Tompkins’ Landing Ferry – Tompkins’ Landing, Alberta
Aboard the Tompkins’ Landing Ferry 2 – Tompkins’ Landing, Alberta
Aboard the Tompkins’ Landing Ferry – Tompkins’ Landing, Alberta
Sunset at Midpoint of the Peace River – Tompkins’ Landing, Alberta
Footner Lake 1, Alberta
Footner Lake 2, Alberta
Footner Lake 3, Alberta
Footner Lake 4, Alberta
Cattails 5 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Footner Lake 5, Alberta
Footner Lake 6, Alberta
Cattail 1 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Cattail 2 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Cattail 3 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Cattail 4 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Dandelions – Footner Lake, Alberta
Dandelions 2 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Dandelions 3 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Dandelions 4 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Dandelion – Footner Lake, Alberta
Grass & Flora – Footner Lake, Alberta
Flora – Footner Lake, Alberta
Flora 2 – Footner Lake, Alberta
Elektra Air Tankers – High Level Airport, High Level, Alberta
Flower – High Level, Alberta
Forest grows dangerously dry with summer heat. The matter of our region being a tinderbox is an expression used to describe this state in which forest can become prey to lightning strike and neglect by people working with fire. In this setting, rain becomes a welcome visitor calming and cooling our world. Photographically rain serves to reflect the world in unusual ways – doubling what is seen and placing the doubled image in unusual contexts. At night, it is the rain’s reflection of light on surfaces that draws interest.
Life is busy just now. Students in their final year of education anticipate graduation and ceremony and future departure from friends, family and that place that’s been home for them through so many years. Angst is there. Worry is there. Disillusionment about what the world holds is about to occur in more broad and more true strokes than these students have ever encountered before. And, time pushes them and us forward and through different thresholds. It’s totally interesting that the term threshold comes from the act of threshing; the threshold was the place where the act of separating husk from seed occurred. Threshold is that place where former and newer state are in close proximity – what was and what now is. Action is that other important ingredient – the lifting, colliding and splitting, all are percussive, energetic acts that in time yield the seed from the husk that’s held it. Winnowing is the other term, here – the separating and sorting of husk (the now dead, former shell) and seed (the new life holding element). The seed is ready for further use. How will it be used?
The photographs presented here are culled from the last week. There’s the green of Buffalo Head Prairie; there’s the woods between La Crete and Blue Hills. There’s the Peace River and the Tompkins’ Landing Ferry. There’s rain slicked streets of High Level and there’s images from Footner Lake. There’s even an image of a flower from a flower bed on our front lawn.
Listening to – U2’s Mysterious Ways, Coldplay’s God Put a Smile Upon Your Face, David Gray’s Babylon and Radiohead’s High and Dry.
Quote to Inspire – “I didn’t want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.” – Wynn Bullock
A teacher’s year end contains the drift and blur of one week’s movement into another, the flex and flux within a sea of ever-changing tasks – it can be a time with little demarcation of days and weeks; there’s only more and more and more of school until that one morning when you wake up to find void in all that’s made up your previous ten months vocation. You note absence of routine, absence of schedule and absence of bells. From frenetic to calm and then to taking hold of your life – the first two weeks are hardest in this transition. It’s the initial unwind and decompression from the year you’ve lead students through, a time to settle in, settle down and a time to settle upon summer plans. But, we’re not there yet. Now, teachers count number of sleeps until school is done. Now, teachers whet their appetite for summer with barbecues and games of golf. Now, few teachers are reading books of interest. Many are marking assignments and tests late into the evening. Many are thinking through how best to help students review for finals. All are working through how to balance what has been taught against what remains to be taught within the time left. Those teachers with experience have managed time well, met all curriculum outcomes and are turning their focus to helping students conclude their year well – helping them to recognize what they’ve achieved and to anchor this self-knowledge within their self-esteem.
