A Stroll to the Creek

Margarit, Helena and I took an ATV ride over to Shunda Creek.  We parked the ATV along the highway, and walked down a trail to the creek.  We explored down by the water for awhile, and Helena caught a toad.  Its funny that we have seen so many toads this year, and not a single frog...?  I took a photograph with my view camera.  After Helena let the toad go, we walked back up to the ATV and carried on a little further.

Once again we parked the ATV and walked down a second trail to the creek.  This one was a little longer and it was a short 15 minute stroll before we got to Shunda Falls.  This is the same spot that we have been to numerous times, including recently with Arturo and Sharon.  This particular trail leads to the opposite side of the creek.  Normally we approach from an ATV trail that allows us to drive right up to the creek.  We explored here for a while and I took another photo with my view camera.  The water level in the creek was considerably higher than when I was here last in early August.  Not really a surprise given the fact that we got 1-1/2 inches of rain over the past couple of days.  The little collection of garden gnomes were still there, beside the spruce tree, where we found them last time.  This time we also noticed some little fairies, perched on the cliff across the creek.  Not sure if these were recently added, or if we just missed them last time.

As we walked back to the ATV it started to rain yet again.  I was grateful that I finally got around to installing the roof on the ATV a couple weeks ago.  By the time we were on our way back to the cottage it had started to pour.  We all stayed reasonably dry, under the roof and behind the windshield.  I checked the rain gauge on my weather station when I got back to the cottage and we got nearly 12mm of rain in about half an hour.

Saunders

I spent Wednesday August 25th out at the cottage by myself.  Initially Margarit and the girls were going to come out and join me, but they decided to stay home for an extra day.

I spent part of the morning splitting and stacking some firewood.  We heat with wood in the winter, and you can't have too much.  We still have one huge and one small pile of cut logs that date back about four or five years to when we cleared out lot.  This stuff needs to be dealt with before it rots and becomes unusable as firewood.  We will not run out of wood for some time to come as we have several piles of cut logs at our second property, and lots of standing dead trees and deadfall.

By early afternoon I decided to take a drive up to Saunders.  There was once a town and a coal mine at Saunders Creek, and it was in operation until the 1950's.  There is not much left of anything now.  It was along the rail line that extended from Rocky Mountain House to Nordegg.  There are a few old foundations left, but no buildings.  The railroad right of way is still evident.  There are some large slag piles and a rock dump just beyond the mine.  There is still a small stream trickling out of the old mine shaft and it smells of sulphur.

On the road in to Saunders there is a gorgeous hillside covered with huge, mature aspens.  One of the reasons that I waited until afternoon to visit was that I knew the sidelight on the trunks would be best at this time of day.  It was gloriously quiet and I wandered around the old mining area with my 4x5 for a while, before moving on to the roadside aspens.  I had both my 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras with me, and shot some images with both of them.  There were no campers at the campsite, and only one vehicle passed me on the road.  Even this one was late in the day as I was taking my last photograph.  It was a very relaxing and pleasant afternoon.

Parts Room

I quite like this image.  It is from a recently processed batch of 4x5 sheet film.  This is the parts room in an abandoned industrial building.  I think this would look good as large print and then all the little details would really stand out.  The small screen sized digital image really doesn't do it justice.

Elk Head

Back before Covid we were exploring in an old farm yard, with permission from the owner, in Southern Alberta.  There was lots of fascinating stuff and I took quite a few photographs with my 4x5 view camera.  This one was not developed in one of the initial batches of film and I just recently processed it.  I'm guessing that the landowner was a hunter, and shot this elk at some point.  I'm also guessing that he wanted to preserve the skull and antlers.  This elk head was left sitting out behind some granaries, perched in an old display stand.  Maybe someday the hunter will return and claim it, or perhaps it has been forgotten.  In any event it made a rather bizarre photograph.

Snow in August

I headed back out to the cottage on Friday August 21st.  I picked up a bunch of electrical materials, and some other supplies, before heading out of town.  

There is a real shortage of many commodities and in particular building materials are affected.  Lumber prices are at record highs and there are shortages of all sorts of things including pipe, windows, furnaces and electrical materials.  I placed an order with a wholesaler for all the electrical materials that I need for the guest cottage.  Much of it is on backorder, some of it for up to three or four months.  I was not able to get a ground plate, a meter base, the main panel, some of the breakers and most of the wire.  I picked up what was available, but won't be able to do much in the way of installation in the short term.  These shortages are all blamed on Covid.  Manufacturing plants have been working at reduced capacity for months, and there is high demand, both because people have lots of money [from the government Covid subsidies] and because a lot of people are building and renovating.

