a western canadian vacation: aurora borealis watching in yellowknife.

october 5, 2009 at 21:00 by felix. no comments.

on our last night in yellowknife, we had the luck to see an aurora borealis. experiencing an aurora is something hard to describe. the following photos and videos just give a small glimpse of its wafting beauty.

for the more technically interested people, the camera settings i used for most photos are a shutter speed of 8 seconds, aperture of f/4.0 and iso sensitivity of 800. this was the first time where i was really happy that i have a remote for my camera’s shutter and a tripod. below you can view some videos, taken with these settings (hence, between two frames there are around 8 seconds delay). there are six frames per second, whence the videos are around 48 times faster as the real aurora was. each video comes as a flash player together with an avi download (the avi files contain essentially a sequence of jpeg files, so no fancy codec is required).

download this movie.

a western canadian vacation: yellowknife's great slave lake.

october 5, 2009 at 19:00 by felix. no comments.

another day, we did a trip to the great slave lake, a huge lake (its area takes 7% of germany’s area, or two thirds of switzerland’s area).

posted in: panoramas photos traveling
tags: canada great slave lake northwest terretories panoramas photos yellowknife
places: canada great slave lake northwest terretories yellowknife

a western canadian vacation: yellowknife's frame lake.

october 5, 2009 at 13:00 by felix. no comments.

we started our canada tour by flying up to yellowknife, the capital of canadas northwest territories. it’s a town having around 20.000 inhabitants, but it is probably the most touristic place in the northwest of canada, and there are a lot of (non-expensive) flights going there. and, one reason why we went there, it’s quite likely that you can see northern lights. besides that, the area is also very different from southern canada.
on our first day there, it was sunny and we did a hike on the trail around frame lake. this resulted in many beautiful views and photos, some of whose can be seen here:

posted in: panoramas photos traveling
tags: canada frame lake hiking northwest terretories panoramas photos telephoto lens vacation yellowknife
places: canada frame lake northwest terretories yellowknife

a western canadian vacation: calgary's zoo.

october 5, 2009 at 07:00 by felix. one comment.

next, we did a trip to calgary’s zoo.

the zoo contains a dinosaur part, which i didn’t really commented on last time. it features a landscape which is supposed to look like back then, and a few dinosaur models. some of these models look really unrealistic, or more funny. the following photos also feature some of those: