Canon Lens

-23C, Leaning North

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Light Intensity, Photoblog Intention, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Season, Still Life, Winter

Saturday – a new treasure of a car, a 2006 Nissan Altima with 35000 km, a vehicle barely finished being broken in, a definite upgrade from my 2000 GMC half-ton, a vehicle that is clean, well maintained and somewhat regal. The opportunity was there to test out the vehicle and to use the day to travel and to look around at the world through my camera lens. The choice leaned heavily toward going south to the Dunvegan Bridge and Grande Prairie; undiscovered landscapes in and around Peace River were to be considered. The choice could also lean into an eastward drive to Fort Vermilion and La Crete; but, I had been in La Crete twice in the previous month.  The choice could also bend westward to Rainbow Lake and Chateh; but, doing so would really require truck or skidoo. Early in the morning, as I steered the Altima toward the highway … the choice became … north.

From High Level, Alberta to Enterprise and then Hay River in the Northwest Territories has you using one highway, highway 35 in Alberta which becomes highway 1 in the Northwest Territories, their route south to Edmonton. On Saturday, I made the -23C drive from High Level to Hay River and back stopping wherever my camera lens found interesting opportunities for image capture. On the Alberta side of the drive, a train trestle on the highway’s west side was the first image. A quarter of an hour later, I arrived at Steen River where a cabin along ancestral land of a Dene Tha’ trap line was the next image. Another hour passed, looking right, left, forward and back into the landscape along the road; often I turned the car around to revisit an area and to find photographs. I got to Alexandra Falls and clouds broke to reveal sun shining into trees, onto the highway and onto the Alexandra Falls. Midday’s light was bright and harsh, but for photographs along my ninety minute walk along a snow trampled path in forest atop the west side of the Hay River gorge below the falls; the walk to me from the first falls lookout to the second and third lookouts. Early afternoon found me in Hay River scouting out potential shots for later. After a bite to eat, in late afternoon the sun worked its way into sunset;  several colourful photographs became possible – Buffalo Air’s DC-3s at the Hay River Airport, ships frozen in ice in the west channel below the Great Slave Lake and then photos at the Northern Transportation Company Limited (NTCL) shipyard. The day was colourful and cold, but a good opportunity to see winter’s north by day – one of my never dones.

Listening to – what’s been interesting in the past few days is to listen to CDs; where my 2000 GMC half-ton had a cassette deck and am/fm stereo, the Altima has a CD player.  And, instead of listening to satellite radio which would require some hooking up, I’ve opted to listen to full albums on CD, a significant change from iPod playlists and satellite radio.  Literally, there have been CDs I haven’t referred back to in more than a decade.  Today’s listening has been to a Brian Houston album Mea Culpa and the songs standing out are Hard Man, Dancing with You and Standing Here.  I’ve thought of these songs while thinking of another Brian Houston song – We Don’t Need Religion … a good enlightening tune.

Quotes to Inspire – (1)“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” – Ansel Adams; (2) “I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost – that is important.” – Jacque-Henri Lartique

Collected, Not Yet Discarded – Other Photographs from the Week

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Combine (Farming), Farm, Farmhouse, Home, Homestead, Light Intensity, Photoblog Intention, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Season, Still Life, Vehicle, Vehicle Restoration, Winter

Farms, farm buildings, farm equipment and the occasional treasure of a rusting relic have surfaced within this week’s compiling of photographs.  Rather than let them fall into the discard pile it may be good to give them their due, cluster them into photo gallery format and allow you a look at second, third and even seventh choices.  Below, because this week’s photographs have dealt with farming images, I’m posting the lyrics to Murray MacLauchlan’s Farmer’s Song, a treat to sing and a song that you can find yourself singing with others also around a campfire. Lyrics as found on Lets Sing It http://artists.letssingit.com/murray-mclauchlin-lyrics-farmers-song-2s98rgh#ixzz1nMbsXNcE

Farmer’s Song – Murray McLauchlan

Re-released 9 October 2007 in Songs from the Street: The Best of Murray McLauchlan

Dusty old farmer out working your fields

Hanging down over your tractor wheels

The sun beatin’ down turns the red paint to orange

And rusty old patches of steel

There’s no farmer songs on that car radio

Just cowboys, truck drivers and pain

Well this is my way to say thanks for the meal

And I hope there’s no shortage of rain

 

