Armed with a pair of cameras and an RV, Zach Baranowski embarked on a 30-day cross-country road trip with his girlfriend on a mission to capture 150 images to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial.
“It’s more diverse and there’s more to offer than I really expected,” the photographer said of our country after returning to his Toronto home in May.
“You know, you’ve seen photos before, but it’s really different experiencing [Canada] yourself.”
The spring trip, which was sponsored by a Toronto-based photo printing company, saw Baranowski visit all 10 provinces, snapping some 15,000 photos along the way.
“We’re just working on narrowing that down,” Baranowski said with a laugh. “But photos really don’t do it much justice -- you really have to see it for yourself.”
While you can view a spectacular array of Baranowski’s work at www.canada150photos.ca, the photographer shared his five favourite places and photos with CTVNews.ca.
ALBERTA’S ROCKY MOUNTAINS
“The Rocky Mountains were amazing,” Baranowski said. While in Jasper National Park, the photographer happened upon a herd of grazing caribou. Army-crawling to within six metres of the animals, Baranowski snapped this photo.
“It kind of encompassed everything there was with Jasper -- the mountain range in the background and you’ve got the wildlife and it really shouts ‘Canada’ for me.”
THE RAINFORESTS OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
“The rainforest region of British Columbia was very interesting,” Baranowski said.
Located just a little more than 50 kilometres east of Vancouver, the province’s lush Golden Ears Provincial Park was a particular favourite for the photographer, who shot this photo of his girlfriend gazing up wistfully at the park’s towering, moss-covered trees in the heart of what’s known as the Pacific temperate rainforests ecoregion.
SASKATCHEWAN’S BADLANDS
“Saskatchewan really took me by surprise because I didn’t realize it had so much of the badlands that were in Alberta,” Baranowski said. Castle Butte, in south-central Saskatchewan, is where this photo of grazing cattle was taken.
“It took a little bit of work to find this spot, there were no signs leading to it, and little civilization around to point us in the right direction,” Baranowski said. “We climbed to the top and were welcomed with panoramic views of the landscape around us.”
THE BAY OF FUNDY
Straddling the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy is one of the world’s natural wonders, with a tidal range that can change by more than 16 metres in a day
“The Bay of Fundy was very, very interesting,” Baranowski said. “We went to a couple places twice just to see them in the different tides”
NEWFOUNDLAND’S ICEBERG ALLEY
In Newfoundland’s east, the town of Bonavista is in the heart of what’s known as Iceberg Alley, where icebergs can be seen drifting south from the arctic in the spring and early summer.
“On one of our last nights in Newfoundland, we made our way up to Bonavista and we there just in time for a really beautiful sunset,” Baranowski said of this photo. “There was an iceberg right off the coast from us, and there were waves crashing up against it and there were very beautiful colours from the sunset on the ice.”
