The title of this blog post came from the old song of the same name. It aptly describes my feeling and mood when we set out before dawn and headed up the Icefields Parkway. The drive from the town of Banff to Lake Louise is about 40 minutes, and, while it has very nice scenery, it doesn't have the star power of the Icefields Parkway. About three kilometers north of Lake Louise, the first magical landscape emerges, and that is little Herbert Lake pictured in this image. It is literally three feet off the road. You might drive past it, and, if you weren't paying attention, miss it completely.
This is a sunrise location, when the sun begins to glow off the mountain peaks. If you are lucky, like Jeff Clow and I were this morning, the water is glass-like and gives you a beautiful reflection. This is a panorama taken with the Sony A7 with it's automatic pano feature. While the quality is not up to the standards of doing a proper panorama, it sure is easier and less time consuming. It works by taking about 10-20 photos, stitches them together in camera, and then produces a JPEG file. The one thing I wished it did was save all of the separate files that make up the panorama so that they could be put together in Photoshop.
This was the first morning Jeff and I shot and was a portent of what was to come in the following days.