Straw hats and old dirty hankies

 Moppin’ a face like a shoe

Thanks for the meal here’s a song that is real

 From a kid from the city to you

 

The combines gang up, take most of the bread

Things just ain’t like they used to be

Though your kids are out after the American dream

And they’re workin in big factories

Now If I come on by, when you’re out in the sun

Can I wave at you just like a friend

 These days when everyone’s taking so much

There’s somebody giving back in

 

Straw hats and old dirty hankies

Moppin’ a face like a shoe

Thanks for the meal here’s a song that is real

From a kid from the city to you

Quote to Inspire – “Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing, light is everything.” – Leonard Misone

Listening to – She Walks on Roses by Bill Mallonee & Vigilantes of Love from Audible Sigh, then Mercy of the Fallen by Dar Williams from Beauty of the Rain and then finally Red Clay Halo by Gillian Welch from Time the Revelator.

That Old A&W Shirt and A World Fed

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Combine (Farming), Farm, Farmhouse, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Home, Light Intensity, Photoblog Intention, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Winter

Farmhouse, Grain Bins & Combines

Curiosity surrounds this image.  A derelict farmhouse is at geometric center point for farm buildings and as many as four combines from the fifties and sixties – three on the left (one is hidden behind the darker one) and one on the right, in front of the grain bin.  The buildings have not been burnt off the land and the combines no longer work; again, there’s an air of abandonment as well as reverence for what was a family’s starting point.

My cousin, a farmer, in his first decade of marriage would occasionally wear an A&W shirt from its nation-wide hamburger restaurant chain, something likely found and bought from a Goodwill or Value Village or Thrift Store back in the eighties. I’m not sure if his wearing of this shirt was youthful cynicism or if he was making light of the fact that as a farmer he fed the world – all farmers do this … but role/position in what one does for work as farmer sometimes blurs/shifts to the background what farmers accomplish on a global scale. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about how many people all his grain and all his cattle could keep alive in one year; I wonder if he has?

My cousin and his wife ran a mixed farming operation in partnership with his father and his mother in Rimbey, Alberta, an area of Alberta situated in a golden triangle blessed with the right combination of rain, sun and cloud for their grain crops, an area of the world that supported a sizeable Hereford cattle operation, as well. The Blindman River runs through their property and while summer was an extremely busy season, my cousin likely looked forward to days when friends and relations would visit, allowing him to break away from heavy or mundane routines. On our visits, we’d go back into the wooded ravine and talk. There’d be good-hearted, entertaining, teasing back and forth as we investigated the currency of each other’s lives in playful interrogation.  A good amount of bull-s**t would extend exaggeration into all that our stories could become. On my cousin’s farm, I watched him grow from a boy building model cars, to a youth with a grain elevator job who was dating (… and owning a black, two-door, 1966 Chevelle), to a young spouse, into a farming partner, to a father, and then two decades later into an innovative entrepreneur with patents for frost-free nose pumps.

In recent years I’ve been struck by how close to the land they may actually have been living and how much their success or failure as farmers depended on their ability to rely upon and support their neighbors; help offered and help received is/was really an investment in community and in each other. I am impressed by the humility they exercised in allowing themselves the help offered by neighbors who took care of them and saw them more as family than neighbors. Likewise I am impressed by the care they showed not only to our family, but towards others by putting something positive in their lives when they needed it … even if this was only done by way of good-hearted humour and teasing during an evening board game.

Stories take me back to this era of time when farms such as this one captured in this image were starting points for Canadian families.  One set of Canadian stories about farm-life were W.O. Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid Stories.  The other story that opened out the time toward moving into the fifties was John Grisham’s A Painted House. The farm I know best, though, is that farm my cousin grew up on; and, then I come back to this image and the questions I have about leaving it in this state – it must be memorial, something that draws memory back to what was and who they were that made things happen, feeding the world.

As I’ve searched through my music for songs associated with Canada and with farms I’ve run into Murray McLauchlan, a singer and songwriter whose album I purchased would have been one of the first three albums I ever purchased.  The one that would have pulled my ear to the radio would have been Hard Rock Town, a song I tried to understand in terms of narrative in grade 8, 9 or 10; the other would have been Farmer’s Song, a song that could be sung around a campfire in unison, a song that could be sung in a prairie tavern when everyone’s collected on a Friday or Saturday night.

