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Red Rock Coulee
Photo: ©Mike
Grandmaison
The features at Red Rock Coulee are just not
what you’d expect to see after having driven
a long, straight, prairie road. Seemingly
emerging from nowhere, these limestone
concretions look rather “alien” in appearance.
One might even think you’ve arrived in
Bedrock and expect Fred or Barney to greet
you around the corner.
But real these rocks are. And it’s hard to
resist going back just one more time as you
drive by on your next trip across southern
Alberta. Once again, I couldn’t pass up the
occasion a few weeks ago. The irony though
is that this particular image of gigantic rocks
that were formed in prehistoric times was
made two years ago, with a digital camera
that I have since changed three times. While
the concretion has barely changed in eons
of time, the digital technology we embrace
to make these photographs has evolved in
leaps and bounds in the last few years.
With contradictions aside, this is one place
worth discovering. Armed with a wide-angle
lens and orienting it into a vertical position,
choosing a small ƒ-stop allowed me to capture
detail from foreground to background.
By placing the wide-angle lens close to the
lichen-coated concretion, I was able to exaggerate
its size in relation to the more distant
concretions, thus creating a greater sense of
depth in the image. I tripped the shutter as
the first rays of sunlight began to rake across
the face of the concretion. This, combined
with the shadowed middle ground, added a
further sense of depth and created a contrast
of warm and cool colours.
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