BACKYARD WITH TOTEM POLE

Here is a picture of the backyard. It shows a very chaotic but colourful landscape filled with a variety of sheds, tools and other various small work tables with a totem pole as centre piece. 

WELCOME TO CAPT'N MORGAN MAN CAVE

Actually John named the owner Capt'n Morgan because he did look like the portrait on the sign. The gentleman gave us the full tour of his property. He introduced us to some of his friends the rooster and his chickens and a few ducks. Again it is a great place to just browse and take pictures. We certainly will make a return visit.

THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

Last Saturday we discovered this odd looking curiosity store along the road near Cache Bay. Of course we could not resist stopping to take pictures. It was a little confusing because one sign indicated the store was closed while the other sign read open. Luckily the owner was outside and invited us in. The place definitely was great fun to photograph but definitely very chaotic. I will post a few more pictures in the next few days, which will give you some idea of this unique store.

OLD MACK TRUCK AGAIN

A rainy day today and a good time to teach myself some new composition techniques using Photoshop and onOne RAW and of course an image from the old MACK truck I recently photographed.  It was quite fun working with the various filters and realizing the enormous variety of images you can create working with these powerful programs. All in all a very fruitful day of learning.

PARKING LOT, STURGEON FALLS, ONTARIO

Yesterday I drove to Sturgeon Falls, which is now part of the community of West Nipissing.  It was a great day for an early morning photo trip. It had been awhile since I walked around this town. Although I did not take many pictures I came back with a few nice images. This picture is a very simple but interesting image made of rectangular shapes and dominated by the colours yellow and blue. I like these very concentrated compositions made of very few shapes and textures.

ABANDONED TRUCK REVISITED

The weather has been too nice to be working inside on my pictures in my digital darkroom.I had posted a picture of this old truck covered in snow in April and promised I would go back to photograph the same truck in the Spring. The landscape looked different and I thought almost as abandoned as the the old artifact. The final result is best in black and white, reminding me of the old pictures from the American Farm Security photographers in the depression years of the thirties.

SOLOMON'S SEAL

The garden is waking up. A couple of days ago I made some pictures of this very graceful Solomon's Seal. The unfolding leaves created a very simple, but visually, beautiful  sculpture, which translated in a black and white image, suggesting some classic Chinese or Japanese ink drawing.

ABANDONED, COBALT, ONTARIO

The building is of course not really abandoned because it is still used for storage but obviously it is not inhabitable. A few days I was thinking, its time to make a photo excursion up North again. Cobalt is a fascinating place with a rich history and every time I go there it has changed. Maybe simply in my imagination but there is a feeling of a certain community vitality. This picture I made two years ago. I had photographed this building before so , looking at the image I thought that it would work best in monochrome and here is the result. It looks like an image made in the thirties by Walker Evans, a photographer whose images of the cities and towns in the USA inspire me.

SPRING CREEK, TEXTURE

Another detail of our Spring excursion along the small creek. I am not interested in photographing water in slow motion to get this, what I call, the cotton wool effect. It looks nice but I think the effect has been overused. I like detail and texture, so I photograph with a very fast speed, which freezes the motion creating rich detail. The effect in the image is quite reminiscent of the detailed night images of the the milky way at night, but in addition I also have the motion of the water.  An effect I enjoy.

SPRING CREEK

Last Monday Dan had invited Gerry and me on a small photo excursion along a private trail. It was a glorious Spring day. No black flies yet to interrupt our walk along a small creek. We pend a few hours taking pictures of the rapids. I concentrated on the textures and reflections of the water because I found the sunlight too harsh, which created too much contrast on the white waves of the rapids But we will return on a day when the light is much softer.

KLOMPEN (CLOGS)

Spring has truly started so instead of spending time on my photography , it was time for cleaning up and working outside in the garden. But I did spend time on going through more of my old negatives. I found some very old negatives which I took in 1960. At that time I visited a clog maker or klompen maker in Dutch. It has been such a long time that I can't remember exactly where I took the pictures. Scanning and processing the images takes quite some time but it is bringing back many memories. The clogs are made from poplar or willow wood. In this picture the painted clogs are left outside to dry. Now back to working on the rest of the pictures.

