This past weekend Jo asked me if I had any free nights on my hotel.com account. There was one free night ready for use, and Jo suggested we use it to go to Sun Peaks and do some late-night photography. She had happened on some photos in a winter advertisement and thought there was another photo opportunity for us.
Of course, I am always up to going to someplace new with my camera, so we booked the hotel room and headed off to spend Saturday evening photographing the Sun Peaks village. Jo took a 14-24mm lens, her tripod and, just in case we started early, some neutral density filters. I had my 16-35mm and tripod.
We had planned on having dinner at one of the many restaurants, but as luck would have it there was some sort of mountain biking event with lots of teenagers. Between them, the accompanying adults, and four tour busses of tourists, the only place one could get anything to eat was Mountain High Pizza. We ordered a large vegetarian pizza and sat down on some outdoor walkway chairs to eat and listen to music. (I will mention that that vegetarian pizza was so very good.)
The lights along the brick street between the shops turned on as soon as it got dark, and there were strings of lights zigzagging between the buildings overhead. What a great place to have fun doing photography! Jo was right about another photo opportunity.
I expect that apart from resident photographers who seemed to mostly photograph the place during the snowy winter, the brightly-lit streets of Sun Peaks Village on summer and early fall nights are mostly ignored. But gosh, it’s a really fun location to photograph on a cool September night.
I had my camera set at 500 ISO with a two- or three-second shutter speed, and easily get lots of depth-of-field with F/8 or F/16. I think Jo may have been using a slower ISO. I saw her taking a photo with several people walking in the street who would disappear with a long exposure.
I think that many photographers find one or two subjects that they are good at photographing and don’t bother with anything else. But getting creative with all sorts of subjects in all sorts of locations under all sorts of conditions makes this exciting medium so interesting and so enjoyable.
The pedestrian village offers many interesting places to put a tripod at night to shoot from. The brick-covered street is not for cars. It’s for pedestrians (and bicycles in the summer), so a photographer can place a tripod anywhere and get great long exposures at night.
I know we didn’t have to stay overnight. The distance from my home in Pritchard to Sun Peaks Village is just a one-hour drive, and it's only 45 minutes from Kamloops, so it’s not really a necessity to stay overnight. But what the heck: I had that free night, and getting up in the morning in that charming mountain resort and walking to one of the many coffee shops was nice.
I’ll suggest that Sun Peaks is a neat place for any photographer who wants to try out a new location.
Stay safe and be creative. These are my thoughts for this week. Contact me at www.enmanscamera.com or emcam@telus.net.
