He Ho! Let's go (Voyageur Bop)

I’m not a fan of winter - anything you can’t drive a motorcycle in just doesn’t seem like fun to me. But the one event that can sway me (other than aurora borealis) is western Canada’s biggest winter festival, the wonderful Festivalé du Voyageur.

I had the good luck to photograph this year’s festival for online news outlet ChrisD.ca — my first time at the event since 2020. Go figure, the past few years have been eventful…

My favourite way of working - just wandering, packing just a few lenses - seems to produce my favourite kinds of photographs: small decisive moments that showcase people and light. Did I mention the light? As a festival devoted to the fur trade period of c.1815, the historical re-enactments in Fort Gibraltar have period lighting, namely lantern or window. I absolutely love it.
And you will too. I highly recommend checking out the FDV in the week it has remaining! The website linked has a full schedule.

Louis Gagne twirls a carefully groomed moustache in his role as a French Canadian fur trader at Fort Gibraltar, circa 1815.

Historical re-enactors portraying soldiers hired by Lord Selkirk fire muskets during a demonstration at Whittier Park.

Dancers with the Spirit Sands Singers await the start of a powwow, helping expand the understanding of First Nations presence during the early 19th century fur trade in Manitoba.

Participants in the international snow sculpture contest help their creation take shape near the gates of Fort Gibraltar, in Winnipeg’s Whittier Park.

The currency of the early 1800’s in western Canada - furs, on display in one of the historical re-enactment displays at Festivalé du Voyageur.

Cold air and hot tea, at a display in Fort Gibraltar.

Volunteer blacksmiths work on actual iron items exactly like those needed in everyday life at Fort Gibraltar in 1815.

Winnipeg trio Sweet Alibi performs at the 2023 Festivalé du Voyageur, joining local artists providing sounds from EDM to fiddle and jig to rock.

John Kosse lights up the first night of the 2023 Festivalé du Voyageur. Kosse was one of a group of representatives from the St. Paul Minnesota winter festival attending Winnipeg’s event.

The JD Edwards Band opens the 2023 Festivalé du Voyageur.

Friends, fire, festivalé.

A perennial festival favourite is maple taffy - just add snow and roll.

Initially an accident with leaving my camera on a different setting, I really liked the impressionist effect this had, to give a mood or feeling to this timeless scene. The irony is if I deliberately set out to make a photo like this, I probably wouldn’t do as well as this one!

Goddesses, Dragons and Ancestors

This past month has seen a lot of different photography for me, from portraits to street to even wildlife (OK, pelicans), but I’m returning to the topic of Northern Lights because…well, because magic doesn’t happen very often.

And that’s the only way to describe looking up and seeing the sky dance with softly glowing colours, in the kind of soft comforting silence you can only get from true solitude.

The aurora borealis is a result of solar radiation interacting with the Earth’s upper atmosphere — think of what happens to a neon bulb when you run electricity through it — but standing beneath it, it’s hard to reduce it to just that. There are a lot of legends surrounding the Northern Lights — from goddesses ushering in a new day, to dragons battling for good and evil and (most poetically, to me) the First Nations of North America seeing them as echoes of departed people moving and speaking to them in the infinity of the sky.

My latest aurora encounter began after a long day working. From the numbers coming in on solar activity, and an admin on a Facebook group far more versed in crunching the data, it looked like Friday night/Saturday morning would offer very good chances for spotting the Lights. Happily, the clouds and cold of recent days had departed and it looked ideal for trying one’s luck.
With that, I set out around midnight for a 2 hour drive away from the light pollution - and unfortunately increasing crowds - of the city. Several times I stopped by the side of a highway to gaze at the lights which already had made an appearance…I knew I’d made the right decision despite being on Hour 17 without sleep.

Pulling into my destination all weariness and doubt immediately fell away, as how right my choice was dazzled the sky overhead. Far from being confined low to the horizon, these lights were far brighter and covered at least half the sky. Like I said: magic!

Our sun is currently entering into an active phase of its regular cycle, so there’s a good chance these displays will return. My humble advice, if you want to witness them for yourself: approach them reverently and with respect and take the time to let it unfold. Aurora are unpredictable - they may show up early, or not until late into the night, and they may dance for hours, or minutes.
Set aside more time than you originally planned. It’s rare that we get an opportunity to sit in silence, with no demand to ‘do’ something or justify our time. Make the most of it!

The hot new activity of late winter/early spring in Manitoba (for better or worse) is aurora-spotting, thanks to an upswing in solar activity. The Northern Lights are notoriously fickle — one night they appear, the next they don’t and there’s no set time when they ‘usually’ show up. Forecasting is vague, but maybe it’s all these factors that make it so magical when it finally does appear before your eyes.

True to their name, the further north you go the more visible they become. Near the capital city down south, they are usually a glowing line on the horizon, but occasionally the output from solar flares or sunspots is high enough that shimmering bands of green and violet can appear overhead. Regardless, moving as far from city lights and its attendant light pollution will only make it easier to see, with the happy benefit of seeing just how many stars do fill the inky black night sky.
Happily, the regular cycle of our sun is tracking upwards, so the months ahead should give more opportunities to see (and photograph) them yourself.

