A 2:1 panoramic photograph of Bow Lake and its autumn meadow beneath the Rockies, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada, available as a limited edition print in three sizes.
Artist's Story
I got to Bow Lake before sunrise and then waited several hours for something to happen. The cloud stayed heavy and the light stayed flat. What held me in the end was the ground rather than the water.
The meadow in front of me was running two colors, yellow and red, and those are two different events.
The yellow was already in the leaf. Carotenoids sit there all summer under the chlorophyll, and when a plant pulls the chlorophyll back at the end of the season the yellow is what is left uncovered. Nothing is manufactured. The red runs the other way around. Anthocyanins are not present during the growing season at all. The plant builds them in autumn, days or weeks before the leaf falls, and bright light on a cold leaf is what starts the process.
So the two halves of this meadow are doing opposite things at the same time. One is a subtraction and the other is a construction. Why a plant would build a pigment into tissue it is about to drop is still argued over, with sunscreen for the leaf while the plant withdraws its nutrients as the leading account. Measured across this frame the meadow band runs fifty-two points red on the difference between the red and blue channels while the sky above runs twenty-seven points blue, a spread of seventy-nine points from top to bottom of one picture.
Alpine Serenity is a lake most people come to photograph, over a meadow that was the busiest thing in the valley that morning.
This crop is 32 percent of the frame width, about 26 inches across on the 80 inch print. The shrubs have broken apart plant by plant, and the red ones and the yellow ones read as different plants rather than a blended field. The stream shows its separate channels with pebbles visible through the shallows, and along the still water the shrubs and the cloud above them come back as reflections. Click to view at full size.
About This Photograph
Bow Lake, on the Icefields Parkway in Banff National Park, Alberta, in autumn under heavy cloud. Single frame. The lake is fed by meltwater running down from the icefield above it, and the outflow crosses the meadow in the foreground before reaching the valley below.
The open ground here is meadow rather than forest because of water. Conifer roots need oxygen, and saturated soil holds very little of it, so where a braided stream keeps the ground wet the trees cannot establish and low shrubs take the space instead. The boundary is visible in the frame: conifers standing on the raised drier banks, shrub filling everything between them.
Measured across the frame, the tonal spread is the widest of any photograph in this collection. The luminance is also unusually even across the width, varying by only eight points through the middle four-fifths of the picture.
Alpine Serenity
Steve Austinhttps://www.steveaustinphotography.com/
Location
Bow Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
Subject
Bow Lake · autumn meadow · Canadian Rockies
Capture
Single frame, autumn
Format
Photograph · horizontal panorama, 2:1
Sizes
40 × 20 in · 60 × 30 in · 80 × 40 in
Print Media
TruLife Acrylic · ChromaLuxe Metal · Baryta paper
Edition
Limited, 25 / 50 / 100 by presentation
What it Does in a Room
This photograph has no bright side, which makes it the freest thing here to place. Measured in vertical strips, the brightness across the middle four-fifths of its width varies by eight points out of two hundred and fifty-five. Almost every photograph has a light end and a dark end, and that gives the piece a lean, so it wants a wall approached from a particular direction and it wants the room's own light coming from a particular side. This one has no preference at all. It will sit on a wall lit from the left, the right, or neither, and it will not read as tipping toward one edge. On a wall where placement is constrained by doors, traffic, or where the light happens to fall, that indifference is worth more than it sounds.
It has no quiet region either, and that decides whether it can share a wall. Hanging two pictures together works when one of them yields, when it has an area of low contrast or empty tone that lets the eye rest before moving on. This one carries content at every level from near black to near white, distributed evenly, and every part of the frame is doing something. Put a second photograph beside it and the pair will compete along their whole shared edge rather than balancing. It belongs alone on its wall, and it will hold a wall that would otherwise need three pieces to fill.
There is also nothing in it to coordinate with, because everything is already in it. Blue sky, gray cloud, white snow, bare rock, turquoise water, dark conifer, yellow shrub, red shrub, brown stream. A room usually picks one color out of a photograph and answers it, in a cushion or a rug or a ceramic, and the answer works because the picture is mostly one or two hues. Here any color you choose will match about an eighth of the frame and ignore the rest. The better approach is to let the room stay quiet and neutral and let the picture supply all of it, which it can.
