Photos

This was taken inside the Banff Park Museum National Historic Site of Canada, from the second floor. There are many wonderful artifacts and stuffed creatures packed densely into this small museum. Unlike most things in Banff, it was inexpensive to get in for a visit.

It is set up as if it were 1914. Some of the creatures were actually collected before that - they've done a wonderful job of keeping the specimens in excellent condition.

The building was undergoing some renovation when I was there, or else I would probably have some mundane picture of the exterior. To it's credit, this building does have a distinctive shape and is a historic site, but the real views are inside. I captured several and I had a hard time deciding which one presented the museum the best. I chose this one because it depicts the lighting provided by the built in "lantern" in the middle of the building and it is not so crowded with a plethora of other items as to distract your eye from the actual idea of the shot, which was to present the museum as a whole. I don't know if I succeeded, but it is the best I have without posting two or more workshops to amplify.

I used my kit 18-135mm lens, left it stopped at about f3.5 and focused for the center, on the elk's antlers. It retained a fair depth of field, I think, and did a decent job of keeping my shaky hands from ruining the shot by staying at a fairly quick shutter speed and not a terrible ISO. I did use DxO Optic Pro to recover some of the lens distortion that was introduced by my attempt to "get it all in" once again. Then I used PS CS2 to bring forth some of the shadows, reduce noise, build the frame, reduce the size to 800 pixels, sharpen a little bit and then save at less than 300kb for display here.

Thanks for checking it out - be sure to take a look at my Travelogue of our Canadian Rockies vacation, especially if you are thinking about taking a trip to this wonderful destination. We took Amtrak most of the way!