At an age when wearing glasses assists me in my day, my experience of working with a camera through to editing an image often is about revisiting subject and context to see what else is there; it is actual re-view (review). The process is similar to gleaning feedback in using a personal journal. And, in journaling, one point of revelation has been sorting through the conception that memory, perception, thought and even feeling are only what they were on the day that they occurred. In that portion of experience in which they occurred they were what truth was – they became the facts in response to Life’s events for that duration of time. Without a record, the memory that is carried forward can shift, adjust and change over time … with new thoughts, feelings, perceptions and influences – memory is or becomes malleable. Just like a journaling process, creating a photograph isolates the truth of ‘what was’ for the duration of time in which it occurs. What is also valuable about a journal and photographs produced by the photographer and camera is that you can revisit subject and context to see and appreciate more of what else was there. The journal and photograph inform you and other readers/viewers about the personal narrative of the writer/photographer. The feedback of what else was there, that you now see, informs future action.
Listening to Neil Young’s Old Man and reminded that Lizz Wright also sings this song; there’s not so much experientially that separates us, the older and younger; it does seem to be a father-son song and the son’s revelation of greater similarity than difference.
Quote to Inspire – “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” — Ansel Adams
I’m sifting photographs on my computer, tonight, aiming to locate photographs taken of the road among mountains between Grande Prairie and Banff, Alberta, a trip taken this fall in early October. To refer to them will allow future planning of High Dynamic Range (HDR) shots; but, photographs have been shifted between my C: drive and L: drive within the past three months and am having no luck, tonight. Sifting at a later date will yield them.
A photograph has caught my eye, a reward for my look-back – a photo of an early fifties Plymouth Savoy dragged into the woods behind the McNaught homestead, home to Alberta artist, Euphemia McNaught. She’s had some intention in dragging the vehicle to where it sits among Aspen willows spaced with what appears to be regular rhythm as you look across the car from front to back and diagonally from driver’s side to passenger rear. This back drop changes in colour with the seasons – whites and blacks in winter, greens in summer and the reds of leaves in fall.
Those who discover and view the vehicle orient themselves to still life juxtaposition, a car oxidizes among the regular cycle of life and death of plants and greenery; the scene is a treasure in terms of colour, shape, context, season, light and themes of still life. The day amidst its drizzle did get cold but not before two hours had gone by looking through my camera lens at the car, its situation and the play of light.
Listening to U2’s One, tonight from the U218 Singles album.
Quote to Inspire – “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” ~ Ansel Adams.
Again, today – out and about on a photowalk … others’ fresh perspective has me looking up and looking at things. Green needles of a conifer remind and point towards spring … loving the colour and background, here.
Listening to U2’s Mysterious Ways … the subject and content of the lyrics are something good to unravel, in their unraveling. Coldplay’s In My Place, is up next, reminding of U2, Paul McCartney, Coldplay and the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft (Bittersweet Symphony) and the world-wide Live 8 concert and the Gleneagles decisions made by G8 leaders … some good, that day! Brian Adams kicked things off in Toronto followed in the day by The Tragically Hip and Great Big Sea.
Curious Quote to Inspire – “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
Today – out with fellow photographers, a first cluster together. Some creatives among the group, ones willing to experiment with perspective and their subject. Totally cool to be a part of things today and to capture this photographer’s photo in the making. Good schtuff!
Listening to How Soon Is Now by the Smiths, as found on The Wedding Singer Soundtrack.
Quote to Inspire – “Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham
Deer – three does chased by a stag crossed Alberta highway 88 as I traveled eastward from High Level to Fort Vermilion at 8:00 a.m. on January 23, 2012; the three does made it across safely between myself and oncoming vehicles. I slowed my truck down on the icy road but not enough to miss hitting the stag. I stopped further ahead and turned around to see about animal remains that might need to be hauled from the road. Nothing was found. There was a swale in the snow where the deer had drifted into the ditch on the north side of the highway. But, the stag and does had taken off. My truck, on the other hand, received damage – the grill and light housing mainly and the radiator and transmission cooler were pushed back toward the engine. I checked it out and watched the gauges – it held together for another 160 km and still is driveable today. Despite being in immaculate shape, at 286 000 km, this 2000 GMC Sierra is considered a write-off as the cost to repair the truck exceeds the value of the truck.
The antlered stag, imagistically recalls U2’s Electrical Storm video, its being written about Ireland’s Easter Day Accord, and the ghosted image of the stag in the Electrical Storm video – a subject I’ve commented on on the old U2 Zoo Station (Zooropa) website.
Listening to – Impermanent Things by Peter Himmelman from his Stage Diving album.
