Outsourcing a Photo Walk

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1 Farm Road – Beaverlodge, Alberta

2 Farm Road – Beaverlodge, Alberta

3 Farm Mailbox – Beaverlodge, Alberta

Those of you, who have read Timothy Harris’ book, ‘The Four Hour Work Week,’ have likely contended with the possibility that it may be possible to generate an income from only four hours per week. While that may be the premise for this guide to entrepreneurialism in the twenty-first century, the book also presents many novel concepts for earning a living. Within a project-based earning environment, another idea would be to follow a pattern of working for two months and then taking a month off – the focus would be to manage one’s resilience and project tenacity using the principle of contact and withdrawal as it is applied to work. Cool stuff! Beyond this, the book presents many resources available for the entrepreneur who needs help with part of a project – that project piece can be outsourced to others who can earn a living helping you out. What occurred to me within the last few days was to outline a project – a photo walk – to be organized and configured according to parameters that I set. Then, I would outsource my project idea and have others potential photo walk leaders (perhaps other photographers) bid on the opportunity to lead the photo walk and from there refine terms toward what would work for the project leader and me and others who might participate in the photo walk. The eLance website would be the forum in which I would farm-out and tender the project to others. Hmmh? Have you ever thought of doing something like this?

I did have all these thoughts. But, the weekend that could be used for this endeavor crept up rather quickly. I did not configure the project. I did not submit my project for tender in elance. I was not at the start or finish of a photo walk. Rather, at the end of my work week at school, having been encouraged to get away for some photography by my wife and others at school, I gathered my photo gear and bags, got into our Ford F-150 and headed south. I aimed at Edmonton and intended to see my father who’s in a retirement home, there. But, at four hours in to the journey the weather changed – winter rain began to fall and it seemed unwise to travel the remaining distance on treacherous roads. No hotels could be found in Valleyview. I changed my course and phoned ahead to Grande Prairie’s Stanford Inn – they had a room for me.

Saturday in Grande Prairie was overcast. It was not a day for outdoor photography.

Saturday became more an opportunity to explore what was new in familiar stores, to see a movie and to gather and replace clothes damaged in our recent Guatemala trip. At Long and McQuade Music I stopped in and tried out a couple of L’Arrivee guitars; I taught one of the sales persons a song – Rickie Lee Jones’ ‘Sailor Song,’ a song my mother heard me play when she was alive. It was a high point in the day to be able to jam with another guitar player.

Sunday, on the other hand, swept in with substantial spring muster. To the west from Grande Prairie clouds billowed as they crossed the final strip of the Canadian Rockies before meeting foothills and prairie. The photos presented here are ones gathered along a westward trek from Grande Prairie towards the Rockies – an interesting area in terms of landscape and it being a bright spring day. The subject is a paved farm road near Beaverlodge, Alberta – something extraordinary for me as most farm roads I have known have been gravelled ones. Here, the reflection of the sky colours the road blue.

Listening to – Rickie Lee Jones’ ‘Sailor Song.’

Quote to Inspire – “But when viewed in their new context, the museum, or gallery, photographs cease to be ‘about’ their subjects in the same direct or primary way; they become studies in the possibilities of photography.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’.

Open-Air, Sacramentality & Echoes

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Antigua – Central Square

Echo Chamber Entrance – Antigua Convent

Convent Wash Basins – Antigua

Convent Corridors – Antigua

Convent Atrium Arches – Antigua

Convent Architecture – Antigua

Convent Architecture – Antigua 2

Antigua Cathedral – 5

Antigua Cathedral – 4

Antigua Cathedral – 3

Antigua Cathedral – 2

Antigua Cathedral – 1

Our group of twenty-four walked through Antigua’s open-air market in the morning of one of two market days in the week, the market an active, crowded, buzzing place in which we bumped and jostled our way forward trying not to lose sight of each other as we wound our way from the market entrance on the market’s one side to city streets of central Antigua on the other. Colour was to be taken in, dark and bright, subdued in shadows, vibrantly woven into fabrics, glowing at times when lit by sunlight streaming through breaks in the market canopy. Faces, those of adults and children moved around us and past us traveling in the opposite direction through corridors created between vendor tables. Women balanced baskets on heads, a hand lightly steadying the basket and their purchases. Stay moving, keep moving, keep up with the group.

We gathered together near a fountain in Antigua’s central square, surrounded on two sides by what appeared to be hotels, shops on another and a Cathedral on the final side. We moved in and through this Cathedral which connects to another much older one, one that had suffered the devastation of earthquakes dismantling and bringing down huge pieces of architecture. The immensity of this older Cathedral is substantial, a place commanding reverence and sacramentality in size and depths and shape and ornamentation. The Cathedral had not one, but two crypts that could be entered, places where bodies of saints had rested.

