Elora Photography Tour

Things have been a bit crazy lately with client assignments and I ended up working most of last weekend on a major market analysis project. Needing a bit of relaxation (and to clear my head of statistical data) I decided to go on a photography tour in the Elora, Ontario area. The day was simply wonderful with great weather and plenty of opportunities to capture some images. My day trip resulted in four different articles on my photography blog. I thought Photography Life readers may like to view some highlight images.

Southwestern Ontario has a lot of beautiful farm land and scenes like the one above can be found when travelling on some of the back roads. What caught my eye and caused me to pull over were the striking colour bands of the combination of the field and sky, and the rustic fence.

My first planned stop was at the West Montrose Covered Bridge. There are not that many covered bridges left in the province of Ontario and the West Montrose structure is a great place to visit.

There is some parkland adjacent to the bridge which is a nice spot for a family picnic or to do some canoeing or kayaking.

Plenty of wildflowers adorn the riverside and the combination of trees, flowers and the Grand River make for some pleasing image captures.

I am always attracted to repeating patterns and all things mechanical and couldn’t resist taking an image of the inside roof structure of the West Montrose bridge.

To capture the image above I tilted the rear screen on my Nikon 1 J5 into the ‘selfie’ position, held the camera at my waist and pointed the J5 straight up at the roof structure. By lining up the main supports with the grid on the rear screen of the J5 I was able to capture the image above. This is a 100% capture without any cropping or perspective control done to the image.

My next stop was the Elora Gorge Conservation Area. There are a number of hiking trails at the facility, some of which follow along the Elora Gorge. The image above is very representative of the type of forest trails at the conservation area.

To access one of the Elora Gorge outlooks you must descend down through a natural rock tunnel. Metal stairways have been constructed to make the descent easier and safer. Returning back up the staircase yielded the image opportunity above. I needed to do some simple perspective control adjustments in DxO OpticsPro 10 Elite to the image.

Most of the views of the Elora Gorge are somewhat obstructed by the forest coverage making image captures difficult. I continued on along the conservation area road. It took me down to the water level of the Grand River which I found to be much more picturesque.

There is no parking at the ‘low bridge’ area on the conservation road so I needed to park my car up on the other side of the gorge and walk back to the ‘low bridge’ area to capture the previous two images.

Next I ventured into the town of Elora. I couldn’t help but explore an old ruin adjacent to the river. I find these kinds of structures are just incredible in terms of the character that they exude.

Much of the structure was being propped up with thick beams to keep it from falling over and potentially causing injuries or worse.

My eye is always attracted to details and the roof joist poking through the brick wall in the image above called out to me.

I then proceeded into the town of Elora and did a bit of street photography. There is a wide array of photographic subject matter in this beautiful town. Old stone buildings, eclectic shops and eateries, splashes of colour, and of course, views of the Grand River.

I have only had my Nikon 1 J5 for a few weeks and I’m still getting used to shooting with a camera that does not have an EVF. The tilt rear screen does help to minimize glare, but from time to time it is a bit tricky to get the exact framing that I want in an image.

Overall, I really enjoy using the Nikon 1 J5 and I really appreciate the improved performance of the 20.8MP BSI sensor in the J5. It provides noticeably better dynamic range and colour depth than the Aptina sensors in my trio of V2’s. When working with images in post there is simply much more latitude in the J5 RAW files.

After only shooting with the Nikon 1 J5 for about a week, I decided to purchase a second copy of the camera. These will be my main cameras for landscape photography, macro type images when shooting with extension tubes, street photography and for general travel use.

My Elora photography tour was just what the doctor ordered. I came back refreshed and with quite a few useable images.

Technical Note:
All images in this article were captured hand-held using a Nikon 1 J5 and a 1 Nikon 10-100mm f/4-5.6 VR zoom lens. All photographs in this article were processed from RAW files using my standard post process of DxO OpticsPro 10, CS6 and Nik Suite.

Article and all images Copyright 2016 Thomas Stirr. All rights reserved. No use, adaptation or reproduction of any kind is allowed without express written consent. Photography Life is the only approved user of this article. If you see it reproduced anywhere else it is an unauthorized and illegal use.