Out with the "Off The Beaten Path" Gang - 1

Back on March 12th my friends Chris and Connie from Calgary came up to Edmonton.  Chris and Connie are historians, researchers, explorers and photographers and write a blog called "Off the Beaten Path".  It can be found on line at www.bigdoer.com

Margarit was away for the weekend at a ladies craft retreat out in the foothills and the girls and I were home alone.  On Saturday morning I headed out for the day with Chris and Connie.  Middle daughter Annelise decided to come along, but the other two stayed home.  Our first stop was at an old stone house that I had previously explored.  Chris later did a little research on this place and talked to someone that was familiar with the history of the place.  As we suspected when we visited, this was originally a wood frame house and the masonry was added on the exterior of the walls at a later date.  After taking a few snapshots here and exploring a bit, we headed on to our main destination.

 

Earlier in the spring I had located a stately, mansion-like structure.  It was on private land and at the time I originally found it, was unable to check it out.  In the meantime Chris was able to get permission to go in and do a little research and take some photographs.  Though heavily overgrown with carraganas, being still early in the season there were no leaves yet, and getting to and seeing the structure was not too difficult.  This is one of the most impressive abandoned homes I have ever seen.  The walls of the lower two stories were finished on the exterior with precast concrete blocks that resembled cut marble.  The millwork on the interior was exquisite.  The house was almost completely empty and not full of junk and garbage like so many old structures.  Equally impressive was the fact that it had really not been vandalized or disturbed, though the glass was long gone in all the windows.  The keystone on one side of the house had a date of 1915.  I took a bunch of digital snapshots here, but also set up my view camera and took three more serious photographs.  The digital ones are posted below, and I am still in the midst of processing my film from this outing so those will follow later.  Here is a link to the rather detailed report that Chris has put together since that outing, and posted to his website...

http://www.bigdoer.com/25298/exploring-history/1915-cement-house/

Shooting the Crowsnest Pass - Day 3

When we got up on the morning of Thursday March 10th conditions were less than ideal.  It was REALLY windy, even by southern Alberta standards, and the mountains to the west of Pincher Creek were under heavy cloud.  We almost gave up on the idea of shooting, but decided to head into the Crowsnest and see if we could find a sheltered spot to shoot a little.  After another crappy, free hotel breakfast we checked out and hit the road.  The winds were in the 80 to 100kmh range out on the prairie but surprisingly once we got into the front ranges they dropped off a lot.  We headed back over to the Greenhill mine site and spent the morning shooting here.  It was overcast and showered a little off and on, but all things considered, it was a lot better than we expected.

By about noon we finished up at the mine site and decided that we'd better hit the road for home.  We stopped for a late lunch in Nanton, and decided to see if we could check out the Lancaster Museum.  This is an aircraft museum that includes a restored Lancaster bomber, as well as a number of other aircraft.  The museum was closed, but there were some guys working inside.  I had done a little work for the museum a few years back.  At my shop we custom fabricated some new acrylic for one of their gun turrets.  I used this contact as an in and got permission to go into the museum with our cameras.  It was great because we had free run of the place, without any other tourists around to get in the way.  The guys even turned on all their big overhead LED lights for us.  I didn't take any digital snapshots here, instead only working with my 4x5 view camera.  So the only snapshots I have of this day are the ones I took at the Greenhill mine.  But, as I get around to processing all of my film from this three day trip there will be a number of scans posted in the days and weeks to come.  After we finished up at the museum we hit the road for home, pounding the pavement all the way back to Edmonton.  We arrived back in the city in the early evening, tired but pleased with the results of our three days of shooting.

Shooting the Crowsnest Pass - Day 2

Court and I got up pretty early, had the crappy free breakfast at our hotel in Pincher Creek and then hit the road west into the Crowsnest Pass.  Our first stop was in the town of Coleman, where we photographed some of the historic buildings in morning light.  This included the old Roxy Theatre, the Morrison Block, the Italian Hall, the Grand Union Hotel and the International Mining Office.  I remember that the temperature was pretty brisk and even with gloves on I was having trouble holding a pencil and writing down the notes about my exposure.  Conditions improved later in the day.  In addition to taking a lot of snapshots with my digital camera, the big view camera also came out and I managed some shots on large format film.

After we finished up in town we headed over to the nearby Collieries.  Although the site had once been fenced off, the gates were all open so we just wandered in.  I understand that one of the largest buildings on the site was torn down and demolished a year ago or so.  But lots of stuff still remains to explore including the maintenance shop, the shower building, some coke ovens, and an old railway locomotive.

We spent a fair bit of time exploring at the Collieries and again shot a bunch of digital snapshots, as well as some more serious work with the view camera.  By mid-afternoon we headed back up to the dance hall at Crowsnest Lake and shot there for a while.  Late in the day we made our way back over to the Greenhill Mine Site near Blairmore.  I didn't take any snapshots there but did do a few exposures with the big view camera.  By the end of the day we were both pretty exhausted.  Turns out I exposed 38 sheets of film on this day... mostly black and white... but there were a couple of sheets of color included in that count.  This was a record for me.  We retired back to Pincher Creek at the end of the day, had our evening meal at the nearby restaurant, and settled down for the evening.

Shooting the Crowsnest Pass - Day 1

On Tuesday March 8th, with a couple days booked off work, I headed down to Calgary.  My friend Court, a fellow member of the Monochrome Guild, was along with me for the ride.  We arrived at the Leighton Art Centre just south of Calgary at about 10:00AM.  Stephanie and the other girls at the gallery were just packing the last of the prints from my just completed Ag2 show into the crates.  I understand that about 450 guests attended the gallery over the four week run of the show and during that time another 500 kids, on field trips from various schools in the Calgary area, also attended the show.  Nothing sold, but at least my work was viewed by a wider audience.  

Court gave me a hand to load the crates full of prints into the back of my truck and we were soon on our way down to Pincher Creek.  Our first stop was the Lebel Mansion Gallery.  The Ag2 exhibition will be shown here through the months of April and May and I had made arrangements to drop off the crates in advance of the show.  We off-loaded the three crates full of prints, carried them up the big flight of stairs into the mansion, and stored them away in a closet.  I really appreciate the fact that the curator allowed me to drop off early as it saved me an extra trip down to southern Alberta.  With the business part of the trip out of the way, Court and I made a quick stop for lunch.  Refreshed, we headed west into the Crowsnest Pass.

It was cool and windy and not the most pleasant day.  We decided to scout around for a while and see what we could find.  We were staying for a couple of nights in Pincher Creek and would have a chance to do some shooting for a day and a half before we had to head back home to Edmonton.  Our first stop was at the Leitch Collieries Historic Site.  It was closed for the season and the gate to the parking lot was locked up.  We parked in the driveway and wandered around for a little while.

After a brief walk around the site we jumped back into the truck and headed further west.  We headed north out of the town of Frank, on some backroads, trying to find the Lille townsite.  The crappy map that we had indicated that this ghost town was right beside the road.  We later learned that it was a bit of a hike in to the old townsite.  My friend Chris of the Bigdoer.com website later provided some information on what was left there, and how to get to it.  On this particular day we didn't get that far, though we did find some sort of old foundation beside the road...

After this stop we headed further west still and soon found ourselves out on the shores of Crowsnest Lake, out near the Alberta - British Columbia border.  We knew there was an old dance hall here and soon find it, nestled in the trees on the shore of the lake.  We poked around here for a while and took a few snapshots.

The day was beginning to wind down by this point so we started making our way back towards Pincher Creek.  There was an old industrial building up on the hillside, overlooking the Crowsnest River and the town of Coleman.  We made our way up here and stopped and checked things out.

After this stop we continued further east and eventually ended up at Blairmore.  Here there were more old, abandoned mine buildings.  The sites were designated historic sites and were partially fenced. But the gate was standing open, and in another area the fence had been cut.  We wandered in and explored here for a while as well.  We ran into another photographer near one of the mine entrances.  He was from Calgary and his name was Royce Howland.  He was shooting with a digital medium format camera.  He is a serious fine art photographer and conducts workshops and has a website called vividaspect.com.  We chatted with him for a while and wandered about making a few more snapshots.

By this time the light was starting to fade, and the day was drawing to a close.  It was still pretty cool and chilly, but the wind was starting to die down.  My big camera never made it out of the truck on this day and the entire afternoon was spent just scouting around and taking a few snapshots.  But, we had the entire next day at our disposal, and now had a pretty good lay of the land.  We headed back to Pincher Creek and settled down at our hotel.  We wandered over to a nearby restaurant for supper and then retired back to our room.  Court brought along a nice bottle of Irish Whiskey and we made sure to give it a good test drive.  We turned in relatively early, anxious to get after some more serious photography the next morning.

Winter Hockey - Renegades Season comes to an end...

The winter hockey season abruptly came to an end this week for the Renegades Hockey Team.  There were 12 divisions in our league and 9 teams in each division, plus two conferences, each of equal size.  Lots of teams and players in a city wide league.  Eight of the nine teams in each division advance to the playoffs.  We were a little outmatched in our division 7 in the north conference but managed to finish in 7th place.  This meant that we had to face the second place team in the first round of the playoffs.  It was a best of three games matchup, and we started out really well.  While I was away out to Vancouver Island the guys beat the Padres in game one by a score of 10-6.  Right after I returned and was still sick fighting off that miserable cold I came down with, the guys played the second game and lost a close one by a 6-5 score on a questionable goal.  Last week we played the final game of our best of three matchup.  It started out OK and despite a short bench, the score was tied 2-2 going into the third period.  But... victory was not to be ours and the Padres scored two goals in the third period and were up by a score of 4-2 late in the game.  We pulled our goaltender in an attempt to even things up but they scored an empty net goal to seal the game at 5-2.  This put an end to our winter season and we skated off in disappointment.  Not too long to wait as in early May the summer season will get underway and we will have another shot at another championship....

100 T-Max and plus development in Perceptol

Back in late February, when I had a batch of Perceptol developer mixed up to process my FP4+ film, I also experimented with a sheet of Kodak 100 T-Max and plus development.  As with the other film, I used the developer diluted 1:1.  I processed this sheet for an estimated N+1 development, for a time of 16:00 minutes at 24C.  This shot of some hops growing up onto the wall of an old barn was taken in the summer of 2014 down in central Alberta.  It was a heavily overcast day with rather flat light, which is what prompted me to experiment with this developer.  I like the soft contrast that this combination has provided and will continue to experiment with it in the future.

Ilford FP4+ in Perceptol

I have been shooting Ilford FP4+ film in 4" x 5" format for many years now.  It works really well for plus development when added contrast is needed.  For that I have been exposing it at 160 iso and processing in HC-110 developer.  But other than for this application I have drifted away from this film in recent years.  This past few months I have decided to experiment with it in an alternative developer.  I have been giving slightly more exposure than the rated speed of 125 iso and exposing it at 100 iso.  This most recent batch I experimented with Ilford Perceptol Developer, diluted 1:1.  I processed for 11:45 minutes at 24C with limited agitation.  I must say that so far I am quite pleased with the results.  This combination is definitely worth further experimentation.  I really like the tonality in subdued light... contrasty but smooth...  Here are scans of some of the recent negatives, all taken in late 2015.

Time to Catch Up....

I've been busy in recent weeks and haven't had a chance to post much on my blog.  Earlier in the spring I was kept busy delivering prints to the various gallery shows that I am involved in.  The most recent one was back in early March when I delivered the Ag2 show to the Lebel Mansion Gallery in Pincher Creek.  My friend Court came along with me on that trip to help load and unload the crates full of prints.  While we were down in southern Alberta we spent an extra couple of days photographing in the area.  I still have to catch up on posting all the snapshots from that trip.  

In the mean time the gallery exhibition has since opened in Pincher Creek and I encourage anyone that is in the area to stop by and check it out.

Then after that, I got out for a day trip with my friends Chris and Connie.  We ventured out east of Edmonton to a couple of places that I knew were of interest to them.  The snapshots from that trip are yet to be posted as well.

Finally, I was away for 10 days over Easter and Spring Break.  The girls and I drove out to Vancouver Island and stayed in a rental home in Courtenay.  Lots of snapshots from that trip, and when I get around to processing some of my film, hopefully some more serious images as well.

The Renegades Hockey Team wrapped up the regular season and is now into playoffs.  The guys were victorious in our first playoff game, while I was away on vacation.  More to follow on this story as well.

We just arrived home from Vancouver Island last night and today was my first day back to work.  I came down with a bad cold at the tail end of our trip and am just now slowly recovering.  Had to skip the hockey game tonight to complete my recovery but looking forward to getting back on track in the coming days.