January 23, 2014 – In My Back Pocket

Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 1

Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 2

Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 3

Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 4

Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 5

Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 6

For Bobby, a cousin and Canadian veteran, who passed away last Wednesday and whose funeral occurs today in Grande Prairie, Alberta. Thank you for the friend you’ve always been to my wife and me. Thank you for the family you’ve been a part of. Thank you for your service to Canada – wounded, but accomplishing what very few others could have. Very well done!

Listening to – ‘William’s Lullaby,’ ‘The Gairlock and Loch Duich’ and ‘Amazing Grace’ offered by the Canadian Scottish Regiment Pipes and Drums.

Quote to Consider – “‘A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept.’ To take a good photograph, runs the common claim, one must already see it. That is, the image must exist in the photographer’s mind at or just before [it is taken].” Susan Sontag (working with an Ansel Adams quote and taking it further) in ‘On Photography.’

Courtyard Melt – High Level, Alberta 1

Courtyard Melt – High Level, Alberta 2

Directed to our school courtyard, these images bear witness to a curiosity of weather. In twenty-four hours our boreal winter temperatures have moved from -35C to 0C, a change most noticed by way of intense wind rattling houses. There has been melting that has occurred at night in the wind’s warmth. Remarkably, this same weather system has stretched eight-hundred kilometres from us in northern Alberta all the way to Edmonton in central Alberta, the wind, there, breaking railroad traffic arms and causing the LRT not to run. For us, at school, in our courtyard this extraordinary night melt has produced the following sculptures.

Listening to – a friend of Brian Turner (Bachman Turner Overdrive) play a self-sculpted tune in my office at school, the end of a parent meeting establishing goodwill – this parent, playing upon my Larrivee L-05 and our special needs students enjoying the show immensely … a good, good moment, the best kind.

Quote to Inspire – “… photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’