Within a few weeks, staff will cluster at year-end dinners and barbecues; they too will be looking at all their year has held – the successes and the challenges; and they’ll work to put issues to bed and leave them behind in the year that was. Already, we’ve held an awards night, a night celebrating staff’s years of service to students as well as recognizing notable within jurisdiction school achievements. Of all the times in the school year, this time, this month of June highlights the busyness of planning and of culmination; we’re heading toward threshold. Student behaviour is at its most extreme in June, something more significant than the student behaviour we see in December’s anticipation of Christmas. Warmer weather, extended hours of sunlight and the approaching end of what’s been normal for students through ten months, all can serve to escalate things in the worst of ways for students – fighting, skipping, withdrawal from school. It’s June. It’s that critical month in teaching when it’s so important to hold fast to your goals that lead students to their year end and yours. And, it is about each student. June is the month that contains the final moments in a year of transformation for adolescents. In June, the cocoon rattles and shakes, eventually bursting upon the threshold of that moment in which a school year and grade concludes and students are set free into their summer and their next year’s endeavor. It’s a birthing process.
Photography – the images presented here are ones in which I’m investigating what can be done with macro photography. The initial set of images are those taken in and around farming equipment on display at the High Level Museum. The others come from locations in Fort Vermilion, Alberta – an old building (to be demolished), grave markers at the Anglican cemetery and dandelions outside the cemetery.
Curious Quotes – (1) “Nothing isolates one person from another person as the species of their perception.” – Boris Pasternak; (2) “Stress is a perverted relationship to time.” – John O’Donohue
Quotes to Inspire – (1) “I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help.” – Ruth Bernhard (2) “It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.” – Robert Brault
Listening to – Can’t You Hear Me Knocking (Rolling Stones), California Sun (The Rivieras), Let It All Hang Out (The Hombres), Louie Louie (The Kingsmen), Pink Cadillac (Bruce Springsteen), Sultans of Swing (Dire Straits) and Back in the Saddle (Aerosmith).
Interchangeable, Early Sixties GMC Half Tons – Fairview, Alberta
Dunvegan River Bank – Dunvegan, Alberta
Older Barn – Fairview, Alberta
Canada Geese Feeding at Sundown – Fairview, Alberta
Tonight has been an evening of yardio – yard-work and cardio effort. Our lawn is now dethatched, the old grass bagged (and ready for garbage day) and our lawn is fertilized and being watered as I write. For the first time this spring I have sudsed-up our Nissan Altima – I’ve washed it by hand, with brushes and sprayer, first with Palmolive soap to take the dirt off and then with Mother’s Vehicle soap. The Altima is clean. But, its six-year old exterior is in need of detailing – a good go-round with a good glazing polish, buffer and various amounts of elbow grease. If I’d had some Autoglym Bodywork Shampoo the wash would have produced a glossy sheen. My cabinet in the garage holds two things that will brighten this vehicle – Autoglym Super Resin polish and Autoglym High Definition paste wax. Not only will the paint gleam but the relief in the vehicle’s shape will be enhanced optically, in some cases to a degree of optical illusion. The waxing will have to wait until summer break and the chore will become a way to settle towards summer’s calm following a hectic school year. The chore, the time invested and the dazzling outcome are things I look forward to as summer projects.
Most photographs presented here are ones taken in the final hour of sunlight last Saturday night; it’s about half past ten heading to eleven o’clock. The river bank at Dunvegan features shadow play with shadows lengthening and darkening to enhance the rolling mounds of hillage above the Peace River. In two photos rusting relics are stored in public view. The three early sixties GMC half-tons seem ready to share parts in order to cluster into one working whole. The ready interchangeability of parts between the three trucks points to a need to gather them all rather than only one. Canada Geese move actively at sunset in a farmer’s field feeding. And, a disused barn catches the light of sunset … a dusky day’s end in Alberta’s late spring.
Listening to – J J Heller’s Your Hands, Missy Higgins’ Warm Whispers, Coldplay’s See You Soon, David Gray’s Kathleen, Jem singing Maybe I’m Amazed, Ray LaMontagne’s I Still Care for You and all the way through to John Denver’s Thank God I’m a Country Boy. The playlist rounds out to the Counting Crows’ Raining in Baltimore and David Gray’s Jackdaw.
