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Road Trip 2012: Days of Heaven in Lethbridge

Posted on: 2012-06-03

In May 2012, my mother-in-law gave us her old car - but we live in Halifax and the car was in Edmonton. So we flew there and drove it all the way back to Halifax. We had great weather and I had a new camera. This is part 3 of a series of blog posts about the trip.

(All of the photos are hosted on Flickr - click on any to see bigger versions and browse the full set.)

We're both huge fans of Terence Malick's gorgeous film Days of Heaven and we were excited to be in the part of southern Alberta where the film was shot.

We had lucky weather on our trip and we saw the prairie and the town of Lethbridge under a cloudless deep blue sky - so when our aunt asked us what we wanted to do in the evening, we said "we'd love to get some shots of the high-level train bridge and the prairie at dusk!"

Sunset over the Bridge

This is perhaps an odd request to make of anyone, especially a family member - but my aunt-in-law is a noted Alberta artist who takes a lot of photographs of the source material for her paintings. So she said, "the light is already fading fast - so let's go right now!" and we piled into her van.

Me and the Bridge in Lethbridge

She took us to several different vantage points around the coulis and the bridge, and waited patiently in the van while we ran around taking lots of pictures and gawking at the spectacular golden evening light and the silver-gold grass.

Prairie Grass at Magic Hour

Untitled

Contrail and Rail Bridge

Here's a slideshow of some of the shots we took.

On the way back home, our Aunt talked about a noted photographer friend who had traveled the world but who had decided to retire in Lethbridge because the light was so magical and clear. After this evening, that made perfect sense.

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