Not sure which size the room calls for, or want dimensions not listed here? Sizes beyond 80 × 40 are available on request and ship crated by freight. That conversation is welcome before an order is placed. Start that conversation and I will answer within one business day.
How small is too small for a photograph this wide?
At the Intimate size the picture is forty inches across and twenty tall, and the large structure holds. The peak holds, the cloud holds, the turquoise band holds, and the mass of autumn color holds as a mass. What goes is everything the meadow is made of, and the meadow is half the picture. The individual shrubs merge into a single orange field, so the yellow and the red stop being separable plant by plant. The stream loses its channels and reads as one dark line. The small conifers scattered through the foreground merge with the shrub around them. The Collected at sixty by thirty separates the shrubs again and returns the stream to two channels. If you are weighing a size against a specific wall, choosing the right print size covers the measurements and the viewing distances in more detail.
What changes at the largest size?
At eighty by forty, working down the frame: the cloud separates into distinct layers with lit undersides rather than reading as one bank. On the peak the pale scree fans become individual slides with edges, and the rock bands running across the face read as separate strata. On the right the glacier resolves into ice with visible surface texture rather than a white patch. The conifers along the far shore separate into individual trees against the water behind them. In the meadow the shrubs break apart plant by plant, and the yellow ones and the red ones become distinguishable as different plants rather than a blended field. The stream shows its separate channels, with sky reflected in the open water and shrub reflected along the edges. Why scale matters covers what happens perceptually when a photograph reaches the size where the eye has to cross it.
What kind of room does this photograph suit?
Rooms where people sit rather than pass through, and rooms with daylight. A living room, a dining room, a study, a long wall in a family space. Hang it at standard height with the center at about fifty-seven inches. On materials it is the least fussy piece here, since it already contains warm and cool in roughly equal measure and will not argue with either scheme. Three things to avoid. Keep patterned rugs, busy textiles, and heavily figured stone out of the same view, because the meadow is already fine detail across half the frame and a second busy surface doubles it. Use neutral bulbs rather than warm ones, since a warm lamp pushes the meadow further warm and closes the seventy-nine point split between the ground and the sky that the picture is built on. And do not hang it where a strong architectural horizontal runs near frame height, since the lake band and the ridgeline are already two horizontals and a third will read as competition. When your mind needs to rest takes the question further.
Every work ships insured and arrives with a signed certificate of authenticity.
If a piece is damaged in transit, the choice of replacement is always yours, and your edition number stays with you.
Production time runs 2 to 3 weeks for metal, 3 to 4 weeks for acrylic and paper, and 5 to 6 weeks for framed work.
Each print is made to order and takes its place in a numbered edition, so sales are final. Before you choose, I am glad to help: send a photo of your wall and I will show you this work in your room at true scale, at no charge. Start a conversation
Collector's Choice · TruLife ® Acrylic in Italian Frame
Collector Edition of 25· Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Handcrafted Italian Frame
TruLife acrylic in a handcrafted Italian frame with a linen liner chosen for the image. Frame series, finish, and liner are settled with you after the order, and production begins from there. The frame and liner add about fourteen inches to the finished dimensions, worth allowing for when planning placement.
Signature Acrylic Edition of 50· Lumachrome TruLife · Gallery Float Mount
Face-mounted to TruLife acrylic and floated approximately one inch from the wall, with no frame to mediate between the image and the room. UV-resistant, anti-reflective, and scratch-resistant, with a lifetime guarantee against fading.
Signature Metal Edition of 50· ChromaLuxe Print · Gallery Float Mount
Color infused into the aluminum panel itself, floated from the wall on a concealed system. Where acrylic produces luminosity, metal produces clarity. Exceptional fade resistance with no glazing or coating required.
Fine Art Edition of 100· Hahnemühle Baryta Fine Art Paper
Printed without acrylic, so light meets the paper surface directly. Highlights stay luminous, shadows keep their nuance, and the surface has a tactile quality the other presentations approach differently. The understated choice, and the traditional one.
Complimentary shipping within the continental United States. International collector shipping available upon request.
Still deciding
Designing for Stillness
A guide to choosing art for restorative spaces
How to tell whether an image will still hold you in a year, how scale changes what a photograph does in a room, and how to match a piece to the work a room actually performs. It cites the research it draws on, and it is equally clear about where that research stops. About ten minutes to read.
