Winter Hockey - Game 21

Last night after dinner I prepared for a late hockey game.  The Renegades were facing off against Los Banditos, a new team to our Divisiion X.  Then had been moved down from a higher division right after the holiday break.  I had completely shuffled our line up looking to put an end to our ongoing losing streak.  I printed off the line up sheet, packed my gear, and went to put on my contact lenses.  I opened a fresh set of contacts, rinsed off the first one, and put it into my eye.  I was immediately met with an extreme burning and excruciating pain.  Thinking I'd had something on my hands, I washed my hands and proceeded to put in the second lens.  Same thing... burning pain.  My eyes turned bright red, started watering profusely, and became very swollen and sore.  After much rinsing and wiping I had a look at the bottle of contact lens solution only go discover that it was actually a cleaning and disinfecting solution of hydrogen peroxide and a weak acid in saline.  It said right on the bottle, NOT to be used prior to insertion.

Eventually my eyes cleared enough for me to be able to drive across town to the Knights of Columbus Arena for our 10:30 game.  When I arrived and went into the dressing room my buddy Matt, our backup goalie looked at me and immediately asked if I was stoned.  I explained the whole contact lens thing and he laughed at me as the rest of the guys began arriving for the game.

We played a solid game and the complete shuffling of our lines seemed to inject some life into the team.  We jumped out to an early 1-0 lead and never looked back.  At one point in the third period we were up by a score of 5-1, and hung on for a 6-3 victory.

This lifts us out of last place in the division, one point out of a playoff spot.  Hopefully this is the start of better things to come.

New Prints

I finally finished up with my Jobo Processor for the time being.  I've wrapped up all my color processing, and everything that I need the processor for, so I've put it away and moved on to other things.  I'm planning on getting to some regular film processing in the coming weeks, and also to some printing.  Last week I started on the tedious task of making contact prints of all the negatives that I've recently processed.  These are small proofs of the negatives, that help me to decide which ones I might want to enlarge and print properly.  In the process of making these I came across several that I thought would make good enlargements.  I went down into the darkroom a few days ago and tried printing a few of them.  These were all printed to smallish 8" x 10" format, but I took the time to print them to archival standards on fiber based paper.  The prints were then properly fixed, cleared, selenium toned, and fully washed.  I will live with these work prints for a while and decide if I want to invest the time to make bigger enlargements.  For the time being I will show them at the next Monochrome Guild meeting, and share them with friends and family.  One of them is a shot of the Monarch Garage in Loverna, Saskatchewan.  This building has since been demolished, and when we visited there late last summer, I promised the owner, who had taken us on a bit of a tour of the remaining buildings in town, a print of this negative.  These scans were all made from the finished prints...

January Thaw

Winter arrived about the usual time this season, but with some bite.  Through the latter half of November, all of December, and most of January it has been cold, with lots of snow.  For the last week and a half it has been unusually mild, and a lot of that snow is disappearing.  This is somewhat depressing as it just makes for a mess and we all know that there is a lot of winter left.  It was been mild for the last ten days or so, but these past couple of days the temperature has been up around +9C during the day, and it has not dropped below the freezing point, even at night.  It was been breezy as well.  About a week ago we hit not only a temperature record for the day but also a wind record with gusts of 120km/h recorded.  This is the equivalent of a category one hurricane.  Needless to say that wind combined with the mild temperatures has significantly reduced the snow pack.  The winds have lived up to their translated name... chinook... meaning Snow Eater.

I went out for a drive on Saturday afternoon.  The skies were mostly overcast but every once and a while the sun popped out for a bit and teased me.  Of course every time that I found something perhaps worthy of a shot with the big camera, the clouds rolled over and thickened up.  It was a mess, lots of dirty water running everywhere, lots of mud, and a lot of that ugly dirty snow.  Here is a shot of some of that meltwater and the related ugly conditions on a small pond out in Elk Island Park.