Quote to Inspire – “Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” – Matt Hardy
Saturday – new horizons await a friend, a colleague and a mentor as he moves on from our school. He is the person who hired me into our school division. And, he’s someone who in action, thought and approach is a character developing leader worthy of Goethe’s quote (below) because he’s able to encourage and bring forth the best contribution people have to offer among our team. He lives this out in practice, “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. And, his farewell party – a remembrance and celebration of the impact he’s had on people’s lives – is something I’ve had to miss being a Dad who has needed to bring home his son and his son’s gear from University. My contribution to my colleague’s farewell was an Animoto slideshow, a collection of images taken from various points in his thirty-year career – memorable, memorable times (like the fun we had skidooing and coming upon a saucy lynx that wouldn’t be bothered about getting out of our way). My wife went in my stead with our friends to the farewell celebration.
That was Saturday night, a night memorable also because I wasn’t there yet was thinking about all its goings-on. The photographs, here, are taken roughly at the same time of night that this colleague’s farewell celebration would have been in full swing. I stopped in my drive to look around with my camera lens because I know my friend and mentor would want me to. This week has been about offering photography as a contribution to the school’s dinner theater. The Northern Actors’ Guild, our school theater troupe, is presenting the musical, Grease. It’s been fun working with students and staff to create a visual record of rehearsals and headshot portraits for foyer display. Students in high school are at the tail-end of adolescence still metamorphosing into adult form – photography, here, along with the actor’s costumes acknowledges state of change, a step closer to or perhaps into adulthood. It shocks and surprises – the new state does not always assimilate easily in terms of understanding one’s identity.
Perhaps that is something else that photography is – a record of threshold moments.
Listening to – Over the Rhine’s Spark, Patty Griffin’s Tomorrow Night, Mindy Smith’s Train Song and Dar Williams’ Mercy of the Fallen. I-Nine performs Same in Any Language and Ryan Adams, his She Wants to Play Hearts. Then there’s Bruce Cockburn’s Pacing the Cage and David Gray’s Tidal Wave which rounds out into Over the Rhine’s Born.
Quote to Inspire – “If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.” – Robert Capa
Imagine in your walking that you come upon a local cemetery, one you know well because it’s where your family has been buried through the ages. Imagine also that it’s getting to be a crowded place and that the sexton (gravedigger) has need to prepare a new grave. You’ve been away. So, you chat to catch-up on the news. The sexton’s efforts bring forth the skull of someone known to you and your family. The sexton is able to provide narrative about that skull and the soul which inhabited it – tales of good, mainly the good and memorable that connects to you. It’s the skull of someone known to you as a child and your memories tumble forth in your mind’s chatter. Your curiosity interrupts you. You know this region well. Your conversation shifts to the newly needed plot and for whom it is being prepared. Someone’s died. Someone you have known. That’s pretty much how young Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play comes upon Ophelia’s death, the death of a young lady from court that Hamlet should perhaps have wedded. There’s regret. Hamlet finds that she’s brought about her own end – likely from the confusion and obscurity relating to his intentions towards her. Her death is part of something bigger that’s happening, the unraveling and exposure of the truth.
Globally, the play is about addressing abusive power and control and is as much about organizational wrongdoing as it is about personal or individual wrongdoing. The plot seeks to confirm wrongdoing and to set things right from the top down and doing so requires elaborate and subtle means of addressing wrongs. People get hurt along the way, most notably those who surround the throne; by the end of the play Ophelia’s father, Polonnius, dies as does her brother, Laertes.
Death and change have been a part of Life in the past few weeks. In some ways it seems we are left reeling or perhaps numb in moving on from what’s been at play. In other ways the lesson to take away is that change does occur and it’s needed if Life and Lives are to improve. Hamlet, the sexton, Yoric (Hamlet Senior’s jester), Ophelia and the funeral come to mind with these photos of grave markers. It astounds me to consider what any of these Lives (as represented by these grave markers) has been comprised of, even only those lives memorialized by rock within these photos. Each Life has seen the bad and good in our history. Each have been at play within history. And, each has found a way to make a go of living Life. I am struck by how often the cross is representative of the Life that has been lived.
Listening to – Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds perform Gravedigger, then its Anna Begins by the Counting Crows and You Might Die Trying by the Dave Matthews Band; Coldplay’s What If and Jack Johnson’s Rodeo Clowns also have featured in this evening’s listening.
