Over the last few years I have been asked many times about how I take my night shots. Mostly if it depends on the camera, the settings, the lenses and what not. Usually I don’t really answer the question. Because there is no real definitive answer.

What I can talk about is how I started out and what has become of my view of the night sky and night vision.

Read more: Acquiring night vision

This hasn’t happened a lot lately. Having a job, a home to care for and lots of other things to do that arrive without warning, free time seems to be in short supply. So when the opportunity arises, I take it with both hands.

Last week we went for a short drive into the Whiteshell Provincial Park. Nothing fancy, just starting at Rennie and finishing on the other end of highway 307. When we arrived at Brereton Lake, we thought it would be full of people, swimmers and so on. After all the summer has been quite warm. Unfortunately, the recent t-storms have rendered the water pretty cold. As well as a bit murky.

Read more: An afternoon off

It sounds like the title of a song. It might as well be, when the time from dusk till dawn is spend inside Winnipeg, shooting… For many people, being outside during the night is a “sin”: you should be at home, be with your family and enjoy the homely life. For photographers, this enjoyable, indispensable part of life must inexorably be supplemented with time outside. With a camera, of course.

While I don’t consider myself a photographer, that is, a professional one, I do like to go out during the night, shoot all kinds of cityscapes and landscapes and then come back to the comfort of my home.

Read more: From dusk till dawn

We’ve all experienced this. Early morning, you get up, taking care of Nature’s business and you look outside to see… nothing. Everything is white and no way to see a hand in front of your eyes. Well, maybe I exaggerate a little here, but you get the idea. My usual reaction to this phenomenon is to get back to bed. Sometimes, however, the opportunity is too good to pass up and I go outside instead.

The last time this happened, my cat had woken me up, triggering nature’s calls and a serious invite to feed the furry animal. After that was taken care of, I looked outside and thought to myself: “Self, you should go outside and shoot some of this!”. So that’s what I did.

Read more: Early morning dampness

This summer we are being treated again to a number of very interesting skies. I never get tired of them, even if some make me feel a bit uneasy. The first storm of the year for me was pretty far away, over Lake Winnipeg and witnessed from Matheson Island.

At first glance it doesn’t look like much, but we could hear the thunder from that distance. That meant that the storm was pretty intense. I can only hope there was nobody unlucky enough to find himself underneath it.

Read more: Skies of Manitoba (8)

A few days ago we wanted to get out of the city, out of the near neighbourhood of the city. Into the wilderness, so to speak. With Winnipeg as a starting point that always includes a fair amount of driving to get somewhere. Be it Riding Mountain National Park or the Whiteshell Provincial Park, driving a lot remains part of the trip. Nopiming Provincial Park is the same, just in a different direction.

We started relatively early in the morning, with the heat already building up. On the road to Nopiming, the sky grew more and more cloudy. Little did we know that those clouds were the outskirts of the tornado-like weather they had in Ontario that day. The only weather we got was cloudy and a little rain.

Read more: Nopiming

Seasons come, seasons go. When it’s stiflingly cold, we long for the warm summer. When summer finally arrives and presents its scorching 30+ degrees, we long for spring or fall. When they come, we want the brisk freezing air again because the roads are so dirty and the cars are wearing the roads like a cloak, it seems. Whatever season we are in, we always want the “other” season to be here. So why don’t we simply stop complaining and enjoy what we have at hand?

Because that’s not in our nature. Humans always want what they don’t have. So here are a few birds that we don’t have right now. You can still enjoy them over a nice cool beer on the patio, no problem there

Read more: Gone hunting