After rolling through the park I headed north and scouted around for a while.  I stopped by at the old house that I have been shooting for the past couple of years.  This is the unfinished one that sits there forlornly in an abandoned farm yard.  The yard has now been gated and posted so I had to shoot it from the road.  It looked like the sun might pop out briefly for me but after waiting in the wind for a while, I gave up and shot this image in the flat overcast light before moving on.

I scouted around for a while before eventually making my way back home.  I came across this neat looking but somewhat overgrown little brick house.  I think it's brick, although often houses of this era are wrapped with an asphalt based shingle-like material with a fake brick pattern.  The light was really flat, the snow really ugly, and the day coming to an end when I finally found this one.  I took a record shot but will return in better conditions and see if I can find an image here.

Winter Hockey - Game 20

The Renegades played a late game last night against the Canadians.  The Canadians are in first place, with a record of 11 wins, 8 losses and 1 overtime loss.  The Renegades have an identical record, but we find ourselves in last place.  This is because 6 of our victories came in Division XI and when we were moved up to Division X, we had 8 points deducted.  The game last night started out well, and we jumped out to an early 4-0 lead.  But, late in the game we ran out of gas, and the Canadians cranked up the level.  They got some couple lucky bounces, scored some late goals, and we ended up losing the game by a score of 7-5.  There are 10 games remaining in the regular season and we are going to have to put this ongoing losing streak to an end, and string together some wins.  Hopefully I can get the guys to focus on more consistent play and we can turn things around.

January Day Trip

Through the end of 2013 and into early 2014 the harsh winter weather has continued.  Mostly it has been cold with a lot of snow.  These past few days the pendulum swung the other way and we have had record warm temperatures.  We have remained above the freezing point, even overnight, for most of the last week. When it has dropped below Zero, it has only been by a degree or two.  We set high temperature records here in Edmonton at least once this past week.  We also set a wind record as for one day we had extremely high winds, with gusts hitting 120km/h.  This weekend it was really nice, with the temperature peaking at around 7C, and the winds just light.  Most importantly the skies were clear for a change and the sun was out. I decided to take advantage of the mild conditions and headed out with my camera.  Mostly I wanted to do some test shots with Kodak 100 T-Max.  A friend of mine shared some technical data, and I want to shoot some duplicate test shots, and compare my typical exposure and development to what my friend suggested. I typically shoot this film at 64 ISO and develop in Perceptol 1:3.  My friend gives much less exposure, at 200 ISO and develops in X-Tol 1:1.  

I headed out east of the city and enjoyed the afternoon.  I found a really cool old school house and did shoot a couple of comparative sheets of 100TMX.  I forgot to bring my little digital camera with me, but took this record shot with the camera in my cell phone.

Winter Hockey - Game 19

The Renegades played a late game on Wednesday evening out at Coronation Arena.  This was the first time that we ever faced off against the Hungry Beavers.  It was a pretty evenly matched game, but for one short stretch we played really poorly, lost all momentum, and handed them two short handed goals.  To make matters worse, both goals were during the same 4 minute penalty.  I saved a couple of goals during the game... once knocking a puck out of mid-air with my hand as it bounced over our goalie's shoulder and was about to go in.  Then later in the game I cleared another loose puck as it got past our goalie and was about to go over the line.  But... I made a bad give-away in the neutral zone that ended up in our net... the first of the two short-handed goals.  We ended up losing the game 8-6, and are temporarily knocked out of playoff contention.  We have a chance to redeem ourselves with another late game next week.

Winter Hockey - Game 18

The Renegades played one of those dreaded early morning hockey games on Saturday while I was away in Jasper.  In my absence the guys finally managed to put an end to our losing streak, squeaking out a tight victory over the Bulldogs.  Perhaps I need to stay away more often...??  In any event we can now focus on trying to turn things around for a push into the playoffs.  We play again on Wednesday this week, against one of the teams that just got moved down into our division.