Quote to Inspire – “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” -Ansel Adams
Edmonton – June 2, 2011 – In 1988, in Anzac, Alberta I painted the walls of a Northland School Division teacherage making it home for my wife and I in our second year of marriage. That fall, I listened and painted as a song aired for the first few times on the local FM radio station from Fort McMurray featuring Robbie Robertson and familiar ‘Joshua Tree’ vocals as back-up to the song with also familiar chiming guitar work. As I listened I was confirming the sacred arena that the lyrics were dealing with. Backing to the song was provided by Bono and Edge of U2. The song, Sweet Fire of Love, alluded to and opened out the experience of awakening to the Holy Spirit’s work. In the lyrics, awakening was the issue and the story side of the song had a biographical element, something true and encountered by members of U2.
I would read about such awakening in Steve Stockman’s Walk On – The Spiritual Journey of U2, a book originating in response to a Canadian in Vancouver, British Columbia challenging Steve to set out proofs that members of U2 were Christian. There was much disbelief about U2 being Christian. The band’s appeal to audiences would seem worldly and something quite far away from … ministry. Yet, Steve set about looking through the U2 canon to establish context and biblical reference for U2 songs and in doing so exposed the bad and good, the hurt and the love experienced in the current Church. Moreover, Steve considered the role contemporary secular and Christian music play in overcoming or ameliorating a grace-filled Christian walk.
Throughout this time of challenge regarding U2’s credible Christian walk, Steve hosted a Sunday radio show called Rhythm and Soul on BBC Radio Ulster (8:00 p.m. – Ulster, 1:00 p.m. – Alberta) that examined Christian message found in contemporary Christian and secular music; over the internet, I tuned in from 2002 to 2007. By the time Rhythm and Soul completed its run, Steve had written three books considering music in the Christian walk, completed a Masters of Theology, led youth (young adult) missions trips to Cape Town, South Africa and had served as Dean of Derryvolgie Hall at Queens University in Belfast, Ireland. In the summer of 2005, I enjoyed an hour’s visit and dialogue with Steve at Regent College (Vancouver, British Columbia). After a few years, Steve became chaplain at Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in Belfast, Ireland; he now has a blog that follows from his Rhythm and Soul days and his Rhythms of Redemption blog – its called Soul Surmise. For Steve, Bono of U2 remains his favourite Irish pastor. For me, I finally got to see U2 in Edmonton, Alberta at Commonwealth Stadium in my forty-ninth year, days before I would turn fifty – 2 June 2011.
The photographs presented here capture something of the evening. It being an overcast day on June 2, 2011, the night became chilly and U2 donned extra clothing to stay warm. The evening held stories of Bono hitch-hiking in a Vancouver rainstorm and being picked up by a Vancouver Canuck’s player who Bono rewarded with tickets to the Edmonton performance. Bono sought out a female audience member to sing a Canadian tune, Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. The whole of the stadium knew each song of the U2 canon; all sang with U2, and together. As I would remark later – I was glad to be able to take my wife, daughter and son to see a live performance by a band whose music has filled our home through the years – a memorable, once-in-a-lifetime night.
Here’s the set list.
Even Better Than The Real Thing
I Will Follow
Get On Your Boots
Magnificent
Mysterious Ways
Elevation
Until The End Of The World
All I Want Is You
Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
Beautiful Day
Pride (In The Name Of Love)
Miss Sarajevo
Zooropa
City Of Blinding Lights
Vertigo
I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Scarlet
Walk On
Encore: One
Where The Streets Have No Name
Encore 2: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me
With Or Without You
Moment of Surrender
Curious quote for the pondering:
“… some may call it blasphemy
But I believe it’s true
God lies there beside you in the gutter
And grace, like a mother holds you.” ~ Steve Stockman, from poem,Up on Scarlet Street
Listening to Ryan Adams’ Wonderwall from the album, Love is Hell
Englishman River Falls, Vancouver Island, British Columbia
In the heart of coldest January, summer photographs aid reminiscence of warmer, pleasant times. I’ve been to Englishman River Falls on Vancouver Island three times – dangling feet in the water with my wife and cousin, hiking the area with my Mom and Dad and finally as photographic opportunity. This photo shows the interplay of the river’s movement among fading light, mist, shadow and greenery.
Listening – I’ve been listening to Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Live at Radio City Music Hall – poignant, well-sung lyrics among resonant rhythms.
Curious quotes for the pondering:
“God becomes and unbecomes,” from Meister Eckhart highlighting the idea that God is only our word for it, that it’s so much more.