Listening to – Murray McLauchlan’s Hard Rock Town from his Songs from the Street album and Farmer’s Song, done I think with Murray McLauchlan et al in Lunch at Allen’s Catch the Moon album. Finally, tonight I purchased Ryan Adam’s Chains of Love from his Ashes & Fire album.

Quotes to Inspire – (1) “A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.” – Norman Parkinson; (2) “Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” – Matt Hardy

Parked – Not On the Road

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Farm, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Photoblog Intention, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Vehicle, Vehicle Restoration, Winter

Chevrolet - Parked, Not on the Road

A parked mid-fifties, Chevrolet four door sedan from 1955 or 1956, a Chevrolet that would have been ‘on the road’ in an era Jack Kerouac writes about in his novel with the same title – On the Road.

In the novel, a young World War II veteran, Sal Paradise, newly based in New York embarks on a career as writer, a writer in search of experience just at a time when America wrestles with new identity as world power and war victor. In one sense the book documents the restless, youthful spirit of a nation discovering identity as it moves into an era of prime economic stability.

Key among the era’s cultural entities is the independence of movement brought about by owning and driving a car. A car allows you to see the world.  And, there’s always a car going by; so, if you’ve had a mishap with yours you can thumb a ride from someone else.  Or, you can take a bus.  Again, there’s the idea of a vehicle being something where all riding within it, all have their eyes fixed on the road ahead.  Perhaps that’s part of what Kerouac aims at with message in all the travel – he might be pointing to the road ahead for the nation.  Perhaps the car and occupants image is also about riding along with shared ideologies and intentions … but this is extrapolation.

Needless to say, a variety of vehicles – cars and trucks – move Sal Paradise and his cohorts across the nation from New York to San Francisco and back again … two or three times. A friend with a car is the force initiating Sal into a road trip.  There’s the within vehicle narrative – what’s going on – and there is the travelogue narrative of Sal making sense of the America he finds along the way.  By the end of the book Sal has ridden in and driven many vehicles … he’s been more a passenger than driver, though – one able to observe the goings on rather than being the driver compelled to get where he’s going.  Perhaps there’s something there about stances that can be taken in living life.

Jon Foreman of Switchfoot got me to read Kerouac’s On the Road because of a section of stream of consciousness writing embedded into the novel’s narrative – the ramble and rant of thought-life shared, somewhat soliloquy, somewhat monologue, expression utilizing meter and curious placement of rhyme usually halting abruptly with quirky insight into the issue at-hand – Life and living. Here’s the quote Jon excerpted and placed within a Switchfoot concert that led me to consider a serious read of On the Road: “… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Listening to – Lucinda William’s Can’t Let Go from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, The White Stripes’ 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues (Live) from Under Great White Northern Lights (Live); it’s also been Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie (Live) offered by Bob Dylan from The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961-1991.

Quotes to Inspire – (1) “Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic.” – Edward Weston; (2) “You don’t take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it.” – Pentax Advertisement.

Painterly Farm Shed – Canada’s

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Farm, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Light Intensity, Photoblog Intention, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Winter

Canada Flag - Shed

On the drive northward to Peace River from Edmonton, a few kilometres past the turnoff east to MacLennan and High Prairie you’ll find these grain bins and shed on the west side of the road, something unexpected, something to cause you to look into your surroundings, something that could perhaps have been a Canada day project – painting a farm shed with the Canadian flag … for all to see. The shed and grain bins serve as landmark along this road, visually positioning people who travel on it in terms of hours north towards Peace River and minutes before you’ll reach the valley of the Little Smoky River as you head south toward Valleyview.

This image is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) shot created using the camera’s Automatic Exposure Bracketing to fuse three exposures (one darker, one average and one lighter image) of the same shot together into a single image; the intent in creating the shot is to produce greater accuracy and to expose a broader range of what the eye sees naturally in terms of light and shadow. The image is toned mapped, yielding a moody, painterly feel to its rendering. Beyond this, the image seems to emphasize true geometric angles and does not really show much for backdrop but the sky  … it sort of seems like you’re on top of the world … but that’s a few miles north, up where I live.

