May Calendar Image

This is the image I selected for the May page of my 2026 Fine Art Photography calendar.  This was taken during that spring day trip with my Brother-in-law Shawn, about a year ago.  We found this old Dodge on the side of the road, and the door was unlocked, so I took this photograph.

Back to Work

By Monday April 27th... or should I say January 117th... it finally quit snowing.  It warmed up nicely and the melt was on.  By the end of the day most of the 3 inches or so of snow that we got in the days prior, was gone.  It was still pretty cool in the morning, but by afternoon it had warmed up nicely.

I dug out my chainsaw and got to work outside.  During recent stormy weather this spring, several trees came down on our property.  I set about cutting a bunch of these up for firewood.

I realized that I'm pretty out of shape, and after a couple hours of this I was getting pretty tired.  Later in the afternoon, after Hailey got home from work, I made some chicken wings, and then put a couple of steaks on the BBQ.  It was the first time that I've fired up the grill in quite a while.

Trapped Inside

The first few days of my stay out at Nordegg were spent indoors.  Hailey was out with me, as she was training for her summer job at the Miner's Cafe.  While she was at work, I spent my days indoors, trying to keep myself busy.

I got my Dad's old bucksaw.  This dates back to when I was a little kid and I remember Dad using it, as well as me using it, to cut up firewood at our cottage at Pigeon Lake.  It was laying around Dad's old shop when my brothers and I were cleaning up some stuff, and I claimed it and hung it on the wall.

I bought a second rack for firewood and set that up beside our wood stove in the main cottage.  Whenever it rains or snows our outdoor firewood piles get wet, and sometimes it is hard to get a fire going.  I like to keep quite a bit inside, so it has a chance to dry a bit before we burn it.

I also worked on one of my line wash drawings of an old hotel from the Beer Parlour Project.  This time around it was the now closed Cadillac hotel, outing number BP14.0 to Cadillac Saskatchewan in June of 2024.  I finished the sketching part and now will start to apply the wash of colors.  After that I will detail it all in with pencil and ink.

One of the girls busted my TV.  I never did quite get the full story on who was responsible and how it happened.  Maybe someday the truth will come out.  Last time I was out I hung up a TV on the wall of the guest cottage.  This time around I got it all connected to the internet so I could stream some shows.  This allowed me to watch some of the Edmonton Oilers Stanley Cup Playoff games.  I would have been even more upset if I wasn't able to watch.

BP24.0 - Big Bubba's Saloon

This is a scan of another color negative from one of our Beer Parlour Project outings.  This sheet of 4"x5" film is from the second batch of C-41 color chemistry that I ran on March 23rd.

Unlike most of the film that I shoot, this was actually a sheet from a moderately fresh batch, and was not grossly outdated.  This stock expired in 2024, so mere months, rather than years or decades, before I exposed it.

This was our BP24.0 outing to Big Bubba's Saloon at the Alix Hotel.  Margarit and Connie were out for this one, with Chris and I.  It was the day after we visited the Stettler Hotel, just down the highway.

I took this shot on April 26th of 2025... almost exactly a year ago.  It was at about 8:00 in the evening.  If you look closely you can see that big palooka Chris, walking up the sidewalk at the right edge, in his red T-shirt.

I used my Ebony SV45TE view camera and a slightly wide Fujinon 125mm lens.  The exposure was for 1/4 second at F20.0.

January 116th

Is winter ever going to end...?!  This is what I woke up to out at Nordegg on April 26th... aka January 116th.  The snow has been completely gone at least four times now in 2026, only to be followed by yet another snowstorm.  I suppose its good in that there will be lots of moisture for the trees, and the risk of wildfires will be low, at least for a while.  We had virtually no snow all winter and most of what we received in these several waves has been in the spring.  At this point I would rather have milder temperatures and see the moisture come as rain.  It was -8 overnight and was still -4 when I took this photo at about 10:00AM.  If you look really closely, near the center of the picture, you can see a deer resting under the trees.

