Justfolk's photos

Today the sun came out for the first time all week and hundreds, perhaps thousands of people left St. John's to walk the two miles to the top of Signal Hill, or to drive the five or six miles, as we did, to Cape Spear, to look at today's crop of icebergs. According to the radio, there was a traffic jam on the road going up Signal Hill at 4:30 when we headed out this way. There were a lot of people there. We had intended to take an hour's walk along the rocky cliffs but the temperature dropped pretty substantially as we got close to the Cape. Right here, when I took this picture, it was six degrees Celcius. That's about 40 F. We decided we'd enjoy the walk more if it was warmer, so we drove inland a couple of miles where it was sixteen degrees C (like, about 61 F). And we walked for an hour there. Even at 16 degrees, we saw some leftover winter snow in a ditch. It was what had been ploughed off a parking lot and probably had seen no sun this spring. It was a pile about a metre deep at its thickest and probably ten metres long. I think today, 13 June, is the latest I have ever seen winter snow. It is not the latest I have seen snow fall here: I got sent home from work on 15 June 1974 because when we arrived in the morning at the archaeological dig I was an assistant at, there was six inches of snow on the ground. That melted by noon.

I won't have you guessing about what this is. It is a book we keep in the car-door pocket. It's called Some Newfoundland Birds and, now that I've told you, you can easily read the title. I don't know how I took this picture but it was obviously a mistake. Equally obvious is the fact I made the border. I made it in PSP X5. Less obvious is that I took this while sitting in the driver's seat; I probably was being clumsy as I put the camera on the seat next to me. The picture was on Kodak ColorPlus 200, taken in the Canonet QL17. Nice film. Nice camera.

I don't know who the gentleman is whose cabaret this is but apparently he likes some mystery or anonymity. He apparently goes to some effort to let people know he is gentleman; a sign like that is not the usual order of business in making a reputation. It does however remind me of my father's statement when I was a child, that what someone accuses someone else of being something, it is what they suspect they are themselves. <i>Mutatis mutandis</i>, hey?

I've long admired poured concrete buildings. They are often lovely examples of 1920s and '30s modernist style. I'm not sure why the EXIF says this was at 12:22 AM. It was actually around 9:00 pm; that's a sunset being reflected. Maybe my camera was dreaming it was still in Europe.

I'm just walking along the street and these two doors almost jump out in front of me. I had to take their picture.

Harvey and his son Everett and E's family are our good neighbours in Ganny Cove. E is going to extend his father's garage and bought a load of stone to level the ground below. His entire family is helping spread it. You know, gathering stones and all that.

In the past few years, like five or eight years, maybe, all those houses have been carved out of some virgin wood. Neville's Pond didn't used to look like this.

For eight years, I've been watching (from my garden) this sixty-year-old store as it crumbles down. I keep thinking its end is near, but it's still there. Just barely. This was on Sunday past. I was using the Olympus E-P2 with its 75mm lens.

This is an even smaller bit of the picture the previous posting was a fragment of. This represents about one twentieth of the original frame, I think. I've balanced the colours, built a frame, and done a tiny bit of burning and dodging, but otherwise it is essentially a hand-held and shaky picture taken at a ninth of a second.

I suppose there are better times to visit St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican than when I did. When I was there, there were thousands of other tourists like me, rushing around so to be able to leave with a secure sense of having done it. This is about a quarter of a picture that failed in what I tried to do, but succeeded rather better in what I didn't try to do.

A friend gave me a slip from her potted coral berry bush. The bush grew in her dining room and took up almost as much space as a livingroom chair. She had trimmed it back a little and thus the slip, about four inches long. I put the slip in water where it rooted. I planted it in a pot. It grew wonderfully in my office window for two years, blooming, setting fruit, and being healthy, putting out new leaves continually. That is, until I neglected to water it for about ten days last fall. And it died. All the leaves fell off and the berries started drying up and falling off too. I kept planting the berries in the soil in hopes it would start again. And, I kept watering it. Now, six months after its death, here is a shoot, probably from the root rather than a berry. In either case, I'm pleased. A different version of this picture is here: www.flickr.com/photos/flipflik/14118726870

I was at graduation ceremonies today. I took a dozen or so pictures of people I knew as they crossed the stage and afterwards in the foyer. Here are two friends and their daughter. I've known P & L, parents for much longer than H, their daughter's been alive. In the right-hand picture they are laughing at what I said, that P & L can look relieved now that they've stopped paying for H.

The tourist books call this area the "Italian Riviera" and there are a few very public beaches. In late April, when it wasn't much over ten degrees through most of the rest of northern Italy, it was warm enough here for people strip down to their skivvies and hang out on the beach. Some even paddled around in the water.

I haven't got tired yet of looking through the 4500 pictures I took during three weeks in Italy in April and May. And I'm still finding pictures I like despite their failures, like the horizon in this one, or indeed their likeness to hundreds of other people's pictures of the same thing. There's a solidity in one's memory when you achieve a picture that looks like pictures you've seen in the past. Or in *my* memory... :) This is the view in light fog from Venice proper of San Giorgio Maggiore, one of the islands of the Venetian archipelago.

Tourism inevitably leads to fakery. Fakery is a harsh word; let's say "creativity." It might simply be the crystalisation of local culture. Or it might be the invention of whole new things claiming to be representative of the authentic, the old, the real. Local people, doing well enough by the passing trade, are loathe to correct any mistaken ideas held by enthusiastic tourists. And who is to say that the creativity of the 2010s is any less important than the creativity of the 19th century? Verona is a beautiful town, with a history that goes back over two thousand years with lots solid traces of that ancient history. But it has been overtaken by the fact that for 30 or 35 years a certain balcony in the town has been identified by its owners as having belonged to the (real) family that was the basis for Juliet's (fictional) family in Shakespeare's play. And thus has grown Verona's Number One tourism draw: "Juliet's balcony" and the little courtyard beneath it. Most visitors do not have the lead time to book a visit onto the balcony itself (and might not want to pay the fee anyway), but they can shuffle and turn and walk sideways through the thick crowd below it. There, in the courtyard, they can turn their attention to the Wall of Letters, mostly graffiti, stating the love of visiting tourists for their amorous objects; or the Wall of Locks, where they can mark their initials and perhaps a heart on a padlock locked to a high double gate (most of the locks are made especially for the purpose of selling to tourists); or leave a piece of well-chewed gum (presumably chewed by both lovers, setting in uhh gum their mixed and loving saliva) on the Wall of Love Gums. Often names and initials are written or carved into the gum. This particular Wall of Gums does not have the reputation of being among the five most "germy" tourist sites in the world, but I would not think it is very different from the one in the USA that is on that list.

This is from the Varenna, Italy, procession by local church people doing the Stations of the Cross on the evening of Good Friday, a a few weeks ago.

This was the front of the Varenna Good Friday procession with girls carrying this large cross with a white banner. The bigger ones alternated carrying it. Boys and girls followed with candles. One assistant had an electric flashlight for the priest to be able to do his readings.

The other day, I posted a picture of a cross used in the Stations of the Cross in Varenna last month on Good Friday. Here the group of children (boys in red cassocks and girls in white surplices) has just come out of the church and, with the priest, are performing the first station. You can see some people watching from the town square, some underneath umbrellas. (I was worried about the long exposure and balanced the camera on the rail which runs down through the picture. I later pushed the ISO setting up further.)