Justfolk's photos

The sea angel is apparently a pan-arctic species of pteropod and Newfoundland is really at its southern-most distribution. This one was about three cm long.

Several of us puzzled over the appearance of this fellow and a lot of his friends, plus the littler black winged creatures all around them, in the sea water just below our house today. One friend is a biologist and he tells me this evening it is probably a sea angel, an Arctic pteropod, a "naked" one since it bears no shell. I never knew they even existed until today. The littler purple-black fellows are probably their common prey, a related (but shelled) pteropod. This was taken simply leaning over the water, holding on to wharf decking.

This agglomeration of what I assume are eggs is less than a square inch, more like 3 square cm. And, no I didn't count them all, but I figured there were about 150 of them. They haven't hatched yet -- the weather's been too cold. But no doubt they will soon. I don't know what they are. Maybe you do.

In 1994 I had a Great Wall 6x6 slr. In 1995 it broke and was irreparable. I missed it a lot. Tonight I went looking for some pictures I'd taken twenty-odd years ago of a friend in order to scan them. On the same roll I found this nearly empty frame but, being one who likes a puzzle, I scanned it too. This is what I found. It's me. I don't remember taking the picture which I must have set with a timer. I was sitting at our kitchen table looking rather pensive. Or conversational. I don't know. But the picture reminds me of the kinds of pictures the Photo Pictorialists of 120 years ago were taking. I don't like many of my selfies, but I like this one. The film, according to my notes, was eleven-years-out-of-date Tri-X (having expired in 1983). Taken in my Great Wall. It is square but it isn't the entire negative; it is a crop down to about 50% of the original 6x6cm negative.

This was today. Our provincial government has decided to look after rich folks' purses by closing a lot of services used by poorer folks, like libraries and health clinics. They've reduced funding for university students. And they've instituted a tax on books. And they've instituted a new tax which hits poorer people proportionally harder than rich folks. In a classic Let-Them-Eat-Cake statement about closing libraries, the minister responsible for schools and libraries said something to the effect of "Oh, no problem -- everyone uses e-books these days." Yeah. Right. A lot of us are pissed off. It was a good demonstration of that, too.

P and I have been friends since we met in Kindergarten in 1957 and he had a picture from the Christmas concert we both performed in that year. He was showing C where I was in the picture.

I have a thing for hand-made grave markers. They strike me as more meaningful than commercially-made ones. With this one, I even like the plastic flowers and solar light. It is signed by its maker, Samuel's granddaughter. It probably won't last too many years, though. That's a good thing about commercially-made headstones. I didn't pull back the leaves, but I expect Ms Harrison put the stone there last July, 2015. If it makes it through a few more Julys, it will be remarkable. When I Googled Samuel Noseworthy's name the very first hit was information about him. He came from Cape St Francis, about twenty crow-flies km north of St. John's where this graveyard is. My own grandmother and her parents are buried not far from this grave. I took the picture in late March 2016 on 2014-expired Kodak Colorplus film in my sixty-years-old Kodak Retina 1a.

The male goldfinches in May are definitely the snappiest dressers at our feeder.

There were a few things blooming, but not many, today when we were out walking. Some colt's foot and these willows. Perhaps some things I didn't notice. There's still lots of snow in the dark undergrowth.

I hadn't seen Harry in a few months and his beard has grown out nicely. Kodak Colorplus 200 film in Kodak Retina 1A. The film's hardly expired at all: August 2014.

This is what it looked like on my street Wednesday morning last week, the 20th of April. The fellow who delivers the morning paper didn't even come in off the road; he just tossed the bagged paper in the driveway. The city shut down for the day, too, mainly because most of the roads workers had been laid off a few weeks earlier. I'm never surprised by this kind of weather. About forty years ago, on June 15th, I got a day off work because we'd gotten a decent snow fall the night before. My grandfather's generation used to just talk about two seasons, not four -- just summer and winter. By April month -- snow or no -- we are into summer, and that lasts until November or even early December. Then winter starts. Kodak 200 film in my Kodak Retina 1a camera. Taken between shovel loads.

Now that I look at its picture, this short-cut does not look like it would make you short-breathed. But it does, it does me: it's steeper than it looks. This was over-exposed Sensia slide film in my Kodak Retina 1a. Being an over-exposed transparency, the image had a pretty short contrast range. Boring. So I converted it (using btw a virtual yellow filter in PSP X5) into b&w. It's still a pretty boring shot!

Two weeks ago at a small bar on Cayo Coco, with only ninety or hundred in the audience, I went to a two-hour concert by the Buena Vista Social Club. Great show, and I took about 200 pictures from my seat in the front row. This picture gives some indication of the range of age in the band. He's 83 and in the middle of a few songs he was singing he started dancing with the much younger woman in her twenties. There were thirteen in the band with an average age well over fifty and at least four over seventy. The music ranged from hot Cuban folky to heavy blues-inflected jazz rock. And they played a few from the Ry Cooder album.

We apparently needed a shower.

We spent a week in Cuba, last week. And I saw this guy every day, or friends of his. I kept thinking he was like a robin, the "robin" that we North Americans know. And it turns out he is, sorta. They are both of the familyTurdus, true thrushes, this one being the red-legged thrush.

We were on a day trip to Morón in north central Cuba and stopped at a bar-cafe where, already at 10:00 am, there was a group of musicos ready to perform for tips and a bit of fun. The leader's son stood leaned against that post through five or six songs, clearly fascinated by and maybe learning his father's licks.

Some of us are foolish enough to get in the water, heavy breaking-waves water, even when the red flag meant to discourage us from doing it is up. I enjoyed the seven days we spent on or around this beach. The red flags were up several days. The very first morning we were on the beach I went into the red-flagged water, turned away from a large wave which then knocked my nice prescription sunglasses off my head, into the water, never to be seen again, and I immediately felt like a fool. Nonetheless, we came back home this morning, rested, warmed, entertained, and happy. The picture was one of about a thousand pictures I took during the week. It required some turning, so I thought I'd make it look like a picture taken by a cellphone with an app for disguising sensible pictures as "Art."

This afternoon, I was part of this crowd of about a hundred people who stood on the sidewalk waving signs and inducing motorists to show their support for the preservation of Bryn Mawr, the property behind us. It's a lovely house on seven acres of green grounds that a developer wants to tear down and tear up for condominium apartments. The city has been complaisant to the developer's demands. We don't want it to happen, and a good 80% of the thousands of rush-hour motorists passing by agreed, if their honks were anything to go by.