Pontiac

Last spring I went out on a day trip with my brother-in-law Shawn.  Sadly he is not in good health, less than a year later.  He is in the Mazankowski Heart Institute in Edmonton, awaiting surgery to implant an artificial heart.  Wishing him all the best, as I reminisce about our outing 11 months ago.

We went out exploring to the northeast of Edmonton.  Shawn had never gone on a photo day trip with me before, so this was a first for him.  He was plunking around with a digital camera that he had recently started using.

We found this old Pontiac, overgrown in the bush at the edge of a farmers field.  Obviously it had been there for quite some time.  I'm not sure of the vintage of this one.... 1970's I would guess....?

This shot was taken on a sheet of Kodak High Speed Infrared film.  Kodak stopped manufacturing this film in the late 1990s.  I still have several boxes of 4"x5" left in my freezer and have been slowly trying to use it up.  This particular sheet hit its best before date in August of 2001.  I loaded it into a film holder on May 25th last year, and exposed it the next day.  After exposure I unloaded the holder and stored the exposed sheet in my fridge until I developed it on March 20th this year.  I find that now that this film is getting really old, I only get reasonable results if I don't let it lay around too long at room temperature or warmer.  So I will make a point of making the best use that I can of the stock that I have left.  Development was in Kodak T-Max Developer, 1:6, for 6:45 minutes at 24C.

I shot this image on May 26th 2025, at about 2:00 in the afternoon.  I used my Ebony SV45TU view camera and a wide 110mm lens.  A #25 Red filter blocked much of the visible light, so that the film was exposed mostly by IR wavelengths.  As a result I did NOT compensate with any filter factor, and the film was rated at 100iso.  The exposure was for 1/8 second at F22.0.

War Wounds

My Renegades hockey team elected not to sign up for the summer season this year.  I signed up to play the Spring/Summer season in my Vintage league.  Starting in early April there is a hockey game scheduled every Thursday morning at 11:15, running until the end of June.

There are a few guys on my team that I played with during the past winter season.  And there are a number of guys that I played with last summer, plus a few new ones.

The first game of the season was last week and I missed it as I was away in Saskatchewan for the Beer Parlour Project.  The second game of the season was on April 16th, and I made it out to that one.  It was a fun game and the skill level and the pace is slightly higher than the team I played with last winter.

I got clipped by a wrist shot as I was defending in front of the net.  There are only a couple of spots on your body that are not protected by padding.  One is the stomach and the other is the inside of the thighs.  The shot clipped in a very small area below the hockey pants and above the shin pads where there is no protection.  It was simply a shot on goal, which I blocked, at the expense of this ugly bruise.  I felt the burn right away and knew it would be a good one.  By the time the game ended and I changed out of my gear it was getting pretty red.  By evening it turned dark purple.  Unless you've played the game you can not imagine the pain of being hit by a puck in a lightly protected or unprotected area.  Those frozen pucks are really hard, and travel with a lot of speed and force.

The next day, it was even worse, and a lot more purple.  It looks worse than it feels, and although it's a little tender, it doesn't really hurt that much... anymore...

Heading for Home

Monday April 13th was check out day at the rental house in Macklin.  After morning coffee Byron, Chris and I packed up all of our gear, and tidied things up around the house.  By late morning we said our goodbyes, and Chris and Byron headed off towards Calgary.

It took me slightly longer to get my gear packed up but I hit the road a short time later.  I headed back up Highway 13 towards Edmonton, and made a few stops along the way.  First I stopped at the Amisk Hotel and dropped off some history books that we had borrowed from the town library.  

I took my time, and wandered around on a few backroads a little.  I found the North Rosyth School and took a photograph here with the view camera.  I also stopped in Lougheed, hoping to photograph the old hotel.  But the light wasn't right and all the good angles were backlit, so the view camera never came out at this stop.

