Plymouth Savoy – Beaverlodge, Alberta 1Plymouth Savoy – Beaverlodge, Alberta 2Plymouth Savoy – Beaverlodge, Alberta 3Plymouth Savoy – Beaverlodge, Alberta 4
No longer gliding forward on each tire’s balloon cushion this vehicle slumps to the earth in resignation. Snow’s first fall dusts this Plymouth Savoy’s pitted hood, scars of gravel-sprayed journeys. Paint erodes, chrome still gleams. The vertical of trees’ up and down becomes contrast to rounder more human car curves.
Listening to – Lenka’s ‘The Show.’
Quote to Inspire – “I don’t believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.” – Sebastiao Salgado
Canola Homestead – Fort Vermilion, AlbertaElektra Water Bomber 1Elektra Water Bomber 2Winter Snow 1Winter Snow 2
At -39C steam hangs in the air almost failing to dissipate, resolving into a fog residue – vehicle exhaust, factory steam, breath from your own mouth. Cold cranking car batteries fail and must be boosted. January into February, in the North we’re rounding the cold portion of the orbital arc, pulling January’s cold with us into February. To look back, to rework and to resurrect in new ways – former photographs become blessing. Blown, compacted, heated and crusted snow is the subject of two images. Summer images include a homestead house within a field of canola as well as the Elektra water bomber from July.
Listening to – Stompin’ Tom Connors’ ‘Sudbury Saturday Night,’ Ray Wylie Hubbard’s ‘Mother Blues,’ Gurf Morlix’s ‘Gasoline’ and Buddy Miller’s ‘Does My Ring Burn Your Finger.’
Quote to Inspire – “I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not ‘photographing’, in order to keep the eye in practice.” – Josef Koudelka
Winter’s sun gleams passing through translucent glass, stained glass hung in our kitchen window to catch sunlight from the southern exposure of our home. The image, a macro shot, plays with depth of field – focus and blur – and colour and reveals some of the glass interior.
Listening to – Chilly Gonzales’ White Keys from the Solo Piano II album.
Quote to Inspire – “The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.” – Richard Kalvar
Snow – Back Deck 1Snow – Back Deck 2Snow – Back Deck 3Snow – Back Deck 4Snow – Back Deck 5Snow – Back Deck 6Snow – Back Deck 7
We’re there. We have more than our quota of snow … and there’s still two months to go. Within the town of High Level every place you look is contending with a snow blanket that is three to four feet thick. Driveways are framed on two sides with snow mountains five, six and seven feet in height, snow that’s been cleared away to allow vehicles to park and access to garages. Great clumps of snow hang from the eaves of houses in unusual, windblown shapes. And, our weather hasn’t broken its pattern of a once in three-to-four day solid snowfall since November. The images presented here look south from our back deck where snow is beyond four feet in depth, having drifted in.
Listening to – Mike Plume’s ‘Stay Where Yer To’
Quote to Inspire – “I don’t care so much anymore about ‘good photography’; I am gathering evidence for history.” – Gilles Peress
Henday S-Curve – Edmonton, Alberta 1Henday S-Curve – Edmonton, Alberta 2Henday S-Curve – Edmonton, Alberta 3
A Sunday evening, alone – wife and daughter at fellowship within our Church care group. And, me … I’m dealing with the sore reality of a yet to be diagnosed stomach ailment, something beyond the jungle tummy that’s been making its way round the globe. My wife has brought me a DVD to watch tonight and I’ve found it to be something powerful, something to recommend and something I’m sure I will own – ‘Being Flynn’ with Robert Deniro and Paul Dano. The movie grapples well and quite realistically with open-your-eyes-wide issues of broken families, homelessness, what lives amount to in their totality and moving on with Life despite the muddles encountered. ‘Being Flynn’ is a narrative of making that quantum leap to put the mess behind you and about getting to that strong and compassionate state that underscores the ‘why’ in contributing to make a better world for coming generations. The film is personal commentary about family and families for each of us as much as it is social commentary about something more than societal malaise … it chronicles the downward spiral of human life discarded and disposed of, Gehenna’s trash heap, before one encounters death; Lives are lost while the world looks beyond the down and out. ‘Being Flynn’ is essay as much as it is narrative film.
The image presented here is an array of street lights that light Anthony Henday Drive in Edmonton – the S – Curve attracts my attention as does some of the roadway architecture as Gateway Boulevard meets Anthony Henday on Edmonton’s South side near Ellerslie Road.