DRIFTWOOD FOR PAUL KELLY

Last Friday evening we went to the opening of Paul Kelly's exhibition at the Kennedy art gallery here in North Bay. It was very wonderful to see Paul and his wife Susan again. The show was very a surprise for me because Paul has gone back to his roots in design and colour theory. It isa show worth seeing so, if you are in North Bay just go and have a look. Paul was telling me how much he likes my black and white photographs. So, i have gone back to my roots in black and white photography and scanned in the very old negative from 1974 when I was interested in the bleak landscape around Sudbury.When first walking into the landscape was the almost surreal environment. The rocks were all black and pitted caused by the sulfur released during the smelting of the ore. All the trees were gone of course except the dead wood laying strewn all over the landscape. But as I mentioned before in some earlier postings, the city of Sudbury has been doing and amazing job restoring the landscape.

SAND AND WATER, SPRING RUNOFF

Sorry David but I have to disappoint you this time. Yesterday I took my car in to have my tires changed, so I took a walk into the area behind the garage. It is actually a large are of disturbed land. Walking through the parking area I had to jump over different little streams of melt water and of course I could not resist photographing the sand ripples and the textures of sand and gravel. When I worked on the image it looked to me more like flames than streaming water. Anyway here is the final image.

ICE BREAKUP, LAKE NIPISSING

At last Spring has started, although today we still had some snow but at least the ice is starting to break up. This morning I made a little excursion along the shore and made a few interesting images. The light was very nice and was able to get a few dramatic pictures. The black and white images were visually more dramatic than the colour versions. Of course, lately I have been quite interested in black and white photographs. This picture reminds me of Bill Brand's dramatic landscape photographs.

CEDAR, ROCK AND LICHEN

This was an image I really enjoyed working on. What intrigued me was the old cedar, which had grown all around the rock. Time had added the rich texture of the old dead tree and the lichen all over the rock surface. The subject would have greatly interested Edward and Bret Weston, two photographers I greatly admired. Way of working with a picture is quite fluid. I simply try different techniques using Adobe Lightroom then transfer the image to Photoshop and Adobe Camera RAW then into On1 Photo Raw then back into Photoshop for some final tweaking of the image till I am satisfied with the result. Do I know exactly all the steps I have gone through to get the image I am satisfied with? Well no only the general workflow. So no exact process.

HWY 599 NEAR OSNABURGH HOUSE

Another negative from my trip in North Western Ontario. We were staying in a camp on Pashkokogan Lake near the First nation's reserve Osnaburgh House, which is on HWY 599 just South of Pickle Lake. At the time, that part of the highway had not been paved so it was quite dusty. What struck me was the abandoned stuffed toy animal, sitting forlorn on the side of the road. The whole scene was covered in dust and the negative was quite flat. I had taken some closeups of just the animal but never printed this negative. Looking at it again I preferred this overall view better than the closeups. As I said, it was a difficult negative to work with but after working on the image in Photoshop, I am quite happy with the result.

BEACH, LAKE ST. JOSEPH

This picture is from some photographs I made many years ago when I was invited by a German geologist to accompany him on an exploration trip in north Western Ontario. This particular image was made when we were checking various sites on lake St. Joseph.It had some very interesting landscapes. I think Moremiles and David would have appreciated that trip. I took only black and white film on this trip and it is interesting to work again with these old negatives. Ansel Adams always said that the negative is the score and the print the interpretation of that score. I totally agree with that analogy. So now working on the computer my interpretation is quite different from my earlier prints.Again, working on the computer is very similar to working in the darkroom.

CONISTON, ONTARIO-1989

A last image of the Coniston area. This image is for John and David because both of them enjoyed the rock landscapes I posted. This is an overview of the landscape as I saw it in 1989. Much has changed for the better in the Sudbury area, as I already mentioned before. It would be interesting to go back to the places I photographed to see the changes and maybe it is still possible to find some of the original bleak landscape. But we will find out this Summer at one of our photo excursions.

ABANDONED FARMHOUSE

Another old negative, but this time a colour negative of an old abandoned farmhouse I photographed quite a few years ago. The colour image lacked the dramatic atmosphere of a black and white picture. I never printed it before but when I found the negative and after scanning and processing the photograph, I wondered why I forgot about it. I gave it a slight warm tone reminiscent of the old warmtone papers so popular in the twenties and thirties.

COLOUR AND TEXTURES, CONISTON, ONTARIO

This picture definitely can only be in colour. I tried a black and white version but it certainly lacked the impact the textures and colours added to the visual richness of the image. I have not been back to the Sudbury area for a long time, but thsi Summer I definitely plan to return for another promising photo excursion.