Flora

Yardio

Barn, Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Farm, Farmhouse, Flora, Homestead, Light Intensity, Night, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Spring, Still Life, Sunset, Vehicle, Vehicle Restoration

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

Step Into Line

Barn, Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Combine (Farming), Farm, Farmhouse, Flora, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Prime Lens, Spring, Still Life

Ray LaMontagne’s song ‘Beg, Steal or Borrow’ plays, a tune I’m drawn to lyrically and melodiously. It’s a tune that says as much about the creation of a song – “you beg, you steal, you borrow” – as it does about the act of settling into Life and working through disillusionments, “Are you gonna step into line like your daddy done, punchin the time and climbin life’s long ladder?” It’s a tune that looks at the cost of pursuing individuality (or greatness) versus conforming to Life’s norms (mediocrity). It seems also to be the tune of the man further along the road looking toward a younger one, perhaps hoping to help him avoid Life’s misteps, perhaps gauging the outcomes of the younger man’s choices and responses to Life events. In this, there’s the sideline vicarious living out of life through the actions of another, a younger man who aims to make his stand and put his footprint on the world. The song’s really about that twofold look at oneself – the you that pursues passions coming against that wiser part of self that looks critically at actions, outcomes and costs. There’s wrestling with truth and wrestling towards truth. In content the lyrics associate well to much of what Tom Cochrane sings about (e.g. Boy Inside the Man) … more good tunes.

Photos – out and away on a Saturday morning that extends longways through most of the day returning me home in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Old-time farm buildings and homes feature in these photos amongst Alberta spring weather, a mixture of moisture laden air rising as the sun heats the earth, the air rippling in mirage fashion in convection’s warmth.  Clouds billow and stack throughout the day becoming backdrop to earthly structures – land, trees, buildings and roads.

Listening to – David Gray’s Fugitive, Ray LaMontagne’s I Still Care For You and Ryan Adams’ Oh My Sweet Carolina.

Quote to Inspire – “For me the printing process is part of the magic of photography. It’s that magic that can be exciting, disappointing, rewarding and frustrating all in the same few moments in the darkroom.” – John Sexton

Goethe, Horizons and Thresholds

Backlight, Barn, Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Farmhouse, Flora, Light Intensity, Night, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Spring, Still Life, Sunset

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

Beyond Yoric

Backlight, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Live View, Cemetery, Flora, Light Intensity, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Spring, Still Life

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

Dusk’s Golden Hour

Backlight, Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Live View, Cemetery, Flora, Home, Light Intensity, Night, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Spring, Sunset

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

An Hour Away

Best Practices - Photography, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200 mm 2.8 IS L Series Lens, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, Farm, Flora, Light Intensity, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Spring, Sunset

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