None of the girls wanted to come out this time, so it was a solo trip for me.  I stopped in Rimbey on my way out and picked up a few groceries and made it out to the cottage by mid-afternoon.

On Saturday the weather was a little unsettled.  It was cool and partly overcast and there were a couple of light showers.  Overnight on Saturday in to Sunday it started to rain more significantly.  On Sunday August 23rd it rained all day long and we got a total accumulation of 33mm.  Overnight the temperature got down to near freezing and there was some wet snow mixed in with the rain on Sunday morning.  On Monday morning I woke up to a heavy fog.  Once it evenutally burned off and the skies cleared there was snow on all of the mountain tops.  To the west the Bighorn Range was totally white.  But even the peaks of the front ranges... Coliseum, Baldy and Eagle, all had a covering of fresh snow.

Windows

Here is a scan of a recently processed 4x5 negative.  I shot this image earlier this summer while I was out on a day trip.  Arturo and I found this wonderful abandoned home down in a coulee.  We spent quite a bit of time shooting there and this is one of the first images from that location that I have processed.

20th Watercolor

I started on this, my twentieth watercolor painting, back around August 10th.  This was just before Arturo and Sharon came to visit out at Nordegg.  When I went back to the city on August 12th, I left all my watercolor supplies out at the cottage.  It seems I only have time to paint when I am out in the mountains, so I decided to stop hauling all the stuff back and forth.

This is just a small painting... image size 4-3/4" x 9-1/2", on 6" x 12" paper.  I took the photograph of this old house on one of the spring daytrips that I went on with Arturo, Court and Fred.    We stopped and photographed this majestic old house when we were on our way down to the Paintearth badlands.  I shot it on 4" x 5" sheet film, but cropped it to fit the panoramic proportions of the paper I was working with.

When I got back out to the cottage on August 20th I went back to work on the painting and finished it up on Sunday.

I used some masking fluid on this one so that I could retain a sharp edge between the sky and the building.  I also used some to retain the highlights within some of the window openings.

I'm generally pleased with the way that this one turned out.  I suppose one of these days I should start to do something with all of these painting that I'm creating.  They are beginning to get to the point that I would consider hanging a couple of them.

Gas Turbine

This is a recently processed negative, from the batch of Fuji Neopan Acros 100 4" x 5" that I developed a week ago.  It is an abandoned gas turbine and I found it at the industrial plant the Arturo and I explored about a month ago.  It turned a generator and created power for the industrial plant.  I can just imagine the noise this thing must have made when it fired up and and whirled up to speed.

Bunk Complete

Last time I came home from Nordegg, I brought all the parts for Anna's bunk.  We stored them in the garage for a few days until she got around to buying a mattress for it.  We tried to pick one up at Costco, as they were on sale... but they were sold out.  Eventually Anna found one she liked and brought it home.

We discovered that we can not position the ladder on the open side.  The hooks that I found for the ladder are not strong enough and it tends to swing into the opening.  We have since moved the ladder to the end.  That is probably just as well, as Anna wants to install a bed rail at the long side.  I have the pieces made for the rail but I'm not sure if it is tall enough, given the thickness of the mattress.  Anna is going to think about it for a couple of days and then make a decision.

Small Prints

While I was working on the exhibition prints for "Coal in Alberta", I also printed two small 8x10 prints.  One is a shot of The White Pocket, in northern Arizona.  I will be giving this print to my friend Brad, who was along with me on that trip in 2015.

The second print was from a negative I just processed.  I took this shot a little over a week ago when Arturo and Sharon were visiting at Nordegg.  This is Shunda Creek, not far from my cottage.  I used a sixteen second exposure to record the swirling bubbles in the creek as an eddy.  I plan on putting this print into the Beehive Artisan Market.   The images below look a little curved and distorted because these are snapshots of the actual prints, in a tray of Hypo Clearing Agent.

Coal in Alberta

For the past three years or so my friends Nigel, Court, Fred and Arturo, from the Monochrome Guild, have been working with me on a themed photography project.  Initially it was a historic project that was going to document the remnants of the coal mining industry in Alberta.  With the recent decision by our Provincial Government to open the eastern slopes of the Rockies to new mining activity, this became a very political issue.  There has been a huge backlash in the province from much of the population.  The majority appears to be against destroying our mountains and water for some coal, that would ultimately be sold to China.