Listening to – Coming Down from Martyn Joseph’s Vegas album; there’s been U2’s Fez – Being Born and David Gray’s We’re Not Right from the White Ladder album.  Then it’s been Minor Swing from the Chocolat soundtrack.

Quotes to Inspire – (1) “I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.” – Ansel Adams.  (2) “When people ask what equipment I use – I tell them, my eyes.” – Anonymous.

Donnelly Homestead – Part 2

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Home, Homestead, Light Intensity, Photoblog Intention, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Still Life, Winter

The Donnelly homestead is subject for these photographs, tonight. It’s the second photograph of the homestead I’ve posted in this blog.  The first photograph seemed to polarize reaction from bloggers.  Those viewing the photograph favourably were perhaps familiar with the homestead as landmark within a region they’ve frequented or travelled through; or, perhaps they could relate to winter’s brooding darkness. For others, the black and white image of the building and its textures were very dark and brought forth rejection of the image as something lacking the light and colour associated with Life and Living.

In taking the photograph, again, I’m on a return drive from Edmonton, my time more my own than time with immediate responsibilities and it allowed looking more at what could happen with this photograph. Where January’s photograph is taken near dusk, at day’s end, this photograph has more of spring’s growing light and is shot earlier in the day … about 3:00 p.m.; the light allows for more colour and more possibility with the well-lit subject. Taking the photograph is also about learning a new lens, a Canon 70-200 mm IS Mk II L series lens and using it with live view to sharpen focus (1/3 into the frame … nodal point) and to play with what could be accomplished with depth of field. Shooting close to the ground with this zoom lens compressed distance between the homestead and the trees behind it, a kilometre away. A day later, the fun has been working with different renderings of the photograph. Each rendering of the photograph evokes different response – seeing what’s possible has been some of the fun. Each photograph presented is something I’d be happy to print; yet, there are two that are favourites.

What about you?  Which rendering of this Donnelly homestead appeals to you or attracts you to it?  How would you talk about what is attracting you within the image?

Quotes to Inspire – (1) “In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.” – William Albert Allard; (2) “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!” ― Ted Grant

Listening to – U2’s Get on Your Boots (Justice Remix) from Artificial Horizon, Coldplay’s Cemeteries of London from Viva La Vida, Kings of Leon’s Crawl (first recommended by Nicole Kidman in an iTunes playlist … something she listened to on her daily drive out to the movie set of Australia); then it’s been All I Need from Radiohead’s In Rainbows album.

Success and All Concerned

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Vehicle, Vehicle Restoration, Winter

“Coming together is a beginning. Staying together is progress.  Working together is success.” Leaders use this quote often to enhance organizational teamwork.  Counselors use it to bolster and sustain forward movement among people in relationships who stumble and tumble. The words derive from Henry Ford and their analogy to the work of Life quite likely is taken from first automobiles produced on an assembly line. These words describe that dynamic of steady, determined, hope-directed forward movement towards goals through trial and error and improved performance. The statement articulates the manner of work involved in achieving a productive end through full investment into each learning curve we encounter. We work to understand what’s to be done and how to improve. We act, we work and we utilize feedback about current progress, tweaking action toward better, future performance.

Photography has its learning curves, too.  Good photography is about you learning subject and context and about you working to see them well through your camera’s lens.  Working together is about you and the camera, it’s about you and the subject, and it’s about you and your environment. The vehicle that serves as subject to these photographs is a 1930’s rusting relic, a sedan with wooden spokes that could be a Chevrolet or a Ford or another make. I saw it last Wednesday in my return journey to Sunrise Beach, near Onoway, Alberta, a trip I was making with a friend to investigate the integrity of a second-hand 2000 GMC Yukon as a possible vehicle to replace my written-off 2000 GMC Sierra.