It's interesting that the tallest portion of the hotel, on the highway side, was once the hotel in the nearby town of Sedgewick.  It was loaded up and moved to Lougheed many years ago.  In the years following there were additions made to the hotel.  It has been closed for some time, which is rather sad, as it would have made a great location for the Beer Parlour Project.

The rest of the drive was somewhat uneventful, though I did make note of a couple of interesting old farmyards in the Camrose area.  I will likely take a day trip out that way in the not too distant future.  I arrived back home by early evening and saw another successful BP trip come to an end.

Sunday Drive

Chris, Byron and I had booked one extra day at the rental house in Macklin.  There wasn't any point trying to visit any more Beer Parlours on Sunday April 12th as most of them aren't open on Sundays.  In fact most of them aren't open on Monday either.  

We decided to spend the day exploring and did a big loop around Macklin.  We started to the southeast, and then circled around to the south, and then eventually headed north.  We stopped at an old trestle bridge on a long abandoned rail line, and a grain elevator on the same line.  We found a couple of old farm buildings along the way, and a couple of decaying small towns.

In one of the towns there were two abandoned schools.  An old one that had been abandoned when the new one was built, and the abandoned newer one, which was shut down.  The few students remaining in the area are now bused to larger centers.

The ever present flocks of geese were all over the place, and at times the skies were full of them.  On this day the miserable wind seemed to have let up a little, so I was actually able to get my view camera out and take a few photographs.  It still wasn't very pleasant, but it was better than it had been in recent days.

As the afternoon wound down to evening we made our way back to the rental house.  With no old hotels to visit on this day it would just be a relaxing evening to unwind, before packing up and heading home the next day.  Chris and I ended up going to the local Chinese restaurant and there was a buffet on.  Byron decided to stay behind at the house and take it easy and made a meal of some of the stuff we brought along.

Beer Parlour Project - BP43.0 Royal George Hotel

On Saturday April 11th the gang visited the Royal George Hotel in Luseland, Saskatchewan.  Luseland is the next town down the rail line from Denzil.  We met with owners Dot and Brad and visited with them through the evening.  Attendance was light on the night of our visit, and I think there may have been some other event going on in the area.  In any event we enjoyed visiting and meeting with the people that were around, and I managed to take a couple of portraits.  The hotel itself is rather large and has a rather dominant presence on the corner of Strathcona Street and Pacific Avenue.  In most Saskatchewan towns these would have been named Main and Railway.  Perhaps at some future date, if we are in the area, we can make a return visit on a busier night.  In the meantime this is officially Beer Parlour Project outing number BP43.0.

More Tooling Around

On Saturday April 10th we headed out from the rental house in Macklin.  We went out exploring for the day.  We headed to the east and south of Macklin and stopped at a bunch of old grain elevators and a couple of small towns.  

The weather was overcast, cool and that ever present cold spring wind was upon us again.  Yet again I was forced to leave my view camera in the vehicle and only managed a bunch of snapshots with my phone.  The spring migration seemed to be in full swing and there were geese everywhere.  The Canada Geese seemed to have arrived a little earlier but the Snow Geese were now arriving in huge flocks.  They sometimes were all across the sky from horizon to horizon.  We saw a few flocks of Sandhill Cranes as well.

We found a few interesting stops along the way.  One of the relatively modern grain elevators that we visited had only been recently abandoned and was still fairly intact.  The scale was still there, as well as the control panel.  There was even a piano in the office.  Another elevator that we stopped at had been heavily damaged by recent winds, and part of the roof was ripped off.

Some goose tracks in the mud, and old service station, a couple of old houses, and a fire truck rounded out our discoveries for the day.

We stopped for lunch at the Denzil Hotel and wanted to say hello to the owner Jenn.  She was away at a couple of catering events and it was good to see that her business is doing well.  The Beer Parlour Project visited her establishment last year.  As the afternoon wound down we made our way southeast to Luseland for a planned visit to the hotel there.