I just got back from a month traveling around the US and Canada. My last stop before returning home was in Banff, Canada as a guest lecturer at the Banff Centre for Arts that hosts the Banff Adventure Photography Workshop. Teaching at the workshop this year was a blast, with great participants, beautiful locations and four days of perfect weather.
The Banff workshop is exceptional because we get to spend so much time outdoors shooting in beautiful mountain locations around Banff. Here's a photo I took during the afternoon kayak session on the Kananaskis River. I like this photo because you never know if you'll get anything decent when you blur really fast action. I shot this handheld at a 1/20 second with a 300 mm lens fitted with a 3 stop ND filter. That slow a shutter speed with a 300mm lens is not a normal recipe for success. I used a Nikon D-300s fitted with the 70-200 2.8 II VR lens. That lens combined with the D-300s' APS-c sensor is how I got the 300mm. I braced the camera and lens against a tree and and turned on the VR that was enough to make the photo sharp where it counts.