In photography, it may seem at first glance that it is appropriate to point the camera at anything that is in front of you. However, what is also at play is context and environment. The reality is that context and environment are associated with being property and with ownership. Beyond this, context and environment have intention; people identify what each are to be used for. Here, you’d assume that a vehicle put out for public display would not have any issues associated with it if one were to photograph it. Well, in photographing anyone’s property, there’s the matter of what will the photograph be used for and in this case there was perhaps something more akin to rural crime watch being what was at play, something that should have been anticipated. And, the curious owner who questioned me about my actions was both gracious and concerned. In this instance, I knew better … I could have lessened anxieties and awkwardness by introducing myself, stating my photographic intention and asking permission to photograph the vehicle. Working together, in this best practice for photographers and as one whose been influenced by a lineage of photographers would have had and will now have me working proactively to avoid discomfort and uncertainty for others and myself and work toward ensuring good, productive photographic outcomes … even to the point of accepting the possibility of ‘no’ being an answer to my request to photograph a subject. Proactively seeing things through well for all concerned is a key best practice in photography.  This may see me creating a business card that will contain the assurance of contact information for people I deal with.  It may even be worth going further and providing them with photographs of the subject as thank you or to create a calendar with my photographs (as bona fide) for this aspect of public relations and good business practice.

Quotes to Inspire – (1) “A definition of a professional photographer: A ‘pro’ NEVER shows anybody the mistakes.” – Anonymous; (2) “The progress of a photographer can often be marked by the accumulated number of mistakes he or she had made along the way.” – Catherine Jo Morgan (3) “Don’t be stupid and remember where you come from.” – Fr. Tony Ricard, NETCA Teacher Convention 2012

Listening to – Patty Griffin’s Long Ride Home, a song about losing a loved-one from the music-filled movie, Elizabethtown, a song followed by You Can’t Hurry Love, by The Concretes from the same movie soundtrack.

Saturday’s Afternoon Drive

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 75-300 mm, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Gas Station, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Prime Lens, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Winter

Wife at school, prepping; daughter at dance, dancing – this Saturday seems to be mine, a day before me to use at my discretion, and, certainly not a day to pass in front of a computer screen. A breakfast out takes me to the Flamingo Restaurant where my Photo Plus magazine becomes object of discussion between fellow Canon photographer (my cashier) and me; I point him to the Zinio iPad app as the best means to download the Photo Plus, easily, here in High Level.

Onward – my outerwear consists of several items purchased over the years from Mountain Equipment Co-op – ski pants (10 years old), Salomon winter trainers (new, this year) and a down-filled jacket with hood. Set for warmth at -22C, today, I point my GMC Sierra (without grill or driver’s side headlamp) toward Fort Vermilion and La Crete. Music is part of what this Saturday afternoon is about – Sirius Satellite Radio allows for tuning into folk music on Coffee House, news at the top of the hour from CBC and BBC, jazz music and an interview with the bass player working with Miles Davis. Comedy does not attract my attention, today. I had had thoughts of listening to Sid and Mac’s Shuttertime Podcast; but, their podcast is good to digest while out on a walk around High Level … I let the podcast wait.

In Fort Vermilion, Shirley’s Snack Shack allows for purchase of coffee and something unseen before, a Reese’s Peanut Butter chocolate bar. The truck rolls south on the Red Earth road. The first photographs are of a red, mid-sixties, FORD, three-tonne grain truck; the vehicle remains active – it has current plates and tires are full. The next photographs are of cattails, at the northeast corner of a massive field – land, newly broken and newly farmed; the wind stirs the cattails enough that Automatic Exposure Bracketing, while tried, will not allow for HDR results.

La Crete has Quality Motors to check out, a used car lot and a new Subway restaurant. Moving southward from La Crete, Buffalo Head Prairie is next.  A chain of hills loom in the distance, a blue backdrop to this settlement and extends to another thirty kilometres away called Blue Hills. Along the way, different untried back roads are taken and they return to the Blue Hills highway.  A derelict farm house is discovered.  Doubling back, a place to park the truck off the highway is found; there, two relics from the fifties are found among old disused farming machinery (Massey Harris is the emblem on a seed drill, not Massey Ferguson). With so much left scattered around, the farm seems to be left medias res (in the middle of things); has there been a family death? There’s a story of a car that drove onto the Tompkin’s Landing ferry many years ago; its brakes failed and one or all occupants of the car drowned.

The final part of the journey involves crossing the Peace River over an ice bridge at Tompkin’s landing; signs are there to direct vehicles and to advise of a maximum speed of 10 km/h for crossing the kilometre-wide river. Another forty minutes in night’s darkness with only a passenger headlight to alert oncoming highway traffic of my presence sees me home before 7:00 p.m..  Supper is grilled cheese sandwiches.

Listening to Miles Davis from his Kind of Blue album and So What; reminds that I first seriously listened to Miles Davis within the Finding Forrester soundtrack … Bill Frisell is also there with Over the Rainbow and Under a Golden Sky.

