Justfolk's photos

I am a man of deep scepticism when it comes to religious beliefs. But I am impressed by others' rituals. People are, I would guess, lucky to have faith; I simply haven't got it. And people are artists in carrying out their rituals; I'm an appreciative audience member. I'm still glad I'm faithless. So it was in seeing the Stations of the Cross being carried out by a robed procession of priest and children, reciting and chanting, in Varenna, Italy, on the dark evening of Good Friday, a month ago. I was one of a tiny number of watchers, watching the larger group of participants wander through the old town's alleyways to conduct a short service at each Station. It was impressive.

This was three weeks ago in Rome, at the Fontana di Trevi where everyone has their picture taken, and today a lot take selfies. I had the feeling this woman was on a live Internet connection to her fans.

I've got a thing for public wells, springs, fountains and taps. This is a nice example of those found in many of the places I visited in northern Italy a few weeks ago. It is in Varenna, on Lake Como. The sign can, I think, be translated as "Don't do your laundry here and don't defile it in other ways either!"

I was at a party for my wife's uncle who had turned 90. I looked down where there was an empty plate with tissues and a grape stem, and I saw the parts of the Labrador flag. I had to take the picture. The real flag looks like this: " www.labradorheritagemuseum.ca/mwm_files/home/sys/large/1301657720.png "

Today, 16 May, at 24 degrees C in some parts of town (though probably only 19 in here in the woods) was probably the last day we'll see much ice and snow left around. This was the biggest patch of ice I saw in almost ninety minutes of walking. It wasn't very slippery.

I think the only animal my father was afraid of was the weasel. I saw him pack up his things and head for home once when he had just seen a weasel. He didn't trust them. You couldn't trust them. After all, they would search you out and get back at you for weasel-perceived wrongs. Zappa's "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" and all that. He told me the story of losing all his ducks or chickens as a boy when weasels ate the birds' feet from below the chicken wire. I think I never saw a weasel until today. This afternoon, we were walking and we saw this little fellow lying beside a brook and a busy road, with a crow pecking at his head. He was only recently dead, I think. I didn't stop long enough to figure out that he was a weasel, but an hour later I came by again and probably the same crow was there still, this time having unearthed some edibles in the weasel's mouth. I shooed him away long enough to take a couple of pictures. The crow stayed about three metres away until I moved away and he moved in again. I suspect the weasel was hit by a car and made it to here, about five metres away fr the road, to expire. Too bad. He was a pretty little thing. Even if he was totally untrustworthy.

I can't say I *admire* successful scams but I can say that all my life I have been fascinated by them. Is there any religious organisation that has more successfully parlayed body parts into fund-raising than the Roman Catholic church? At San Domenico church in Sienna are a couple of body parts, including this one, that are said to have come from the corpse of Saint Catherine of Sienna. This is said to be her right thumb. Most of the remainder of her body is (said to be) at St Peter's Basilica in Rome which I also visited, but I neglected to look for her foot in Venice.

Of course these guys don't like anyone poking around at the folds. The pokers might discover the steel last-like frame that makes this lovely illusion. It still requires a dedication to not moving that most of us do not have. I had never seen this particular bit of street art until my visit a few weeks ago to Italy where I saw versions of it in all the tourist areas. Reading up on the trick, I see that it's been used for a century or more. This one was in Pisa.

This guy and a half-dozen of his friends mope around the old castello that sits a couple of hundred metres above Varenna on Lake Como in northern Italy.

For three weeks in April and May, I was a tourist in various places in Italy. I took 4500 digital pictures and since returning I have winnowed that number down to under 800 to share with my fellow tour-group members. This was one of them, a fifteenth of a second on a Venetian gondola one night. It was a load of fun. The bald man was the tour leader.

A doctor's office in Milan.

It's May 8th and we still have the Christmas tree outside our kitchen door. The birds like it and so do we. And when the May snow comes, the view is even better for the eyes. I don't think I have ever posted a picture from my telephone before.

Orvieto is a lovely place and this is a picture of its funicular tunnel. A tenth of a second can produce a lot more motion blur than I was expecting.

If I find time over the next few weeks, I'll post more pictures frommy three-week trip to Northern Italy. I carried my Fujifilm X100 digital camera (from which came this picture) and my Olympus Pen D3 half-frame camera which I loaded with Tri-X film. I've got about 200 frames to develop on the Tri-X; I took over 4500 (!!) in the X100. That's photographic grab-shot overkill, I know. :) This picture was at the Vittorio Emanuele II memorial in Rome two mornings ago and it may have been the only shot I got where the Italian flag is clearly visible. Although it rained almost every day in late April and early May, at least wherever we were, the wind was not usually high enough even to unfurl flags. Being such a stick-in-the-mud film guy, I did not foresee an advantage to shooting digital on a trip like this one: EXIF data. I kept a small pencil&paper notebook and the EXIF date/time stamping helps tell me what my thousands of pictures are. Duhhh. Who'd a-knowed?

Back in the 1990s I became increasingly interested in picking mushrooms. That was mainly because I had access to a really good place to pick chanterelles. I'd go there and come home in an hour with five or ten pounds (3-4 kg) of beautiful fresh sweet-smelling chanterelles. For several years I'd just blitz cooking with them, which was nice enough, but by the late '90s I was trying to dry them. Here, in 2000, I tried to dry some in the oven. I learnt very quickly that was the wrong way as the temperature was far too high and they cooked instead of dried. I switched right away to a slower method -- by placing them on trays on top of my refrigerator where warm air from the back of the fridge wafted over them and -- in a couple of days -- made them perfectly dessicated. Then I would freeze the dried mushrooms; they keep for years in that state. The mushrooms in this picture cooked, and I ended up freezing some of them but they were not as pleasant as properly dried ones. I lost acess to that chanterelle ground a few years later and it was torn up for new houses soon after that. I haven't found a good spot since to pick my chanterelles. This was Ektachrome 100 SW in the Nikon FE.

My friends' son, Will, was fourteen years old in the summer of 1998 when he, his parents, and I went for a hike around Signal Hill. At the Battery Hotel, halfway up the hill, there was a big metal globe, a WW2 anti-submarine-net buoy, on display as historical paraphernalia. The hotel painted it several times with whimsical images, here an ancient-looking map of the world. The globe stood on a piece of steel I-girder on that concrete plinth. I took several pictures of Will acting like he was trying to pick it up. The globe probably weighed a quarter ton and he wasn't about to move it. When I came across the slides last week, and scanned them, I thought they were calling to me to do some 21st-century fakery. I gave in to the temptation and produced this pair of pictures.

I hesitate to use the word "bokeh" because some people have a visceral reaction to it. But it's a good word that we need. And I like good bokeh -- as in this picture from September 1997. I *think* this was taken on Ektachrome 100SW film but I cannot tell because the slide is mounted. And I *think* I may have used my Nikon FE to get the picture. And I don't know which mushroom this is, though I know I used to know. That nipple-like protrusion on top and the radiating lines from it are good indicators. By the way, there is no post-production in this image. It's what I took from the scanner.

I've been scanning slides I took in the 1990s lately and have come across several of mushrooms, and I no longer know what they are. I used to know mushrooms better than I do today, but that doesn't say much about my former ability to recognise them. Take these, for example. Maybe they are Pholiota. Maybe not. This was probably Ektachrome 100SW because I was using a lot of it around the time, 1997. And it was probably in my Canonet -- but it could just as likely have been my Nikon FE or my Minolta X370. The consistent sharpness of this and other pictures on the roll, and the beautiful out-of-focus areas (not so much in this one) make me think it was the Nikon.