Quote to Inspire – “A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.” – Ansel Adams
Within a busy week opportunity for travel along former routes of home permits departure from the whirring, buzzing, routinized rhythm and press of town Life. An hour upon the road gathers me to others and I listen and we talk, good, informing chatter. The gathering, done, permits time beyond meeting to slow down and attend to what I see in that dusky golden hour of half-light. My look-round occurs through the lens attached to my Canon 60D. At the Anglican Cemetery in Fort Vermilion, Alberta I begin; many of the grave markers are granite headstones. Others, painted or stained wooden crosses, seem more temporary. Perhaps maintenance of this tentative grave marker highlights practice in looking after those who have gone before us.
I point my car northward toward High Level. My drive from home out to Fort Vermilion has given me windshield time, time to look out from my car’s windows and to note the snowless earth that is warming, thawing and drying. As we move into summer, hours of sunlight will extend backward into earlier mornings and forward into later evenings. Summer solstice will see the sun dip below the horizon at 11:45 p.m. and reappear at 2:30 a.m., the time between being a protracted period of half-light that photographers refer to as their golden hour when the intensity of light drops off and the quality of light and what is lit changes. At its darkest, there will be a gray eeriness. Tonight, I’ve been able to catch cattails within our current golden hour (at about 9:45 p.m. the sun has just dipped below the horizon). Shallow depth of field permits focus and highlight of subject and the generalization of shapes that pattern into the background.
Listening to – two female voices; first, seeing Aimee Mann within my iTunes catalogue sparked curiosity toward her work with Til Tuesday – I’ve purchased two different versions of Voices Carry. Then, in relation to psalm 23, I was curious as to whether or not Sarah Masen was able to have her album, The Dreamlife of Angels, made available through iTunes. It’s been about ten years since Stocki first played it on Rhythm and Soul; at the time, a major record deal was not in the offing. But, now her album is something I’ve just found and it’s about time. Sarah is an intelligent lyricist; her song The Valley references psalm 23, making you think, and a curiously interesting tune called Hope is worth the listen. What else – The Five Blind Boys of Alabama will feature at Edmonton’s Winspear Centre along with Over the Rhine on June 10th. Good schtuff … if you’re to take it in.
Quote to Inspire – “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” -Ansel Adams
I have an uncle, my Dad’s younger brother, who was in his career a beloved literature professor at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. As a professor he was well-liked by his students and he knew what students were about and was able to direct them profitably and constructively in their academic careers. At lunchtimes in Edmonton growing up, Dad would read us letters in which his brother would own to his chagrin in the matter of occasionally having to borrow cigarettes from his students. His students esteemed him enough to forego this trespass – he got along with his students that well. What’s brought him to mind tonight is that he was someone who when sitting still at a task for too long got himself up out of his chair or away from his desk and out into his car and go for an hour’s drive and have a look about at his world; the last car of his that I road in was an early eighties Volvo sedan that he had had repainted a metallic green. He loved a drive as did his mother (my grandmother), his wife and daughter. A good drive was always a means to unwind from a day pressing obligations to capacity; he’d arrive back and he would have shifted his state … the world was better for having gone for a drive.
Yesterday, at day’s end I found that I had been sitting at computers, at school and at home, for more than twelve hours combined. And, I found that there was still more to do, more obligations to students and staff and their various undertakings … the work of the work was to stay at it and complete it. But, I wasn’t being productive, more a body realization than anything else … sitting down and sitting still from my day into my evening was not to be had. I pulled my uncle’s trick, I grabbed my camera bag, tripod, down-filled jacket, gloves and hat, and, I got into my car and steered it east from High Level. Twenty minutes from High Level, yielded the opportunity to photograph Canada geese, cranes, swallows and reflection upon water. The evening also yielded the good fortune of stumbling into a former colleague whose career path has mirrored my own; we probably haven’t chatted meaningfully for about five or six years. In half an hour I heard much about her world – her daughters, her husband and their next steps. I finished out the evening with another hour of photography and returned home.
Listening to – the Steve Miller Band’s Rock’n Me, Take the Money and Run and Mercury Blues; Murray McLauchlan’s Farmer’s Song and Hard Rock Town have featured as has Ryan Adams’ Chains of Love. The morning’s walk featured U2’s Magnificent, Eddie Vedder’s Hard Sun among other songs.
