Reddening

Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Season, Summer, Sunset, Weather
Skyline - Edmonton, Alberta - Canada

Skyline – Edmonton, Alberta – Canada

Edmonton Skyline - Edmonton, Alberta Canada 1

Edmonton Skyline – Edmonton, Alberta Canada 1

Edmonton Skyline - Edmonton, Alberta Canada 3

Edmonton Skyline – Edmonton, Alberta Canada 3

Skyline - Edmonton, Alberta - Canada 4

Skyline – Edmonton, Alberta – Canada 4

I dropped them off. Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium now held them – my wife, our daughter and our daughter’s friend – tickets, purchased last November; the event, a One Direction concert.

I began looking for possible photographs – different subjects presented themselves. I got out of our truck opposite Strathcona Composite School and had a look at a rat rod parked outside a gym on the southbound Calgary trail – very minimalistic in design and with little to draw the eye. I moved on. On Jasper Avenue the Gibson Building has always been an interesting subject to photograph – a building built to accommodate the wedge or pie piece shape of the land beneath it. But for the last eighteen months a neighboring construction zone has interfered with its presentation; I would need a fish eye lens to make something of the building without capturing the construction site. A photograph would not be viable today. Later, I had a good walk through the John Walter museum and gathered more information about the area and the history of one of the Walterdale homes I had photographed months before. There, in walking back to my truck, I ran into one of my daughter’s friends from her dance company – she was staying with grandparents and had recognized me. We said our hellos; I chatted with her and her granddad and we parted.

The evening clouded over. As the sun moved into its golden hour, I got to the Riverdale bike bridge and began gathering the shots above of the Edmonton Skyline. People walking by offered encouragement and saw the photographer’s opportunity of reddening clouds. One Direction’s music could be heard in the distance – people wondered if the music was part of the Taste of Edmonton event that was also going on, currently. In wind, spitting rain and cloud, wiping the lens with lens cloth regularly I gathered these images.

Quote to Consider – within the intention of ‘In My Back Pocket – Photography,’ has been the movement toward the seamless ‘See, Think, Do’ of image capture and image making. The following image conveys something similar and is found in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Wish to Be a Red Indian;’ “If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly short heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.” Liking this … sort of what photography can become, response.

Listening to – Maeve Binchy’s ‘A Week in Winter’ for the long drive to and from Edmonton.

Winter Light Work

Backlight, Best Practices - Photography, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Home, Homestead, Journaling, Light Intensity, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Winter
Walterdale House White 2 HDR-Edit-Edit-Edit-3

Walterdale House White 2 HDR-Edit-Edit-Edit-3

An early-hours image from February in Edmonton, one of three surviving homestead structures in Edmonton’s Walterdale community from 1900 or so. The light work in the trees, upon the snow and that reflected to the white walls of the house attracts my attention. The homestead glows in a way you might anticipate when encountering a home within a ghost story, the narrative placing a character too many hours into night and the happenings that occur.

Quote to Consider – “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz

Listening to – Casting Crowns’ ‘City on a Hill.’

Treed Hallway

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Walterdale House Green - Edmonton, Alberta - Canada

Walterdale House Green – Edmonton, Alberta – Canada

Southward, under Edmonton’s 105th Street bridge, just steps to its west are three sturdy houses from Edmonton’s early nineteen hundreds, houses that comprised what was then known as Walterdale. Each is a two storey structure; two are white and another that has become subject for this image is more ornate in its presentation – white or cream on teal or perhaps a turquoise green. An image from memory coaxes me along this early morning photo ramble – an autumnal scene, a photo of my father’s in which he’s framed one of the white Walterdale houses with fall yellows of birch and aspen along a treed path, an open-ended hallway opening out and arriving at that white house. That photo hangs downstairs, on a wall outside my study where it can receive morning sunlight on sunlit days. Until this photograph, I had not set foot in Walterdale for perhaps thirty years.

Colour, composition and lighting attract me to this image.

Listening to – Marco Beltrami & The Giver Cast perform ‘End Credits’ to ‘The Giver (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack);’ it’s also a piece my daughter is playing on our Heintzman piano (it’s just been tuned … good); I’ve been playing Casting Crowns’ ‘Broken Together’ on it last night – something beautiful.

Quote to Inspire – “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” – Robert Capa

Jasper Avenue Apartment

Best Practices - Photography, Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Journaling, Photoblog Intention, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Winter
Jasper Avenue Apartment - Edmonton, Alberta 1

Jasper Avenue Apartment – Edmonton, Alberta 1

Jasper Avenue Apartment - Edmonton, Alberta 2

Jasper Avenue Apartment – Edmonton, Alberta 2

Jasper Avenue Apartment - Edmonton, Alberta 3

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

Canon Camera, Canon Lens, Canon Live View, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Night, Photography & Conceptualizing Beauty, Project 365 - Photo-a-day, Winter
Downtown Edmonton from Cloverdale Walkway Bridge - Edmonton, Alberta 1

Downtown Edmonton from Cloverdale Walkway Bridge – Edmonton, Alberta 1

Downtown Edmonton from Cloverdale Walkway Bridge - Edmonton, Alberta 2

Downtown Edmonton from Cloverdale Walkway Bridge – Edmonton, Alberta 2

Downtown Edmonton from Saskatchewan Drive - Edmonton, Alberta 1

Downtown Edmonton from Saskatchewan Drive – Edmonton, Alberta 1

Downtown Edmonton from Saskatchewan Drive - Edmonton, Alberta 2

Downtown Edmonton from Saskatchewan Drive – Edmonton, Alberta 2

Downtown Edmonton from Saskatchewan Drive - Edmonton, Alberta 3

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.