Athabasca River
Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada

This photograph was made at sunrise in early August 2009 in Jasper National Park. I arrived at this location the evening before and before it got too dark, I scouted this location and decided on what I wanted to shoot the next morning. I thought that a composition that was just off to the left of this scene.

When I got there in the morning, I realized that my idea was not going to work, because the light was not as I envisioned it. The light I wanted was not downstream but rather across the river. I knew I had to change my strategy and I immediately started looking for a new composition. That’s when I noticed my girlfriend a little ways upstream shooting near these rocks. I walked over and I immediately knew that this was exactly what I was looking. I liked the great colours in the sky, the nice ripples in the water in the mid-ground and the rocks in the foreground really helped anchor the scene.

I mounted my 24mm TS-E lens on to my Canon 5Dmark2 and using the tilt feature, I adjusted the focus until everything from the foreground rocks to the background trees was tack sharp.  I used a 2 stop graduated ND filter to hold back the exposure on the sky and I used a 4 stop solid ND filter to get a longer shutter speed. I wanted a long shutter speed to get a nice motion blur on water. The 4 stop ND filter along with my f/16 aperture gave me an exposure of 16 seconds. My tripod was set low to the surface of the water to make the rocks more prominent in the frame.

Post processing on this image was fairly straightforward. I simply boosted the contrast a little bit and slightly lighted the dark trees. After that, I just resized, sharpened, and saved the image for the web.

Here is a photograph of me, shot by my girlfriend Katerina Berkova, shooting that morning in the Athabasca River. As you can see, in order to get this shot, I had to be ankle deep in an ice-cold glacial river for about 30 minutes. After the photo session, I crawled back in to my sleeping bag and it took almost 2 hours for my feet to warm up again.