Fall Moves Into Winter

We experienced an unusually warm November this year. I had planned on photographing someone paddling in a snowstorm but the warm and usually snowy November produced little or no snow. Then, when we did get snow but it came at night. Dang!

Right after the snows, the arctic clipper arrived, ice formed and my chance was gone. This is the way of photography. You want to be everywhere for everything. Its just not reality. Sometimes one gets away.

One that didn't get away was capturing the art of netting Whitefish in the BWCA. A practice I did not know anyone still did. After some research I found that Erik Simula still nets. I hooked up with Erik and spent two nights in the BWCA photographing the process of netting. It was great to observe and the size of the whitefish was impressive. Erik had mentioned if he got 5-6 fish he'd be really happy. I had no idea what to expect. I felt 5-6 would be a bad day. Then, I saw the size of the fish and it all made sense. Many more and it would have been difficult to haul out!

Whitefish I'm told is a rather fatty fish thus is very good for smoking the fish. Erik uses the fish he nets for food over the course of the winter. As a photographer, I couldn't have been happier to see Erik using a traditional birch bark canoe for this. It simply made the images more romantic and captured the mood of days gone by.