and even though it make for some long day; not as long as attendees days if they chose to do the breakout sessions, it was a lot of fun. I get to meet new people, see familiar faces and see and hear some fantastic photographers. I’ll be up to go back next year if the powers that be deem it so.