Justfolk's photos

Glen and I went to the same elementary and high schools though I didn't knew him really well back then. In his professional life he was a musician and a radio producer, and our working paths crossed from time to time. We also share friends so our social lives cross pretty frequently, too. I took this picture in August 2001 in my then-office using a 25-year-old cartridge of b&w film in the Kodak Instamatic Reflex camera. I can't remember what I developed it in, probably in Ilfosol since I liked that so much at the time. I saw the negatives yesterday and scanned them; this is the best shot on the roll. Glen retired last year and is enjoying a lazier life now; I am still working.

My old Canonet had a now-and-again propensity for not moving old frames out of the way when new frames were coming in. Or, perhaps I should say, I had that propensity when poorly winding the film. Either way this is a result, including at the top a little part of the scene at a birthday party. Ah well. This was over fourteen years ago, in 2001. Reala 100 film. I scanned the roll today and found this picture interesting.

Rick was an old friend who I haven't seen much for a decade or more. This might have been the last time I saw him, just over twelve years ago when I was delivering my mother to a then-new neighbourhood bakery just down the street from where we saw Rick. He lived by then in Calgary, 6000 km away, and was home for a short visit. I introduced him to my mother, we chatted, and while we did he let me take his picture through the car window. Rick cultivated a gruff surface, but he was a warm and loyal friend. He died this week in Calgary. This was Agfa Optima 100 in my Canonet QL17. Scanned quickly this morning on the Epson V700.

I keep saying I'm not going to post more cat pictures. But I'm drawn to pictures of my Minnifred, Little Min, Minnie. And she cooperates.

Pigeons, drunk on our generosity, laugh at our folly, at our foolish noises inside the window trying to scare them away, at us hoping some seeds get left for the juncos and finches.

I haven't posted a cat picture in a long time and it may be against Internet laws to go so long. So here's the latest portrait of Minnie, my feline poseuse, leaning on my wife's leg a few weeks ago.

I always look closely at my "failed" pictures. Often I like them better than the "successes."

This was last night at a friend's house. There were a lot of Dan Quayle jokes as we ate these.

This is the latest in a series of such celebratory pictures taken in my family, this one on the evening of New Year's Day.

This is looking north from a spot on the road under what's locally called Butter Cove Mountain. It was at sunset only a few days after the winter solstice, so the sun was shining pretty well as close to north as it gets during the year at a sunset.

The leucistic junco has a name, Lucy (or Leucy). She's spent part of three out of the four past mornings at our feeder. And she got counted today in the Boxing Day Bird Count. She never stays still and never stays long, so I still haven't got a really good picture of her. This was with my 1959-era 100mm f/3.5 Olympus Pen lens, stuck on the new OM-D E-M1 body.

I've been a friend of D since 1957 when we turned five years old. I've been a friend of C, his wife, since 1967, when we started high school. We're still getting together with other friends and hanging out together. This was at the home of another friend from high school.

We get snowbirds every day at our feeder. (These days, it seems everyone calls them juncos.) This time of year I don't think there is ever a time when there isn't at least one there, and usually there are a dozen or two. They normally vary a little in colour from the slate-grey that one of the names of the bird indicates, through to a dark brown-grey. But until today, I never saw one that was this fair. This is a tiny crop of a picture shot through three panes of dirty glass. It's not the brightest or sharpest picture. Maybe tomorrow I'll get a better one.

A week ago we had a thickly foggy day that the sunshine pushed through all day long. This is another picture from that afternoon.

We made it last night to two Short Day Parties. That's what I've been calling them, parties around the solstice (which according to my watch was just twenty minutes ago). A lot of people are bending themselves into anxiety-ridden verbal contortions about what kinds of greeting to give people. Most of the people I know aren't religious, so I've been wishing them Happy Short Days. This was at the second party. And there are more to come.

This road is often called the Priest's Road. It is closed to car traffic but is used by walkers and bicyclists for recreation, and by the Highways dept for access to water that would otherwise wash away the highway underneath it. We walk its length, three km or so, a dozen or so times a year. A nice six-km walk. And the day I took this picture we added two km to each end by walking from our house -- a total of ten km. Good walk. Nice fog, too. It's called the Priest's Road because one end of it, just around that corner in the picture, is the priest's house. Some people say that, forty years ago when the big highway below was built with no local access to it, the priest struck a deal with the Highways Dept that they'd retain his old route between two parts of his parish by keeping this road open. I don't know how true that is.

Despite it being mid-December, today the temperature got up to around eleven degrees C, and there was a thin sun through thick low fog. We walked across the northwest-facing side of the Southside Hills and I shot dozens of pictures right into the fogged sun. Here, the colours disappeared into the fog and into the overexposure at the top, so I converted the picture into b&w (using a blue filter).

I am infatuated by the light that lasts only a few minutes after the sun goes down. Or just before it comes up. "Duckish," that light is called around here. I used to try to get this with film and, from thirty-odd years ago, I have a couple of pictures on slide film that approximate it. But a good digital camera *does* make it a lot easier than all my old film cameras to get it. This is the Fuji X100. I set the focus at manual (close to infinity) and allowed the camera to calculate what it needed in exposure. I may have also had the +/- setting at a stop or two down.