In My Back Pocket – Photography

Tag: St. Louis Mission

Coloured Desaturation

October 19th, 2014

Autumn’s Desaturation – Rycroft, Alberta 1

Autumn’s Desaturation – Rycroft, Alberta 2

Desaturation -St. Louis Mission – Buttertown, Alberta 1

Desaturation -St. Louis Mission – Buttertown, Alberta 2

Looking through this past month’s photos the desaturation of the earth’s foliage draws my eye, Life ebbing away or perhaps about to draw into dormancy under the covers with snow’s blanket. Fields have been shorn, leaving behind uniform lines of a seed drill’s patterned press of seeds into the earth. Great expanses of field hold round bales, some already positioned for feeding cattle, deer, elk and bison. These photos present the colour of a month ago and the desaturation witnessed only a week ago. The desire to be on the land as I was as a youth is there.

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’

Listening to – Sarah Masen’s rendition of an old Supertramp song – ‘Give a Little Bit.’
Buttertown Church – Revisited

May 21st, 2014

St Louis Mission – Buttertown, Alberta 1

St Louis Mission – Buttertown, Alberta 2

We are well into spring and time has been moving quickly as we move, speeding on, toward June and summer. Two weeks have already passed since I took in a photography workshop with Dave Brosha, a photographer from Yellowknife, NWT. What was extraordinary is that Dave had made the return journey to Fort Vermilion, Alberta, his childhood home to offer a workshop on portraiture and landscape photography. The day before the workshop, at the end of a longer workday I got out to Buttertown’s St. Louis Catholic Mission and photographed the Church that is more than one hundred years old. Two days later, during the landscape portion of the workshop I was able to take Dave and our photography group out to this same site. Dave recalled that his father, a former teacher with the Fort Vermilion School Division, had taken Dave to this same site as a child – a memory from childhood. Dave’s father passed away this year.

Listening to: Jose Gonzales’ ‘Stay Alive,’ David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ (featuring Kristen Wiig) and Rogue Valley’s ‘The Wolves and Ravens’ – all music from the ‘Mitty’ soundtrack, a movie that all photographers should check out.

Quote to Inspire – “In addition to romanticism (extreme or not) about the past, photography offers instant romanticism about the present. In America, the photographer is thus not simply the person who records the past but one who invents it.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’
Buttertown Storehouse

October 9th, 2013

Storehouse, St. Louis Mission – Buttertown, Fort Vermilion, Ab 1

Storehouse, St. Louis Mission – Buttertown, Fort Vermilion, Ab 2

The northern lights were out this morning in my pre-dawn walk around High Level – ice crystals are in the air; with last night’s heavy billowing clouds we’re nearing our first snowfall. Here, an image contains two end-points of high dynamic range editing; curiously, I’m liking the colour (tinted) version of the old, old store house at the St. Louis Roman Catholic mission in Buttertown – Fort Vermilion, Alberta. The image has me thinking to former priest, John O’Donohue and different parts of four lectures he’s presented and a journaling exercise he has people work through. The first question to work from is to articulate the seven things that are controlling ideas/elements in your Life – premises upon which your Life is founded.

Listening to – an investigation of the ‘Primitives,’ a group recommended with the ‘iambead.com’ photoblog; ‘Crash’ is the first tune I come across. Then it’s ‘All the Way Down’ and ‘Earth Thing.’

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