Listening to – ‘Know My Mind’ by Bo Weitz, ‘It’s What I’m Thinking’ by Badly Drawn Boy and ‘Mother in Law,’ by Allen Toussaint.
Quote to Inspire – “What I did, anybody can do.” – Weegee
Derelict Farmhouse 2 – Lamont, Alberta 1Derelict Farmhouse – Lamont, Alberta 2Derelict Farmhouse – Lamont, Alberta 3
The front face or façade of a derelict farmhouse precedes a wooden grain shed and newer, state of the art grain silos. The image contrasts new, old and older. The house sits on a ridge overlooking a storage yard for people’s equipment, a collecting point or nexus for anything unused and nearly disposed of … old mobile homes, vehicles, farming implements and machinery. This house, on the other hand, has structure and form and context – it has beauty; it had purpose in a former time. What would this house have been like in its day, when people were proud of the land’s first fruits? Is this a homestead house built following World War I or World War II? Would the farmers who farmed here have come to Canada or would they have been a generation or two arrived. In terms of today, why has the building not been torn down? What memorial does this house provide and to whom? Who does this house continue to serve?
Listening to – Radiohead’s ‘Little by Little’ from the King of Limbs album (Live from the Basement).
Quote to Inspire – “Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it.” – Morley Baer
Muttart Conservatory – Edmonton, AlbertaMetallic Spheres Sculpture – Edmonton, Alberta 4Metallic Spheres Sculpture – Edmonton, Alberta 3Metallic Spheres Sculpture – Edmonton, Alberta 2Metallic Spheres Sculpture – Edmonton, Alberta 1
Glowing green against the copper-lit reflection of city lights upon clouds, an image of Edmonton’s Muttart Conservatory moments after the world has shifted from 2012 into 2013. Other images are from the metallic, spheres structure/sculpture from the Southeast end of Edmonton’s Quesnel Bridge.
Listening to – Cheng Yu’s ‘Purple Bamboo’ and ‘Pipa 2’, Dust Devil’s ‘Liquid Lounge,’ and Alexander Kogan’s ‘Two Guitars’.
Quote to Inspire – “For me, photography has become a way of attempting to make sense of the strange world that I see around me. I don’t ever expect to achieve that understanding, but the fact that I am trying comforts me.” – Mikhael Subotzky
An image of the Scotford Refinery near Fort Saskatchewan, one of the last day-lit images shot at dusk looking east towards Edmonton after a good day of looking for and finding images.
Listening to – Simple Minds’ ‘Alive and Kicking.’
Quote to Inspire – “The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.” – Robert Doisneau
Bison – Elk Island 1Bison – Elk Island 4Bison – Elk Island 3Bison – Elk Island 2
In a day that’s been bright, yet overcast, the sun shines through broken cloud as it moves towards the horizon in late afternoon, shining directly on two Bison grazing at Astotin Lake in Elk Island National Park, images inspired by Sidney Blake’s discussion of animal/nature photography and by her extraordinary black and white images of Bison in winter.
Listening to – The Von Bondies with ‘C’mon C’mon’.
Quote to Inspire – “When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.” – Anonymous
Friday, following Christmas, after time away from Edmonton at Elk Island National Park photographing bison, there, we took the backway into Edmonton, leaving the park and coming into Edmonton through Fort Saskatchewan. Near Lamont we found this derelict farmhouse. I took some shots while my son read a novel in our SUV; curiously, he may have been reading Charles Dickens’ ‘Bleak House,’ a novel sorting through the estate of someone who has passed … the clarity and speed of action within Britain’s legal system at the time is slower than a snail’s pace and those to whom the estate would benefit are in some cases reduced to poverty with the waiting … that’s gone on for what seems a generation; it’s social commentary and plot. With the image, here, the sun was moving toward the horizon and gives partial corona to the roof at each leftmost edge near the eaves trough. The textures and muted tones appeal. In looking through the image, the landscape that the house is set in seems to collect the unused, as well – day’s end for a few things.
Listening to – Cold Play’s ‘Violet Hill’, ‘Yellow’ and John Farnham with ‘The Voice’.
Quote to Inspire – “Everything shifts as you move, and different things come into focus at different points of your life, and you try to articulate that.” Chris Steele
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