Beauty In The Gloom
You know when you look outside, the weather is garbage, and say to yourself, “Self, let’s just stay inside, where it’s nice and cozy, make a cup of coffee, sort through some emails, and doom scroll for a few hours.” Yeah, that’s me on any given nasty weather day.
But not this past Sunday. I checked the forecast on Saturday night, which told me that there was a “slight” chance of rain (drizzle) on Sunday starting at around noon, so I set my alarm for 7:00am, got up, looked outside, no rain. Yet.
Gathered my gear, and headed out to a wonderful local park here in the Greater Vancouver area called Burnaby Lake Park.
Burnaby Lake is large lake right smack in he middle of the City of Burnaby (the city adjacent to the City of Vancouver) and it’s known for it’s wild nature, fantastic walking paths, and rowing. You see, back in 1973, Burnaby co-hosted the Canada Summer Games with the City of New Wesminster and in doing so, they built a rowing complex and pavilion on Burnaby Lake for the competitions. Ever since then, it has been home to Rowing Clubs, who use the lake for training and competitions.
In addition to a great pavilion from which to watch the rowers do their thing, there is a great network of well maintained walking trails that go all the way around the lake and the total distance around the lake is 10 kms. The trails offer up some really good photography and videography opportunities no matter what time of year it is, or what the weather is doing. I just happened to be down there on a damp drizzle-y Sunday morning to capture the last Autumn colours before the stark grey days of Winter really set in.
I didn’t really set out with a plan on what I wanted to capture, I just wanted to get out in nature, see what it had to offer up in terms of photography opportunities and see where the day took me. I was not disappointed. The Autumn colours were still in effect, the damp from the previous night’s rain was still covering everything and the rowers out on the lake made for some really great footage. It all worked out just perfectly.
My kit for the day was my trusty Pentax K3 Mark III DSLR, my Tamron 70-200mm f2.8, my vintage manual Pentax 50mm f2.0, my Pentax 35mm f2.4, and of course, my Manfrotto Element Traveller Carbon Fiber Tripod all packed away into my Tenba Axis V2 backpack. All in all, a good kit to capture the days adventures.
Here are some of what I managed to come away with:
