Spring Photo Weekend on Tri-X

Here are yet more scans of Kodak Tri-X Pan 4" x 5", given Normal development in PMK.  These images were all taken during the Spring Photo Weekend in April of 2015.  For this trip, several members of the Monochrome Guild travelled down to Kananaskis Country and Banff National Park for a few days of exploring and photography.  We also made a side trip over to Yoho National Park, just over the Alberta border into British Columbia.

Oregon Coast on Tri-X

The recent batch of 4" x 5" Tri-X Pan negatives that I processed in PMK included a bunch from our April trip out to the Oregon Coast.  For Spring Break 2015 the girls and I rented a beach house in Newport, and spent a week out on the coast.  This batch includes all the negatives that received normal development.  I have another batch, still in the washer, that received plus development.  Those will be posted in the coming days.

This last shot is of a spot on Cape Perpetua called Thor's Well.  A sea cave in the volcanic rock has collapsed and at high tide, when the surf is high, the waves pound into the face of the rock and surge up through this hole.  Then, when the wave recedes, it creates this 360 degree waterfall.  The first couple of images that I took here were OK, but not spectacular.  As I continued to work with my camera, the tide was coming in and the surf was getting heavier.  With one particularly large wave I was forced to grab my camera bag and scramble for higher ground.  As I turned around I saw my view camera perched on my wood tripod, standing in about a foot of water.  I dreaded the next wave as I was convinced it would knock it over.  I managed to steady the camera and get this shot before being forced to pack up and move inland.  Quite the spectacle to say the least...!!

2014 Fall Photo Weekend on Tri-X

Continuing with this batch of Tri-X film, here are few shots from the Fall Photo Weekend of 2014.  This is the annual trip with the members of the Monochrome Guild.  For this trip we headed out to Jasper National Park and captured the mountains during freeze up and with some of the first snow of the season...

Tri-X in PMK

A few days ago I processed 30 sheets of Kodak Tri-X Pan 4" x 5".  My developer of choice for this film is PMK, a staining Pyro developer that I have discussed previously on this blog.  This will be one of the last, if not THE last batch of film that I process for a while.  Over the next few months I have to temporarily abandon film processing and turn my attention to printing.  I have a lot of prints that need to be made and then mounted, matted and framed for the upcoming gallery exhibitions that I will be involved in.  Over the next several days I will post scans of some of the shots from this batch of Tri-X.  After that it will be work prints and the start of the whole exhibition process.

These first few images were all taken on various outings in the last half of 2014...

Afternoon Walk in East Coulee

On our last day in East Coulee, back at the end of August, we took a walk down along the river.  The moist riparian habitat supports a lot of interesting vegetation.  We saw wild apples, pin cherries, rose hips, wild cucumber and lots of choke cherries.  The choke cherries in particular were hanging off of the trees like big clumps of grapes.  I've never seen a crop so thick...  But this was right down beside the river so moisture was not an issue, and there has been lots of sun and heat this summer.  We picked an ice cream pail full in no time, and took them home to make a batch of jelly.  By mid afternoon we packed up the trailer and reluctantly made our way back home to Edmonton.  As it turned out this would be our last camping trip of the season, and only our second of the year.  We got rained out a short time later on the Labor Day long weekend and will soon be putting the trailer away for the season.  Hopefully we can get out a lot more regularly next summer.

Acting Like Tourists

I've always considered the Drumheller valley to be like a second home to me, as I spend a lot of time down there.  Particularly now, since we've purchased the building in East Coulee.  When we were there at the end of August we acted much more like tourists than locals.  The girls did all the touristy stuff, and for part of the time I joined them.  

On the Saturday evening we headed into town.  We started out at the Spray Park in the afternoon and then headed over to the local Greek restaurant for dinner.  After that we wandered around the historic downtown.  The girls had a blast checking out all the sights.  Later in the evening we went on a historic walk.  Lothar the Magician leads a historic ghost walk through the old downtown.  The town is now 100 years old, and many of the original buildings have quite a history.  This includes claims of at least several haunted buildings.  It was a very informative and spooky walk and I highly recommend it to anyone that visits the valley.  This particular evening provided perfect conditions.  Now that summer is drawing to a close the days are getting shorter and darkness sets in a little early.  It was rather breezy and blustery, adding to the mood.  We started at the Napier Theatre, and made our way through the downtown, eventually ending up at the old school, and the Navy League building.

East Coulee

Last summer I purchased a commercial building in the small town of East Coulee.  Seventy Five years ago East Coulee was a booming coal mine town with a large population.  One by one the mines shut down and many of the residents moved away.  The last mine to close was the Atlas Coal Mine in the 1970's.  It is now a historic site and a tourist attraction and is located downstream a little and across the Red Deer River from town.  In recent years East Coulee has been annexed by the Town of Drumheller and now has about 150 residents.  With the recent closure of the East Coulee Hotel and the adjacent Antique Store there are effectively no businesses or services left in town.  The School has been designated a historic site and is in the process of being restored.  It houses a museum, gift shop and a small cafe.  

My building is a commercial building in the middle of a residential neighborhood.  Town zoning rules prohibit any heavy industrial use, which has greatly depressed the value of this property.  That made it very affordable for me to purchase, and the town has given permission for Dinosaur Valley Studios to operate from it.  Dinosaur Valley Studios is the operating name of Palcoprep Inc. the company that I am a shareholder of.  The building is leased to the operating company and serves as a base for our artistic operations.

It is the history of the building that I will outline here...  The west portion of the building was originally Sloan's Garage, the local Texaco Service Station.  I understand that it was built in 1937.  An acquaintance of mine, Gilles Danis, operated a company called Prehistoric Animal Structures [PAST for short] back in the 1990's.  His wife was a daughter of the Sloan family that operated the original Texaco Station.  PAST set up operations in the original shop and later added two pre-engineered metal building extensions to the property.  I understand that these additions were added in the mid to late 1990's.  Around that time PAST ceased operations and the property was sold.  A local real estate developer owned it for a while and used it mostly as a storage shop for some of his tools and equipment.  I purchased the building from him last summer, and our Dinosaur Valley Studios operation moved in through the latter part of 2014.

Here are a couple of photographs of what the building looks like now.  One was taken last summer and the other about a week ago...

There was a fire in the original garage portion of the building many years ago.  I'm not sure exactly when this occurred but it may have been as long ago as 60 years.  The wood structure of the building became charred but did not collapse.  Some structural steel columns and trusses were added to provide additional support to the weakened wood structure.  While I was there last week, working on rebuilding the skylight, it became very evident that the building has settled and sagged and is showing its age.  After all, it is about 80 years old.  But it seems to be pretty sound and I am confident that it remain functional for many years to come.  While we were in town last week the girls and I made a visit to the East Coulee School Museum.  There are a number of old photographs exhibited there that show what the town looked like in it's heydey.  A couple of them include views of my building.  This first one, based on the car parked out front, was probably taken in the 1960's...

This next one is quite a bit older, and shows a view looking down 2nd Avemue to the west.  This is the road located immediately in front of the building.  Back in the day this was main street East Coulee.  The Texaco sign of Sloan's Garage is visible just beyond the Hotel.  The hotel sat on land that is now part of my property.  It was not quite where the building additions are now located, but sat on what is now part of the yard.  The shops and stores across the street are now all gone, replaced by houses, including one very large new one immediately across the street.  I find it very difficult to imagine what this town must have once been like, particularly since it is now such a quiet, sleepy place.

There is an RV pad with full hook up in the yard adjacent to the building.  This is our private camping spot where we park our trailer when we visit during the summer.  The town is very laid back and quiet and it is a great place to spend a few weekends in the summer.  I kind of hope the town stays this way.  On one hand I want it to hang on and prosper a little and remain an inhabited community.  But I don't want to see it completely redeveloped and built up and get a lot busier.  There are a few derelict properties and abandoned buildings that could use a little cleanup and it would be nice to see the population remain stable, or grow a little, but that is the extent of what is needed in my opinion.

August in the Badlands...

Last week, during my abbreviated vacation, we managed to make it down to the badlands.  We arrived on Wednesday afternoon and set up the trailer on the RV pad at our building in East Coulee.  The next morning the girls took the truck and went out for the day, while I stayed behind and did some maintenance work on the building.

The "skylight" on the original section of the shop wasn't much of a skylight.  It consisted of a couple sheets of corrugated fiberglass screwed down over a hole in the roof.  I'm told this was quite a bit better than the original one, which consisted of a panel of plexiglas from an old grocery store sign.  With the help of a couple of the employees from Dinosaur Valley Studios we removed the old fiberglass material and constructed a proper insulated roof curb.  This consisted of a wood box, approx. a foot high, insulated with rigid insulation, and sealed to the adjacent metal roof panels with adhesive membrane.  The old fiberglass panel was temporarily put back into place over this new curb.  In a couple of weeks I will return with some sheet metal flashings to properly clad the exterior of the curb, and with a new triple glazed dome skylight.  This will be a fairly large unit at nearly 6 feet by 8 feet.  The added insulation and proper construction will eliminate the ongoing leakage issues and provide a considerably higher insulation value.  While all of this was going on the girls hit a bunch of antique stores, some gift shops, and had lunch at the Last Chance Saloon in Wayne.

On Friday August 28th I helped out at the shop, setting up for the painting of a dinosaur exhibit that we were working on.  By afternoon the girls and I set out to spend some family time together.  We headed over to a local amusement park.  While I was there with the girls, Margarit went and checked out another antique store.  This particular amusement park in Drumheller had Bumper Boats and Mini Golf.  While the two older girls had a blast on the Bumper Boats, Helena and I played a round of Mini Golf.  After that it was Ice Cream for everyone, and then we met up again with Margarit.

Later, we headed down the valley to Rosedale, and went for a walk across the old Suspension Bridge.  The girls had a blast climbing around in the hills.  Once we finished up here we headed back to the trailer in East Coulee and had a barbecue.  This included some steaks and some fresh corn on the cob that we had purchased earlier from the Hutterites.

The entire province was really enveloped in smoke for most of the past week.  We noticed it back home in Edmonton before we left but down here in the Red Deer Valley it was particularly bad.  It came from a big forest fire burning down in north central Washington State.  The jet stream was carrying the plume of smoke north into western Canada.  I attempted to take some photographs of the full moon, made very reddish by the smoke, but met with limited success.

Photographically Very Busy....

Last week was supposed to be a vacation from work for me.  For various reasons our departure from the city was delayed, and we weren't able to leave town with our trailer until the middle of the week.  With only a short time available to us we decided to head down to Drumheller.  I spent a day doing some maintenance work on the building in East Coulee.  The next day I helped to set up for the painting of a dinosaur exhibit.  What was supposed to be a one week vacation ended up being just a long weekend.  Although I brought my view camera and a bunch of film along, it never made it out of the backpack and not a sheet of film was exposed.

Once we got home and I returned to work this week I quickly became involved in a number of photographic projects.  I guess this sort of makes up for the lack of shooting.  Here is what is on my agenda in the next little while.

The Monochrome Guild has an ongoing exhibition at a bakery downtown in downtown Edmonton called Dauphine.  This business is located at 10129 - 104 Street.  We have had a selection of images on display for most of the summer and will be changing them over to some new work later this fall.

The Open Image 2015 exhibition, organzied by Visual Arts Alberta, is currently underway at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary.  One of my images is included in this show.  Later in the fall this show will move up to the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton with an opening reception set for October 16.

The Monochrome Guild has an exhibition running through the month of September at Mandolin Books here in Edmonton.  This store is located at 6419 - 112 Avenue here in Edmonton.  Two of my prints are included in this exhibition.

The Monochrome Guild has just secured the Drawing Room Annex at Harcourt House as the venue for our annual Fall Friends and Family Show.  This two day exhibition will take place on November 7 and 8 later this year.  More on this to follow.

My collaborator Rob Michiel and I have been invited to include a selection of our work at the Leighton Center in Calgary for the Exposure 2016 festival upcoming in February of 2016.  Originally they wanted to show our Procession West project.  We had to decline this opportunity as Procession West is already scheduled to show in the area at the same time.  But we have come to terms on presenting an alternative selection of images instead.  More on this to follow.

The Procession West Project will be exhibited at the Okotoks Art Gallery through March and April of 2016.  The exact details have not yet been finalized but this show will include a selection of 30 to 35 large prints.

After the show wraps up in Okotoks a selection of the strongest pieces, numbering about 12 to 15 prints, will move on to the Leibel Mansion gallery in Pincher Creek and will be on display through the month of May 2016.

This is certainly a flurry of photographic activity for me to keep pace with organizing.  Most of the work is framed and ready to go but there are a few new pieces that will need to be printed, mounted matted and framed over the coming weeks.  Over the next little while I will continue to post updates on the progress of these projects and provide details about the exhibitions and the openings.  Please stay tuned......