Quote to Inspire – “I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find the drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.” – Ken Burns
On this morning’s walk I chose music over prose. The brooding plot of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in all the consideration before action seems quite bleak and maybe the story is written intentionally so that renewal in physical sensuality is highlighted against the mundane existence of day-to-day life.
Music suited me better in the initiation of the day. Robbie Robertson played first, then Bruce Cockburn and U2, then on to Roxy Music and The Tragically Hip, all on my genius playlist beginning with Sweet Fire of Love. Then, in combination with thought about this photograph Sting begins on a song called The Soul Cages. For as much as the song’s lyrics refer to our humanoid condition here on earth I was drawn to consider whether or not a camera is another soul cage. I’m thinking that a camera is a tool that cages the soul within the photograph produced in that it encapsulates a moment of time, recording Life status and history in whatever condition we or the world were in – good or bad.
The camera photographed here is a Leica. A while back, Maciek Sokulski encouraged his Shuttertime with Sid and Mac podcast listeners to purchase an older camera, one that causes you to think about photography beyond the digital means, a camera with which to use your honed knowledge/skills of photography and to exercise expertise and skill in creating good photographs without waste. This Leica is my father’s from the early sixties. It is a camera that was used technically in the production of plastic and was used as part of the process to view at a microscopic level the grade/quality of plastics at an Edmonton plastics plant. It is a Leica without a viewfinder and is something my brothers and I should try out one of these days to see how it shoots. Maybe we will give it a try this summer.
Listening to – Robbie Robertson’s Soap Box Preacher, Amanda Marshall’s Sitting On Top of the World, Jann Arden’s The Sound Of, U2’s I Fall Down, Joan Osborne’s Man in the Long Black Coat and Neil Young’s When God Made Me.
Quote to Inspire – “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever … it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” – Aaron Siskind
Water – within the past week I’ve slipped and nearly tumbled on water that’s oozed and frozen into globs of ice on High Level sidewalks during my morning walks. Water has met with gravitational pull and been transported as precipitation from clouds through a distance of kilometres to earth, sprinkling erratically. Water that’s changed state from snow or ice has in its melting been responsible for transport of dust and dirt from sidewalks to drains and through sewage systems. Water has been the key ingredient in transforming dirt into mud and curiously the removal of soil from our bodies is best accomplished with … water. And, within this photo water that is not in motion becomes mirror, an enigma catching my attention as I’m able to focus through its surface to the detail in my subject, the cattails. The water mirror allows cattails to become foreground to the backdrop of clouds of pink sunset, a feat that would not have been possible without this water mirror.
Listening to – Ray Lamontagne’s I Still Care For You, Ryan Adams’ Come Pick Me Up and David Gray’s Fugitive. The David Gray tune from yesterday that’s stuck in my head is We’re Not Right; the other is Shawn Colvin’s take on We All Fall Down. Today, David Gray’s My Oh My plays out to the end of this post.
Quote to Inspire – “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
A cube or a box – the physical structure of the spaces we tend to inhabit for the majority of our days are cubes or boxes. There’s the cube or box of home. There’s the cube or box of work. As human beings it’s important that we find the third and fourth cubes beyond our work environment and beyond the home, the third and fourth elements of our day that balance out contact with work and withdrawal from endeavor. The analogy works forward in terms of thinking outside the box, breaking from routine and locating yourself in activities in the world to gain perspective on your world. Add a camera to the equation and the analogy drills down a step – you’re gaining perspective on the world you live in in much more concrete terms. Photography allows for that look at your broader context. Photography orients you to the beauty you’ll find that’s only minutes away. In fifteen minutes, I’d driven east and found these cattails at day’s end on a warmer spring day well into melt.
Listening to – The Five Blind Boys of Alabama and their rendition of Run On For A Long Time, Feed A Man by Billy Bragg & Wilco, Shakedown on 9th Street by Ryan Adams, Buffalo by Kathleen Edwards, Fully Completely by The Tragically Hip, Wonderwall by Ryan Adams, Eh Hee by Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds, You Might Die Trying by the Dave Matthews Band, U2’s Wake Up Dead Man and Jack Johnson’s Rodeo Clowns.
Quote to Inspire – “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” – Ansel Adams
In My Back Pocket - Photography 
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