A reasonably eventful week in both desirable and less desirable ways. I had been looking forward to a planned photo outing on Tuesday, involving Jim, grandson Mark and I, plus our friends Donna and Adrian. We got underway in the morning, ready to take our time to do the hour and a half drive to our ultimate destination, a "ghost town" I had been told about by another photographer. We knew we would be making a couple of stops en route to photograph the old, interesting, and falling apart church at Laura, then on to the "leaning buildings" of Tessier, the next town down the road. After that, off the main track to our ghost town destination.All was well when we hit Laura, and it was a treat to do photos in this location without the searing pain and cold of previous winter shoots. I got to approach the building from a few different angles this time, unobstructed by the large snow banks of other visits, so that was all quite satisfactory. This is a very compelling building visually, but it is doomed and each time I make a visit there is more destruction and decay. Its ultimate collapse is just a matter of time, which is a shame, although paradoxically it is that very state of decay and collapse that makes it so interesting to photograph. Despite me having taken a lot of shots of it, the "ultimate" shot never seems to materialize for me, although I have a lot of interesting detail shots that are of great use in my photomontages.
Donna was the one who knew the way to the Tessier shoot location. I have noted these building on previous occasions while driving by on the highway, but had never stopped for a closer look. There are a couple of old homesteads that have weathered the relentless winds of decades. Against all odds and, indeed, I think, against the laws of physics and nature, they are still standing, although it's debatable how long this state of affairs will continue. They do indeed lean rather seriously and precariously, and I was hesitant to get too close to the "down" sides in case they chose that moment to collapse entirely.
From Tessier, we were heading off to our ghost town, with a completely inadequate map printed off Google. I had found one earlier in the week that gave pretty useful sounding directions with road numbers and distances, but it turns out that wasn't the one we had along with us. The one we were trying to work from had the name of the town, the name of another somewhat distant town (both well off the marked highway we were on) and a few random lines that indicated un-named roads/trails/cattle paths, with no particular indication of scale or distances to travel. Needless to say, we never did find this site, but we plan to try again in the fall. I located the more detailed map (once we were home and it was too late to help us) and learned that we had gone fairly far astray right at the point we left the main highway, and really didn't stand a chance of getting where we thought we were going. This was compounded by the fact that in addition to not exactly knowing where we were or how far we needed to go, we were perilously low on gas. We decided to cut our losses and try to get to a gas station so we'd have some hope of getting home again. Of course the closest small town didn't even have a gas station, so we had a bit of a tense drive to the next option some forty kilometers away, which we did make and where we were able to get our gas refill. My notes for the next trip include such obvious directives as "have a map that actually shows something" and "have gas in the van". Sometimes I don't think we should be allowed out without keepers. At least we had food with us, so whatever else was going to happen, starvation wasn't in the immediate future.
Today's first two shots are from that expedition. Shot one shows a couple of the leaning buildings. I was facing north to get this, so you can see that the prevailing winds are right out of the west. Shot two shows the same building from the rear, with Adrian getting a shot, and Mark coming in from the left. We think this building was likely a workshop of some sort, and the one in the background likely a storage shed of some sort. There was also an old barn and a house.
Shot three is a reworked version of a photo I got while driving home from the barn one evening last week. The light had pretty well gone when I got to the Floral Road herd that I like to visit. I was ready to give it up as a lost cause when one horse decided the grass looked better on the other side of the water and it would be worthwhile to wade across. There was enough light from the fading sunset reflected off the water that I could get some nice silhouette shots of the horse as it progressed across the pond. I layered in another sunset shot to create the effect shown here. I've titled this one "Fire and Water".
My friend Ric the folk/recycling sculptor has been toiling away to create some bat sculptures at my request, and the final two shots show some of the initial results. Shot four shows the "little" bat, and you can readily see his scale by the size of the chickadee in this shot. We were sitting on the deck having a coffee when this little bat was first hung up, and I would say it took less than a minute for a chickadee to figure out that this was a good new landing place en route to the adjacent nut feeder. I get a great kick out of watching the chickadees (we have a family of four that are regulars) surfing the bat as they await their turn at the feeder.
Ric brought me a larger and more complex bat sculpture at that same visit, and I had one of my flights of fancy about liberating this bat from his sculpture base and creating a little colony of friends for him, so that was the genesis of shot five. I had such a good time playing with this concept that I plan a whole series of interesting (if strange) compositions featuring Ric's sculpted creatures, of which I have a fair collection. Luckily he is very easy-going and seems to "get" what I am doing here (I'd be worried about that if I was him) so no problems with my having fun with his creations in this fashion. Stay tuned to this blog for more of these as I get them done.
The coming week will be largely dominated by horse show photography for me, as Ebon swings into the multi-day "big" summer show. I'll have to keep my batteries topped up and have all memory cards on hand for that one. Here's hoping we can get through at least this one show without torrential rains!