From the Cathedral we traveled three blocks further and entered what would have been a convent; here, there was more an architectural sense of context than something yielding narrative of how its inhabitants used the building. The convent held an echo chamber, a round room below ground level that in shape mirrored that of an onion. In trying out the sound qualities, there was an aspect to the room where you needed to catch the resonance of sound produced in order to contribute to it – adding one’s voice to others, here, was and would have been an extraordinary experience. And, then there were the cells of nuns – all shaped in and out of stone.

Listening to – Cat Stevens’ ‘The Wind,’ ‘Rubylove,’ ‘If I Laugh’ and ‘Changes IV.’

Quotes to Inspire – (1) “The justification is still the same, that picture-taking serves a high purpose – uncovering a hidden truth, conserving a vanishing past.” (2) “The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates … [the camera is] a way of taking possession of the places they (tourists) visited.” (3) “Life is not about significant details, illuminated (in) a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography.’

Sunlight & Mountain Cloud Work

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Volcano Weather – Guatemala City 2

Volcano Weather – Guatemala City 3

Volcano Weather – Guatemala City 4

Volcano Weather – Guatemala City 5

Two weeks ago, students, parents and staff travelled to Guatemala to engage in a service learning project with another school. Leaving Canada’s frigid boreal temperatures we made our way south into ever warmer temperatures. The endeavor saw our students working with local students and their community on a variety of projects. And, we had the opportunity to learn Spanish, understand some culture, travel and see the locale with our Canadian eyes. On our third day out, on horseback or by foot, we had the opportunity to climb high above Guatemala City to the summit of a volcano, a volcano that had last been active in 2011. The images here are looking out from the volcano and our catching glimpses of sunlight within/among mountain cloud work.

Listening to – Martyn Joseph’s ‘Kiss the World Beautiful’ and ‘Sing to My Soul.’

Quote to Consider/Inspire – “… Photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.” – Susan Sontag

Song from My Youth

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Fire Tower, Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 1

Fire Tower, Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 2

Fire Tower, Watt Mountain – High Level, Alberta 3

Watt Mountain 2 – High Level, Alberta 1

Watt Mountain Ice – High Level, Alberta 1

Watt Mountain Ice – High Level, Alberta 2

A quiet Saturday, one spent mostly at home comes to a close. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils play from my iTunes account through computer speakers, ‘If You Wanna Get To Heaven’ – muted strings on a guitar are percussive, a harmonica brings in melody and other instruments, the sound preceding lyrics that consider getting to heaven – song and lyrics attract my ear, a song from my youth. The evening has involved editing images from Watt Mountain.

Listening to – Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Highway Patrolman,’ ‘One Step Up,’ and ‘Last to Die.’ There’s been ‘Rumble’ by Link Wray and the Wraymen. The Who have played ‘Boris the Spider,’ ‘I Can See for Miles’ and ‘Magic Bus.’ The Kingsmen have played ‘Louie Louie.’ Green Day have played ‘East Jesus Nowhere.’ The playlist has rounded out with Bruce Springsteen singing Pete Seeger’s Civil Rights anthem, ‘We Shall Overcome.’

Quote to Consider – “Picture-taking has been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’

Remembering on Watt Mountain

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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.’

Rattling Warmth

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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’

Jasper Avenue Apartment

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Jasper Avenue Apartment – Edmonton, Alberta 1

Jasper Avenue Apartment – Edmonton, Alberta 2

Jasper Avenue Apartment – Edmonton, Alberta 3

An Edmonton apartment overlooks the North Saskatchewan River. It is a building that has been around since the thirties or forties and is architecture of my mother’s time, a time when walking was the way through Edmonton and vehicle use was limited. The apartment is one I associate to Canadian literature as backdrop or setting to scene, a building that could feature in Mordecai Richler’s ‘The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz’ or within Robertson Davies’ ‘Fifth Business.’

The apartment draws me to recall Morley Callaghan’s ‘Such is My Beloved.’ The novel looks at a priest in the Great Depression making sense of God’s Love and the encounter of his reaching out with Christian care to two prostitutes, an encounter in which his efforts are taken advantage of and as I now recall, a situation repeated for real much more recently and narrated more accurately in Nadia Bolz-Weber’s memoir, ‘Pastrix.’ In ‘Such is My Beloved,’ the cocoon of Church, Church-Life and Church politics, all, cloud the words of the great commission being lived out and because they are not current or used readily by the congregation their exploration by Father Dowling is an innocent and naïve endeavor, one done on the sly without others knowing, a first, sustained attempt that’s taken too far with aims of turning recipients’ Lives around.

