Justfolk's photos

I posted this picture this evening on that other F-named site and within ten minutes I had three friends telling me that it probably is not a female Hairy woodpecker but rather a female Downy woodpecker. That distinction is far too fine a difference for my poor-birder skills. I must assume my friends are right, since they are of one voice in this regard.

As the snow melts back, things once unseen are seen again. Here is someone's ashtray.

When snow accumulates for four or five months, it keeps within its drifts lots of things. Spring uncovers them. Walking along a local road today I saw five beer bottles, a half-dozen soft-drink tins, and three plastic water bottles just in a stretch of fifteen metres. Lots more on either side of that stretch. I was thinking some smart kid could make a little money; every such kid is probably thinking they need to wait until all the snow has melted to do their run.

At this slight indentation in the shoreline called Camel Beach, both tannin and iron come down to the landwash from the bogs above, so the fresh water is often golden and the rocks get stained. This is salt water (not coloured) so the reddish-brown here is from the rocks and algae.

There were pieces of northern ice in on the beach this afternoon but it was a few degrees above zero so the snow in the woods was melting. And a few spiders and bugs were out, though some somewhat sluggish. This fly couldn't get out of the suds he'd landed on in a little brook coming down to the beach, and the suds kept turning and turning. Then the suds hit a rock and he was off.

My niece and her boyfriend stopt by on their motorcycles, right after her aesthetician class.

This building, one of the few large 19th-century buildings left in the city, caught fire a couple of days ago, and is almost certainly going to be knocked down as a result. It's not the oldest building; for instance, the blue building to the left is about 70 years older. But it was well-loved. My wife went to school in it forty-five years ago and, like her, a lot of its former students have fond memories. We stopt there on the way home from work this evening and I took this picture.

At lunch-time today we were home and I saw this guy darting around in the back yard. After a heavy rain over the weekend, the snow has pulled back somewhat and there is enough open ground now for birds other than the feeder-feeders. This is the first fox sparrow I've seen in months.

Regina -- here between two of her sisters -- lived another three years after I took this picture. She died this week. She was my wife's oldest aunt, and a lively, funny one. The family is a big and very celebratory one, so the funeral yesterday was a large celebration. At 93, she had lived a long and good life and we did our best to honour her. There was rum.

Celebrating the birthday of one of my sisters, we were at a waterfront pub last night. This was the view of the harbour from the pub's window. The harbour is nearly full of northern pack ice blown into the harbour by northeasternly winds. People have been doing so but I would not dare walk on this. It's too loose. But in about 1974 the NE wind lasted longer; the harbour completely filled up with ice. It jammed in, and rafted up on edges and it was possible then to walk across the harbour.

This week I have been scanning negatives (about 500 of them) from a trip to London and Paris in late 1985. Back then, I used to tell people that I was happy when one picture out of a roll of 36 was a good one. I suspect now the proportion was even lower. This was at the Louvre. Staying back was a better strategy for me than pushing through the crowd of people wanting to get in front of the Mona Lisa (which is in that box on the wall). Instead, I pushed my camera against a door frame and took this slow shot. It's my favourite from the whole lot on that trip. It was askew so, this morning, I turned it a bit and gave it that border. Kodak VR200 film in my Minolta X370 camera, probably with its 50mm lens.

One of the beauties of film is that you can pull a picture from a really bad exposure and like it for its lack of definition. At least *I* can like it. "A face only a mother can love" and all that, right? This was taken on Kodak VR200 film in my Minolta X370 camera and the negative left in a folder for three decades. Finally, I have scanned the roll. This frame was nearly monochrome but I put it through a blue filter to produce this image. It reminds me of those 100-years-ago pictorialist photographers. :)

I've been scanning old negatives, this one from August 1985. T and P were just fooling around, almost helping P's father & uncle do up their hay in the near-twilight. I was no help at all, just taking pictures. Kodak VR100 film in my then-fairly-new Minolta X370, presumably with the flash on and a slow-sync shutter speed.

This is on the window just outside my office as today's rainy windstorm turns to a snowy one.

These are pictures of me wading in the water at Outer Cove, about ten km north of the city, and where the temperature of the water in late August is at its annual highest, perhaps six or eight degrees Celcius. This was an evening in August 1985 and it was already getting dark, so the camera chose pretty long shutter speeds. My wife had the camera while I stepped gingerly into the water and then rushed back to shore. I just scanned these pictures this week, 30-odd years later. The film was "Sooter's" brand 100-speed film. For seveal years Sooter's (a chain of photo shops) used Agfa film, but my note on this roll of film says it was made by Fuji. There is no indication on the negatives themselves. In any case, it was good film if only for its ability to remain perfectly flat for thirty years (unlike typical Kodak films of the same era many of which have curled, making them hard to scan).

I spent part of today scanning some negatives left untouched since 1985. This is the last strip on a roll of Kodak VR1000 and it has three frames, though the exposure was so poor that it is nearly impossible to tell where one ends and another begins. It looks like one frame of 24 x 110 mm or so. My original scan of this is 45 MB, but I resized it to make for easy posting; this version is just under six MB. I've done no spotting as it would be pretty hard to tell spots of dust from clumps of grain. Or giant dye molecules; whatever. I remember the night I took the pictures -- I was trying to get an impression of the light from the other side of Chamberlains Cove falling on the intervening water. I was not impressed by what I got but, thirty-odd years later, I kinda like it. Having the three frames together like this, by the way, makes an image nothing like reality. :) This was in my Minolta X370 and probably with my 50mm lens.

The junco, "snowbird" is what my father always called it, is an under-rated bird. Most of the time it just looks drably grey and white. But some of them are a ruddy brown, and some seem to have an iridescence more like a starling. This is one of the thirty or so regular snowbirds outside my window.

The sun wasn't long up when I took this picture in minus nine (Celcius) degrees. The goldfinches couldn't have been very warm but they seemed happy enough in the sun. And near the food.