Forgotten Prairie at Foothills Camera Club

On Tuesday January 16th the "Forgotten Prairie" short documentary was shown at the Foothills Camera Club in Calgary.  They have a great venue at the Loose Moose Theatre Company in the Crossroads Market.  Turns out that Byron Robb, who is in the film and was part of our entourage out to the ghost towns last spring, is on the executive at Foothills.  He set the whole thing up and invited producer Rueben Tschetter to show the film.  All of those that were involved in the project were invited to attend.  I left work just after lunch on Tuesday and made the run down to Calgary to arrive in time for the event.  Connie of the BigDoer team was able to attend but unfortunately Chris had a prior commitment and could not make it.  Byron even went so far as to invite myself and Rueben for dinner, and to stay the night at his place. 

The showing was well attended and I would guess there were around 50 people present.  It was a regular camera club meeting and the documentary made up the "guest speaker" part of the evening.  It brought back a lot of memories from my days in several camera clubs here in Edmonton.  This included Images Alberta Camera Club and Crossroads Camera Club.  I fondly recall all those meetings with guest speakers, competitions and projects.  I left the club scene when the photo world went digital and it was at that time, back in 2002 that I founded the Monochrome Guild.  We have continued as a somewhat informal collective of photographic artists working in film, and do not have the structure of a typical camera club.  All the same it was kind of fun to watch the proceedings at a club meeting.

After the showing there were a number of questions from the audience about the making of the film and about my photography.  I included a few prints from the trip out to the ghost towns.  After the meeting we headed to a nearby pub with a few club members and continued our photographic discussions over a couple of cold, foamy ones.  Later still we returned to Byron's place and continued the visit between Rueben, Byron and myself.  It was well into the wee morning hours before I finally retired to bed.  The night before had been much the same due to a late hockey game and by this point I was running on fumes.

We slept in a little the next morning and went out for breakfast together.  After that we said our goodbyes and I hit the road north to Edmonton, arriving back at work just after lunch on Wednesday.