Quote to Inspire – “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” — Dorothea Lange

To See What’s There

Canon 60D, Canon 75-300 mm, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Night, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Vehicle, Vehicle Restoration, Weather, Winter

I’ve been out for a 6K walk around town tonight.  It is -35C and I’ve listened to a lecture given by John O’Donohue on Imagination. After the walk, I recalled this vehicle in the High Level industrial park, a vehicle that I’ve known about but never photographed, a 1960 Mercury M 100 long box pickup truck. It’s been on my mind for the better part of a year. I’ve never photographed it because the landscape or situation it is set in seems bleak and uninteresting.  Perhaps such context draws out beauty from the vehicle’s lines and shape or perhaps through time one acclimates to beauty, form and style.

In taking this photograph, I’m using a Canon 75-300 mm telephoto zoom lens and quite literally taking the photograph to see what is there … a rusting relic awaiting restoration when time and circumstance allow.  In terms of integrity the M 100 looks more complete and useable than not.  The photograph also demonstrates the compression that happens with a telephoto zoom as you shoot more flatly toward the subject – the distance from the first snow drift to the truck is 100 m and the posts in front of the truck are actually about 6-10 feet in front of it.

Quote to Inspire – “The duty of privilege is absolute integrity; the duty of privilege is integrity to ourselves, to our possibilities and to live to the full the life that we’d love and to animate and realize everything because the time is so short and it will be soon gone.” ~ John O’Donohue

Listening to Crash into Me from Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds, Live At Radio City and as fretted on my Martin Backpacker.

1960 Mercury M 100 Long Box Pickup

Wind and Winter on the West Bank of the Alexandra Falls

Canon 50mm, Canon 50mm Lens, Canon 60D, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Night, Prime Lens, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Season, Still Life, Uncategorized, Weather, Winter

I woke this morning having dreamed.  And, I woke with intention to make good use of this day for photography.  My progress to my truck and terrain was slowed … Life got in the way is an expression taken to mean that where and when there’s a task that needs done that helps others it needs to be done, presently. I got the business done. And, before getting underway I enlisted my daughter’s help in pinning a map of our municipal district (all six feet worth of map) to the west wall in our garage above the work bench.  We also pinned a map of High Level above our freezer on the east wall of the garage.  With both, the intention is to locate places and subjects of previous photographs as a means to sort out return visits or new places to explore. By 2:00 p.m., I was on the road having shifted from staying within our municipal district (the size of three smaller European countries) to northward travel to Alexandra Falls and to Hay River – both in the Northwest Territories.  I arrived at the falls by 5:00 p.m. and saw the curious way it had iced over and pushed ice over the falls.  An hour later I was in Hay River investigating what happens to its ship yards in winter;  you’d never think that you would drive north to find the largest inland lake in the world, the Great Slave Lake, a lake making use of trawlers and barges, a lake needing more than a few vessels of the Canadian Coast Guard.

The photographs show Alexandra falls and its ice.  Dimensions to grasp – the far wall that river drops down is a 60 foot drop; so, that clump of ice that has fallen over the falls this winter is huge – in height and volume equal to a small two story house.  The next photographs are of boats that have been pulled ashore and are not presently used.  The first shot is of three derelict boats pulled far into the woods, left to rot. The ships are those at the Hay River shipyard close to the southern tip of the Great Slave Lake; at -22C, with wind from the lake, it was a cold time capturing these images – my camera will lock up when it  and its battery is cold.

While I would have preferred to see all of this in daylight it was good gathering these photographs.  For these and others I was using exposure bracketing because I want to investigate High Dynamic Range photography (probably with Photomatix – thank you’s to Shuttertime’s Mac and Sid for encouraging this).  Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the day/evening was being alone with the wind and the sounds of northern winter on the west bank above Alexandra falls.  Good schtuff!

Listening to – a lot of CBC tonight – DNTO and a theme of walking in another’s shoes; also am intrigued to see that John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has had a remake and should be out next Friday – Le Carre’s novels were the light reading during university and my son and I have enjoyed Alec Guiness as George Smiley.  Music – David Gray’s Silver Lining from his White Ladder album.

Quote to Inspire – “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” ~ Elliott Erwitt