About

This website is the product of over 40 years of exploring Ontario's great outdoors.

It is an amalgamation of notes, experiences and photographs that pulls together in one place the best places in Ontario for nature and landscape photography. Before this website came along, you would need to look up six or eight different sites – provincial parks, conservation areas, national parks, Ontario Nature, Bruce Trail Conservancy, to name a few – to find this kind of information. Now it is all 'under one roof', organized by location and natural feature.

I grew up in Hamilton and, as boys would do back then, we explored and hiked and biked along the Escarpment, all the way to Buttermilk Falls and Albion Falls. That was at a time when it wasn't unusual for 8- to 12-year-old boys to be off exploring for a whole day 'unsupervised'.  Times have changed.

My brother and I and my cousins would do the same thing up at the cottages our families rented on Lower Rideau Lake: rowing around the lake, up the Tay River, and back into "the Junk" – the huge cattail marsh that surrounds the bottom end of the lake with its bullfrogs, water snakes, herons, the occasional beaver, muskrat and mink, and the lunker bass we fished for.

My first "A-ha!" moment came during a Grade 11 Physical Geography field trip. Up until that point, I just took nature for granted. This is the way it was. We lived in the city and each summer, we escaped to the natural areas: the cottage for two weeks and the Escarpment for the rest of the summer.

One stop on the field trip was Webster's Falls at Spencer Gorge.  By then, photography had entered my life and I can clearly remember composing photos of the autumn colour, the roaring waterfall and the spectacular gorge it had cut over the last 10,000 years or so. I was smitten, The course really opened my eyes, and my curiosity, about how the natural world worked, both the physical and the biotic.

A few years later, I traded in my job at the camera store for a summer job with the Hamilton Region Conservation Authority. It was in 'Communications' but it was a chance for me to explore and photograph the parks, amongst other duties. The next summer I was off to northwestern Ontario conducting summer nature programmes at schools, conservation areas, and provincial parks. I quickly learned not only how big Ontario really is, but how spectacular it is, as well.  Dark boreal forests that seemed to go on forever, deep canyons, rugged hills, rocky ridges , and lakes, thousands of lakes.

So, all these years later, I decided it was time to share those wonderful places with others.