“God is not perhaps so much a region beyond knowledge, as something prior to the sentences we speak.” ~ Foucault, The Order of Things (cited in Marion 1994:570)
The photograph presented, here, is one of the five boats on Vale Island at Hay River, NWT. While several wordpress blogger photographs this week explore the theme of ‘simple’ in a weekly photo challenge, this photograph more accurately conveys the sentiment of ‘being at rest or at peace.’ This photograph is quirky, though, a boat dragged among the trees, a boat left to rot away … and still the lighting, the subject and boat’s shape suggest simplicity, perhaps a simplicity in resignation. As a concept, simple can be construed to mean the basics involved in the minimum equation for living; it can refer to what one finds easy to do and tangentially it can refer to limited cognitive capacity, perhaps a capacity less than what is required in order to live. Again, the photograph really presents the simplicity of resignation – a life resigned, something complete, something simple.
Listening to The Good in Me is Dead sung by Martyn Joseph in his album Don’t Talk About Love, Volume 1
Quote to Inspire – “There is no such thing as ‘correct’ composition, just bad composition, good composition and inspired composition.” ~ Andrew S. Gibson, Beyond Thirds – A Photographer’s Introduction to Creative Composition
On Vale Island, part of the old Hay River town site, at the wooded corner of 100th Street and 102nd Avenue, if you look into the trees of the northwest corner the sight you’ll see is that of four or five derelict wooden boats of various sizes, some small enough to have navigated the east channel alone, others with size enough to have been considered, in their day, seaworthy on the Great Slave Lake. Three of these boats are the subject of my second high dynamic range (HDR) photograph, boats well-past their prime, dragged to higher ground to rot away among the aspen willows. They will no longer be a nuisance there and they’ll need little upkeep. In actual fact, what I’ve come across is the cemetery plot for these old boats. While life has gone out from them, these vessels, without doubt, saw service in my life time; but, would they have been built in my life time?
The picture and this present consideration of boat-life reminds of a reader colleague and friend who pointed me toward Alice Munroe’s 2001 novel about the different ‘ships’ we sail within throughout our lives; it’s entitled Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and has now been republished with the title ‘Away From Her.’ Within each state we act and move with different intents and purposes. But, a ship graveyard such as this found on Vale Island reminds that our journey within these collective or collected states has beginning, duration and an end, as well. The book was a tough go reading-wise, more something exposing malaise and truth than … hope?
The boats of Vale Island while having had lives that preceded this photograph, have certainly ferried human lives living within the various ‘ships’ that Alice Munroe has proposed in and around Hay River, NWT. These boats still hold their line and shape. Now, beyond their service, they are in demise. And, the winds blow from the Great Slave Lake through Vale Island, among these boats and into Hay River.
Listening to Ride Forever, sung by Paul Gross as part of the Due South soundtrack, a single song referencing the Great Slave Lake, living in Alberta … and matters of growing old.
Quote to Inspire – “Where I come from the challenges are quite different. There are no drug dealers or pimps, few thieves to bother with. There was only the environment and surviving in the face of it is the challenge of the Inuit. A mother gives birth somewhere out on a glacier field, hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost and she knows that the odds are stacked against her son even living to see the spring with disease, lack of food or the elements. And, even if they should survive and if he should grow to be a boy, she knows very well that all he has to do is lose his footing on the smooth surface of a glacier and that’ll be that. In other words, she should know that if her son cannot live … why should she try? Well I know this woman. I helped deliver her son. She was weak and undernourished. The next morning she stood up and she picked her child up into her arms and she set out again into the blinding snow. And, I think that was one of the most courageous acts that I’ve ever seen.” ~ Paul Gross, Fraser/Inuit Soliloquy – Due South
At the Alexandra Falls I used the AEB (Automatic Exposure Bracketing) in anticipation of working with HDR software soon. The Automatic Exposure Bracketing on a Canon camera takes three (3) shots of the same subject in sequence – a darker image, the average exposed image and a lighter image. I downloaded the Photomatix Pro HDR software (thank you for the recommendation Maciek Sukolski – MiKS Media) with Lightroom plug-in and have been experimenting, tonight. The HDR software combines the images to create better (or perhaps more accurate) definition of the subject and an exposure that more accurately sees all that the eye sees – we see a broader range of dark and light than our cameras; HDR overcomes this limitation. Taking these photographs also requires a tripod so that the camera accurately records the same image three times … without movement. In looking at the image of the falls have a look for the level of detail produced throughout the image. I find myself wishing I would have taken more time at the Hay River shipyard taking photographs in Automatic Exposure Bracketing. Alas, it was cold and I needed to return home 300 km south.
Listening to Cardiff Bay by Martyn Joseph from his Evolved album (first heard on Stocki’s Rhythms of Redemption and seen more than few times in Edmonton with friends).
Quote to Inspire – “Photography is like making cheese. It takes a hell of a lot of milk to make a small amount of cheese just like it takes a hell of a lot of photos to get a good one.” – Robert Gillis
In My Back Pocket - Photography 
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