I arrived in Banff in Alberta, Canada yesterday afternoon to beautiful, clear skies and temps in the 30s (F). Much better than the below-freezing temps and ice storms I left back home.

I took this shot of the constellation of Orion on a moonlit hike on frozen Lake Johnson last evening. I haven’t done a lot of night photography and was surprised by how much difficulty I had focussing (time exposures can mislead — it was much darker out than it appears in the photo). I had to switch to manual focus because it was too dark for the autofocus to lock. Knocking the focus all the way to infinity didn’t result in sharp images, however. I needed to “pull back from the edge” a bit and stop down to use the depth of field to widen my in-focus area. It still seemed hit or miss at times (cold and increasingly numb fingers — and brain — might have also been contributing) but I managed to get a few reasonably sharp images.

Another photographer I was with, Michael DeFreitas, suggested using a fluorescent white balance — something he had learn on shoots in the Antarctic. I have to admit, it did give fairly clean whites and nice rich blues in such dim light. Thanks, Michael. I look forward to getting these back to the big screen in the office to see what detail and color I can pull out of them.