Maligne Canyon Ice Walk

I managed to suffer through the first week back at work, and the girls did the same at school.  On Friday January 10th we left the city right after school, and hit the road for Jasper.  Work is really quiet for me at this time of year so it was not a problem to bail out and hour and a half early.  My Mom came along with us for the weekend, and we rolled into Jasper around 8:00PM.  We had a suite rented at the Jasper Inn for all of us.  The girls had a restless night and were a little too crowded trying to share a bed.  They kept everyone up for most of the night, and were more than a little crabby come morning.  None the less we headed out of town and up to Maligne Canyon.  The weather was very mild and pleasant on Friday evening as we drove out to the mountains, but it snowed heavily overnight and was still snowing heavily the next morning.

When we arrived at the Maligne River I was rather surprised to see the river open and flowing.  I had expected it to be frozen over completely.  I guess conditions here in the mountains have actually been a little milder than what we have experienced back in Edmonton in recent weeks.

The Maligne River is rather unusual to say the least.  In some places it flows reasonably heavily while in other areas it is often dry.  This is due to the fact that sections of the river flow through underground faults and caverns, only to emerge again further down the valley.  I knew this to be the case further upstream at Medicine Lake, but was not aware that this was also the case in the canyon.  Some sections, like near the temporary bridge, there was a considerable volume of water, while in other areas further upstream, the river bed was dry and completely filled with snow.  Evenutally we got up into a section of the canyon where there were some small side streams and cascades flowing into the canyon and some small pools and currents of open water.

 

As we worked our way further up the canyon we began to come across some of the ice formations that the canyon is known for.  These were really cool, and in a couple of locations I stopped to set up my big camera.  The snow was coming down heavily, and I knew I would have to dry out my gear carefully when we returned back to the hotel.  One formation was particularly interesting as water was cascading down the side of the canyon, creating a fantastic ice formation, and then forming a small pool, only to disappear into the ground, leaving the canyon further down completely dry. It was at this spot that we had our misadventure.  As Margarit and the girls attempted to walk further up the canyon, they had to cross a patch of ice at the edge of this pool.  It looked safe, as there were fresh tracks on the ice from other hikers that had walked in the same spot earlier this day.  But, Margarit broke through, and was plunged into cold, icy water up to her waist.  My Mom also got a little wet helping her out, and Helena got her feet wet as well.  This put an end to our exploring for the day.  We knew we had to turn back and return to the truck before anyone got frostbite or suffered any other ill effects from the cold.  I had on a pair of wind pants over top of my jeans.  I took these off and gave them to Margarit, so that she could mostly get out of her wet clothes.  The girls headed back to the truck while I quickly finished up the photograph I was making before heading back to join them.  At least we had a great day together and got to experience the ice walk, even if it got cut a little short.

We got back to the hotel in the latter part of the afternoon and everybody changed out of their wet clothes and warmed up.  The three girls hit the hotel pool for a while in the afternoon and then later we went out for a nice family dinner to a local restaurant.  By the time we got back to our suite after dinner everyone was pretty worn out.  All the fresh air, the swimming, and the lack of sleep the night before had everyone pretty much done.  We turned in early, with a re-organized sleeping arrangement and everyone got a good night's sleep.  The next morning, after our breakfast buffet, we packed up for the drive back to Edmonton.  We arrived back home in the early evening, tired but happy.  We will try this again and see if we can't get a little further up the canyon next time.

January Day Trip

The weather was really crappy over the holiday break and there were not a lot of opportunities to get out and make any photographs.  Most of my spare time over the break was spent down in the darkroom processing film.  On January 2nd conditions were mild and pleasant so I went out for an afternoon drive. Unfortunately the light was really flat and ugly and didn't lend itself to any good image making opportunities. I did come across this old community hall out in Lamont County.  I kept some information on the location and will probably try to get out there again, under better conditions.

