OK, we are finally back from our vacation! Unfortunately I have been so swamped with work this week that I haven't had much time to process photos. So, it might take me a little while to catch up with my "Picture Of The Week", and possibly even longer to get all the rest of the photos up on my Picasa Web Album.

For those who are wondering, the trip was fantastic. I'd like to do it again someday, but three weeks really isn't enough time to see the entire west side of Canada, especially if you have to drive 80% of the time. But, we still saw a lot of cool animals along the road, and had time to spend multiple days in Banff and Jasper, and visited some very interesting national and provincial parks along the way. We also took interesting routes on the way back, to avoid covering the same highway twice, and I logged a total of almost 12,000 km on my car.

Anyway, on with the show. I couldn't decide whether to put pictures up in chronological order or geographical order, so I settled on "random order".

This photo was taken near the end of our trip, as we were coming home through Manitoba. It was late at night and we were trying to get to Riding Mountain National Park. Coming in from the north entrance, we stopped at the first campground, which was "Moon Lake".

All I can say is that the name of the campground is incredibly accurate, because this was the sight we saw as we drove around trying to find an empty campsite.

Stay tuned for more trip pictures coming up in the next few days.

Emotional details: It was very dark when we arrived at the park. I could see the moon and the lake while we were looking for a spot to camp, but the campsite with the view wasn't very nice, so we pressed on and found a better campsite. Once we had our site set up, Angela and I walked back to where I had seen the moon, and we found a path that led to the lake. It was very dark, and Angela was a little frightened of being in the woods, based on the sheer number of animals we had already encountered on the trip. She jumped a few times when we came across a large rock, then a large tree stump, and then again when some insect in a tree started making a noise that sounded like a large animal snoring. The grass was long and damp, but we managed to get close enough to the water that I could set up my tripod and get a 30 second exposure without too many trees in the way. Then we hightailed it back to the safety of our campsite, where I took a quick fisheye shot of the starry sky that we could see from there. You should be able to find that shot on my Picasa Web Album. Also check out Angela's Picasa Web Album.

Technical details: This was shot with my Rebel XT + kit lens at 18mm, ISO 100, f/8 for 30 seconds. I processed the RAW file for 5 different exposures and ran it through Photoshop's Merge to HDR function to try to extract as much detail as possible.

Comments

Glad to hear you guys are back.  Sounds like a fantastic trip!	Can't wait to
see the rest of your pictures.

Thank you for thoughtfully adding those emotional details that I so deeply
crave.	;)