Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Shooting the Crowsnest Pass - Day 2

Court and I got up pretty early, had the crappy free breakfast at our hotel in Pincher Creek and then hit the road west into the Crowsnest Pass.  Our first stop was in the town of Coleman, where we photographed some of the historic buildings in morning light.  This included the old Roxy Theatre, the Morrison Block, the Italian Hall, the Grand Union Hotel and the International Mining Office.  I remember that the temperature was pretty brisk and even with gloves on I was having trouble holding a pencil and writing down the notes about my exposure.  Conditions improved later in the day.  In addition to taking a lot of snapshots with my digital camera, the big view camera also came out and I managed some shots on large format film.








After we finished up in town we headed over to the nearby Collieries.  Although the site had once been fenced off, the gates were all open so we just wandered in.  I understand that one of the largest buildings on the site was torn down and demolished a year ago or so.  But lots of stuff still remains to explore including the maintenance shop, the shower building, some coke ovens, and an old railway locomotive.










We spent a fair bit of time exploring at the Collieries and again shot a bunch of digital snapshots, as well as some more serious work with the view camera.  By mid-afternoon we headed back up to the dance hall at Crowsnest Lake and shot there for a while.  Late in the day we made our way back over to the Greenhill Mine Site near Blairmore.  I didn't take any snapshots there but did do a few exposures with the big view camera.  By the end of the day we were both pretty exhausted.  Turns out I exposed 38 sheets of film on this day... mostly black and white... but there were a couple of sheets of color included in that count.  This was a record for me.  We retired back to Pincher Creek at the end of the day, had our evening meal at the nearby restaurant, and settled down for the evening.



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