1979 Yamaha Enticer 300

Before the Christmas break, on one of those cold, miserable winter days that we had, there wasn't much for the guys to do at the shop.  So, I headed over to my Mom's acerage and we picked up my old snowmobile.  This is a 1979 Yamaha Enticer 300.  I used to ride it quite a bit when I was a kid, but over the last 20 years it has sat under a tarp in Mom's storage lean-to.  I don't think I have even tried to start it for at least 10 years.  We dragged it back to the shop and a couple of the guys, that needed something to do, went over it.  The old gas was drained from the tank, and the spark plugs were changed.  A couple of pulls and the old girl started up right away.  The guys made a new windshield for it, and I took the old seat and had it re-upholstered.  I have a set of new skis for it somewhere.  Just have to find them and change over the old worn out ones and she's ready to take out for a spin.  The old license plate on her dates back to 1982.  I was thinking about buying a new sled this year, but with the great snow conditions this year all the dealers are sold out.  I guess I'll have to be satisfied with bombing around on the old girl this year, and then maybe think again about a new one next year.

Winter Hockey - Game 17

The Renegades played a game on Saturday evening against the first place Trojans.  We lost a close, hard fought game by a score of 8-6.  The league has now re-aligned the divisions... again, and released the schedule for the remainder of the year.  The two division leading teams, the Trojans and the Banana Hammocks have been moved up.  The two bottom dwelling teams, the Chiefs and the Old Hawks, have been moved down.  Two other teams, Los Banditos and the Hungry Beavers, have been moved down into our division from division nine.  The Renegades now sit in fourth place, the last playoff spot, in a division that now has six teams.  We need to start winning some games over the remaining dozen in the winter season, and hopefully make a push into the playoffs.

More C-41 Color Negatives

I scanned the last of my large format color negatives today.  These were all taken in 2013, mostly down in Utah during my trip in October.  There are also three images from Jasper taken on the Monochrome Guild Fall Photo Weekend.  With the bulk of this film processing now behind me I will continue with some small batches here and there, but want to focus on some other projects in the coming weeks.

These first four were taken here in Alberta, at various times during 2013.

The following images were all taken in southern Utah, and on the northern border of Arizona, during my trip down there this past October

These last three were taken during the Fall Photo Weekend in Jasper in November

C-41 Color Negatives

Earlier this week, since the holiday weather has been so cold and snowy, I spent an entire day down in the darkroom.  I mixed up a batch of C-41 color chemistry, for processing color negatives.  It was a long and tedious day, but I managed to run 9 batches through the processor.  This included almost 70 sheets of 4" x 5" large format film, 2 rolls of 120 medium format, and 2 rolls of 35mm.  This time around the chemistry was fresher, and I didn't make any processing errors.  The results seem a little more consistent as compared to the E-6 color transparencies that I processed earlier.  I've scanned all of the good 4" x 5" negatives from 2012 and posted them below.

Beauty Creek, Fall Photo Weekend, November 2012

Old Mine Works, October 2012

Fall Prospecting Trip, southern Alberta badlands, October 2012

Late Summer, Red Deer River Badlands [taken by Hailey], 2012

Prairie Corral, southern Alberta, October 2012

Evening Valley, Fall Prospecting Trip, October 2012

Fall Colors, TL Bar Ranch, 2012

Frozen Waterfall, Fall Photo Weekend, November 2012

Forgotten Jackets, spring day trip, 2012

Limber Pine, Spring Photo Weekend, May 2012

Mushrooms, July 2012

Rear Window, spring day trip, 2012

Red Deer River Valley in late summer [taken by Hailey], 2012

Reflecting Pond, Mt. Kidd, Spring Photo Weekend, May 2012

Rills, Pronghorn Coulee, Fall Prospecting Trip, October 2012

Roadside Pond, Spring Photo Weekend, May 2012

Rock Outcrop, Chungo Creek [taken by Hailey], July 2012

Rust Pattern, April 2012

Wildflowers, TL Bar Ranch, summer 2012

Maintenance Shop Windows, April 2012