The story functions as a morality play, unfortunately tragic in structure and is more cautionary about not living out the Great Commission. In actuality, the Great Commission is likely more of ‘do-what-you-can-with-what-you’re-presented-with;’ when lives begin to turn around the Church can mobilize with many resources.

Listening to – The Blind Boys of Alabama and ‘Run On for a Long Time,’ ‘Amazing Grace,’ ‘Soldier’ and ‘Way Down the Hole.’

Quote to Inspire/Consider – “The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed …. You are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’

Edmonton Night

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Downtown Edmonton from Cloverdale Walkway Bridge – Edmonton, Alberta 1

Downtown Edmonton from Cloverdale Walkway Bridge – Edmonton, Alberta 2

Downtown Edmonton from Saskatchewan Drive – Edmonton, Alberta 1

Downtown Edmonton from Saskatchewan Drive – Edmonton, Alberta 2

Downtown Edmonton from Saskatchewan Drive – Edmonton, Alberta 3

Christmas took us to Edmonton, this year. And, I had my camera out for some of it.

Photographically, my intentions for Edmonton are evolving. While I will always find visual interest in exploring the Edmonton landscape, the city, in its sprawling hugeness seems to be holding repetition of structure and shape – areas of the city have become indistinguishable. A growing interest for me in the past few years, is the architecture in the arcs and patterns of Edmonton’s Anthony Henday Ring Road at the junction where the Ring Road meets the Calgary Trail (Gateway Boulevard) – there’s rich artistry and engineering in these, a visual feast for the visitor to Edmonton coming into the city from the Edmonton International Airport. Beyond such architecture, Baseline road and the petrochemical plants were of interest; at -30C, in late afternoon sun, the capture of light and shadow on each side of billowing steam plumes was an extraordinary sight.

Christmas had me recalling my father; at the age I am now, he would have been accommodating me in his Edmonton home as University student. Christmases, all those years ago, would have involved so much – the use of his car, getting home according to curfew, calling ahead if I wouldn’t be home for supper, and, the introduction of my girlfriend, now wife, to our family and within Christmas. These were years I learned so much about writing at University and from my father and mother, simply by involving them in proofreading and discussion. These years, were the years when my father introduced me to audiobooks in his bringing back Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ from the HMV shop in one of his business trips to the UK. Audiobooks became a way to interact with texts beyond what we were reading in the novel-a-week pace set for us in Literature courses.

Downtown Edmonton is presented from two vantage points – Saskatchewan Drive and from the Cloverdale walkway bridge.

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

Listening to – hauntingly familiar songs associated with Emilio Estevez’ film, ‘The Way.’ Tyler Bates’ ‘Ventura’ is one of them; along with it, a real treat – ‘Nadal De Luintra’ by Berroguetto.

Summer Colour & Warmth

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Field Green – Near Greencourt, Alberta

Our Boxing Day is overcast. Snow falls (four inches worth), family sleeps late – the television has had its share of use and all have been able to settle and rest. Coffee and tea warm us. Outside is winter’s cold, an entity that almost requires a northern household to have a fire place to throw off a dry, substantial heat (one day, perhaps) or in-floor heating, at least. Our day is quiet, moving me to recall summer’s colour and warmth, a time when it is easier for an object in motion to stay in motion – a very different time of year. Loreena McKennitt has an album for a day such as this, ‘Music to Drive the Cold Winter Away,’ a Christmas gift from my brother several years back.

Listening to – Ed Sheeran’s ‘The a Team;’ my daughter received sheet music to this song; I’ve had a go at fretting chords and then doing so with the actual song, finding nuance in how it’s played.

“Photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’

Storehouse Timbers

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Storehouse – St Louis Catholic Mission – Buttertown, Alberta 1

Storehouse – St Louis Catholic Mission – Buttertown, Alberta 2

Storehouse – St Louis Catholic Mission – Buttertown, Alberta 3

Storehouse – St Louis Catholic Mission – Buttertown, Alberta 4

A spring thaw in the early nineteen-hundreds saw several Fort Vermilion area farms flooded. In one instance a farm building washed out, the movement of the water weakening its foundation enough to topple the structure. Timber for that building floated downstream on the Boyer River becoming snagged at a turn in the river as it passed the St. Louis Catholic Mission in Buttertown. Those timbers were pulled from the river and after a time were used to build this storehouse for the mission. The photo was created in May, 2013. Last Saturday night, the image became editing focal point as I showed my son how Lightroom 5 and NiK Software can be used – four versions were produced, some following his eye’s lead.

Listening to – Coldplay’s ‘Yellow,’ a song I worked through after all had gone to bed last night; the piano work is more difficult than the fretwork; the resonance and dissonance found in the chords and alternate tuning are captivating.

Quote to Consider – “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’