On that note, these images were made with a DSLR and a wide angle (24mm) lens, wide open at f/1.4 and 20 seconds. Depending on your focal length, any longer than 20-25 seconds and you’ll start to have the stars ‘trail’ or blur from the rotation of the Earth. Some photographers crank up their ISO to 6400 or above in order to get much shorter exposure times, or because their lenses don’t open up past f/2.8 or higher — that’s a (somewhat) viable option now that digital sensors are so much better, but I prefer to keep my ISO as low as possible.
Also keep in mind that ‘infinity’ focus on your lens doesn’t actually focus on infinity! Simply turning your lens all the way to the infinity setting will result in blurry stars. If you have Live View on your camera, turn it on, zoom in on a bright star and manually focus your lens until it’s sharp, then leave your focus where it is and shoot away.

Good luck!

The aurora borealis dances in the sky above the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg.

The red flashlight from a head lamp of fellow photographer leaves a trail during a long exposure. Red lights are used for night photography because they don’t ruin the photographer’s night vision.

A few aurora spotters watch silently beneath the lights, with the lights of nearby small towns and farms on the horizon.

I had thought the aurora had died down for the night, and was driving home when one look through my rear-view mirror showed they had flared back up again. Did I mention the Northern Lights are fickle and unpredictable?

Star trails made using the StarStax app (see previous blog post for details on the app).

As the world turns

I’ve never tried my hand at astrophotography, but recently I learned of a traditional Thai “spirit house” in rural Manitoba. This phenomenon is commonplace almost everywhere in Thailand, a devoutly Buddhist nation with a prior history of animism and spirit worship - but understandably rare in Manitoba.
Once I saw it for myself, though, I knew almost immediately that its juxtaposition with a faraway land and culture would best be expressed by a show of the Northern Lights with it. While the aurora did not make an appearance - yet - I did have a crystal-clear sky to work with and a perfect vantage point centering on Polaris, which would offer a focal point for my image.

Adding to the excitement was the fact Manitoba is currently in the grips of a brutal cold snap, and my set-up was done in temperatures of -40 degrees Celsius. It’s nothing proper clothing and preparation can’t handle, but it definitely made working slower and more challenging. As did hearing a pack of coyotes howling in the woods surrounding the site - something the resident sled dogs responded to in kind!

I’m happy with how the shot turned out - while I would have preferred a show of the Aurora I was lucky that a ‘radial’ type display of star trails could still be had with this unique cultural marker. On the technical side, I used a free program called Star StaX and combined 60 separate photographs (looking basically like the second shot here) to make the final lead image. I’d recommend this program, it’s easy and basically self-explanatory to use, does not downsize or reduce your final image, and did I mention it’s free? The third image gives a view of the app’s homepage; be sure to select the download that corresponds to your Mac’s current operating software.

The sun-dog days of winter

The sight of sun-dogs — parhelion for the meteorologists in the crowd — is a hallmark of bitterly cold days here. Caused most commonly by ice crystals suspended in clouds or floating freely in the air, these crystals act as prisms, bending light into a spectacular display in the sky when the conditions are right.

Wikipedia was kind enough to mention that sun-dogs can exist on other planets, too:

Mars might have sun dogs formed by both water-ice and CO2-ice. On the gas giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—other crystals form clouds of ammonia, methane, and other substances that can produce halos with four or more sun dogs.[8]

My work more commonly involves portraits, street photography and people in general — that obviously is on hiatus now with the lockdowns imposed by our provincial governments in grappling with the pandemic. But that leaves an opening to pursue different subjects and different pursuits with a camera, in my case the landscapes and places around our city. As long as you’re dressed for it, there’s a lot of beauty to be seen!

Frosty Reception

There’s a lot about winter to dislike - the bitter winds and cold, the lack of green and plants, the long dark nights. Which is why it’s more inspiring when a city finds a way to not just endure winter but enjoy it.
Over the years, Winnipeg has - piece by piece - found ways to really make our famous winters come alive and bring people together. It’s a lot easier to get outside and actually see what the season offers visually when there’s so much going on.

This week, unusually mild temperatures brought fog and mist, and the next morning the whole city was coated in beautiful hoarfrost. Seeing a frosted city was just too good to resist, and judging by local social media that day my choice was a popular one. Hopefully I found a few scenes not already documented on the #Winnipeg hashtag.
The warmth, and the hunger to get outside and active after a very stifled pandemic year, have made our rivers and parks much busier places.

The Saint Boniface Cathedral is seen across the Red River nestled in a forest of hoarfrost.

Skaters take to the ice on the Assiniboine River at The Forks in Winnipeg.

The gates of Saint Boniface Cemetery, gilded with frost, frame the historic Cathedral.

Skaters catch the sun at Assiniboine Park, with the Pavilion seen in the background left and a tobogganing run at right.

There’s a lot of competition for the title of “Winter Wonderland” this year, but one family in Wolseley has carved out a real front-runner on the Assiniboine River. It joins a grassroots-created network of skating and skiing trails and rinks in the area.

The ‘Roaring Game’ of curling has found a home on the Assiniboine between the neighbourhoods of Wolseley and River Heights.

A sundial sculpture, entitled “The Passage of Time” by artist Marcel Gosselin, is seen at The Forks in Winnipeg.