We elected to expand our project and not only document the historic aspect of mining, but also to illustrate some of the current mining activities.  Earlier this spring I began submitting our project to various art galleries to see if we would be accepted for an exhibition.  So far we have been accepted for two shows.  The first one will be in October and November of 2021 at the Crowsnest Pass Public Art Gallery.  The second will be in June and July of 2022 at the Leighton Art Center.  The title of the exhibition is "Coal in Alberta... a journey to obsolescence"

With that October deadline looming I decided it was high time that I get busy and start printing some of my images.  So, yesterday I printed two negatives to 16" x 20".  Each participating photographer will be showing five images, for a total of twenty five.  So, I only need to print three more.  The two that I printed were a detail shot of a vandalized air compressor at the Greenhill Mine in Blairmore, and a shot of the showers at the Brazeau Collieries in Nordegg.  The snapshots below are of the prints in a tray of clearing agent as I worked on them yesterday.

Film Processing

Last week I set up my darkroom and processed a batch of sheet film.  This is the first time that I have developed any film in quite some time.  This was a batch of Ilford FP4+ film in 4" x 5" format.  I processed in Ilford Perceptol developer.

I have been having some issues with this developer in recent months.  It seems that the anti-halation dye on the back of the film is not fully washing out during processing, as it is supposed to.  I checked my notes and the film that I processed was from three different manufacturing batch lots.  It seems unlikely that there is a problem with the film.  I suspect that the diluted Perceptol developer that I am using just does not have adequate strength to fully wash out the dye.  I seem to recall that I had similar issues when I developed other films in this developer.  

The stain is very faint and I don't think it will create any issue in printing.  I since read that if the film is bathed in a stronger developer such as Dektol, it will wash out the remaining dye.  As this step is done after the film has been fixed, it does not result in any further development of the image.  I attempted this with a duplicate negative and it seems to have solved the problem.

This extra step is not only a nuisance, but a little concerning so I may have to stop using Perceptol and switch to a different developer.  Alternatively I may have to use this developer at a higher concentration.

For now, here is one of the new images from that batch.

This image was taken in early June of this year while I was out on a day trip with my friend Arturo.  We found this old century homestead in central Alberta, as we were on our way down to the Paintearth Badlands.  I shot this with a 90mm wide angle lens, and used a #8 Yellow filter to increase contrast and create some separation in the sky.

Roof goes on

While Arturo, Sharon and I were out photographing, the roof panels got delivered to the guest cottage.  The next day Dave and Basil installed the roof.  It went pretty quickly and by mid afternoon it was complete.  It is just a simple gable roof, moderate slope, with no penetrations, so it went pretty quickly.

Last time, when the roof went on the main cottage, it was much later in the season.  The trusses were going up on the last day of summer, just as we got 16 inches of wet snow.  I spent the next couple of days after that, shoveling all of the snow out of the cottage.  This time around the roof is on and the building mostly weather-tight in early August.

Summer Hockey

On August 12th I tidied up at the cottage and hit the road for home at about 1:30 in the afternoon.  The drive home that normally takes about three hours, took almost six hours this time.  A tractor trailer had rolled on Highway 2 northbound, just at the south edge of Leduc, where it merges with Highway 2A.  Traffic was backed up for miles.  The highway was completely blocked and being detoured into Leduc.  This also affected southbound traffic merging onto 2A, and northbound traffic on 2A.  Essentially three highways were being merged onto a single lane road through Leduc.  I finally made it back home to the city at around 7:00PM.  I quickly unpacked my gear and got ready to go and play hockey.

This summer season was very unusual.  It was the first time back on the ice since Covid and our team had not played for about a nine months.  We started off the season with a very one-sided loss to a team from River Cree.  The score in that one was 13-0.  The next game was also a loss, but this time a little more respectable one goal game.  Our third game ended in a tie.  After that we were moved down, along with the teams we played in the second and third game, to Division Five, the lowest division.  The River Cree team was moved up to the second division.  After that we never lost a game and finished the season with a record of nine wins, two losses and a tie.  I don't think we ever had more than about a dozen players show up for a game and several times the team played with only seven or eight skaters.  I missed a number of games with everything that I had going on out at the cottage.

On August 5th the team played the semi-final game against the 4th [last] place team, the Punishers.  I didn't make it to this game, and neither did most of our other players.  The guys hung on for a 9-6 victory with only seven skaters.  The final game was on August 12th at 9:45PM at Londonderry Arena.  This was against a team called the Party Sharks.  These guys finished in second place and knocked off the third place Mighty Ducks to advance to the final.  We had ten skaters for the game, but only one defensemen... me... showed up for the game.  We had to play with three forwards moved back to the blue line.  We scored the first goal, about half way through the first period, and never looked back.  The game ended with a scrum and a fight after one of the Party Sharks took a swipe at one of the girls on our team.  Two of our guys were ejected from the game with about five minutes left and unfortunately were left out of the team victory picture.  We ended up winning by a score of 6-0.