Tag: Landscape

Categories
Nature

Photo Accessibility

A black and white photograph of reeds extending from the water while their warped reflections appear on the surface of the water.
Mckay’s Harbour, Lion’s Head Provincial Park

Several years ago, in another context, I lamented the rise of what I described as photographic literalism. It’s a problem produced by search engines which rely on tagging to index photographs. In order to for photographs to rank well in Google searches, the associated tags have to accurately describe what appears in the photograph. We see the same thing on photo sites like Instagram and Flickr where often the photos that get the most attention are those with the best configuration of hashtags.

People have become fixated on the thingness of an image. This is a picture of X. This thing called X is a Platonic X that has about it an ideal quality of Xness. We can name it and classify it and slot it into its proper cubbyhole. Taxonomy is king! Long live the well-named!

While hashtags have their place, it’s important to recognize their shortcomings, too. Hashtags have no way to note ambivalence or vagueness, meanings that teeter on a fulcrum, feelings, the numinous experience, intimations of a spiritual life, visual poetry. And they have no way to register fleeting sensations: I looked here and suddenly I was taken back to my childhood. Instead, hashtags presume that a thing is a thing is a thing for all time.

Accessibility has given new life to the issue of photographic literalism. I’m quite happy to describe my photographs in alt tags for the benefit of those who are visually impaired. It’s a helpful measure for people who chance upon my web pages and want to understand how I have integrated visual media with my words. But, as with hashtags, it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of these tools.

A photograph is more than a representation of a thing. It may also be a provocation or an evocation. If it’s any good at all, it makes the viewer feel something. It is not so much the thing as it is the feeling that is the point of a photograph.

I think, in addition to the alt tag, there should be a poetry tag: a short ekphrastic statement about the feelings a photograph evokes. In the image above, for example, the alt tag reads: “A black and white photograph of reeds extending from the water while their warped reflections appear on the surface of the water.” Yes, but I might also write: “I was filled with a sense of calm as a gentle breeze rippled the shallow waters and, for a brief moment, I felt a sense of surrender.” Nothing overly flowery, something simple to suggest a state of mind.

Categories
City Life

Ghosts in the Landscape

Long pinhole exposure of a Go Train whizzing over the Don River on its evening run.
Evening commute up the Don Valley north of Pottery Road

I set up my tripod and frame a shot of railway tracks across the Don River. I use a 50 mm lens, then swap it out for a pinhole attachment that is roughly the equivalent of a 50 mm lens. I say roughly equivalent because pinhole lenses aren’t quite as precise as modern lenses. Technically, they aren’t even lenses. They’re apertures. To bastardize Leonard Cohen, they’re how the light gets in. But the light gets in unfocused so the images are blurred. And since so little light gets in (which is why I have to use a regular lens to set up the shot), the shutter has to stay open longer. How long is a matter of guesswork. In this case, I leave the shutter open for 135 seconds, which means that the train passing through my frame comes and goes all in one exposure. It leaves its traces in the blurred lines of the lights rushing past.

A commuter train like this carries how many people? 1000? 2000? There they are, rushing home after a long day at work, rumbling up the Don Valley to points north of the city. If I made this shot with a regular lens, you might be able to see faces gazing out of the train’s windows. Even then, because it’s dark and because the train is moving fast, the faces would appear blurred, almost ghostly. But with the pinhole lens, we can’t see the faces; the best we can do is infer their presence from the blurred lines where we would expect to see faces.

Whether or not we see ghosts in our frame depends very much on the shutter speed we use. Something analogous can be said when we gaze down a city street. A cursory glance is like a modern lens: we freeze the scene in an instant and have no sense of time passing. But a long hard look that engages the imagination and invokes deep time functions more like a pinhole lens and reveals how the street is inhabited by ghosts.

I offer the major intersection closest to my home as an example of how that works: Sherbourne and Bloor in Toronto. Today, the intersection is a hotbed of construction as condominium towers go up one after another. It’s hard to see the ghosts for all the concrete. But the writer, Hugh Hood, tells how, when he was a boy, Hooper’s Pharmacy stood on the southwest corner where we now have a Tim Horton’s. He remembers how a man spoke in a friendly way to the pharmacist, then walked onto the Sherbourne Street bridge and jumped to his death.

Long before that, from 1839 until the 1860s, a military blockhouse stood in the middle of the present-day intersection. It could accommodate 44 soldiers and was put there in response to the rebellion led by William Lyon Mackenzie. Looking even further back in time, before the first white settlers, we can imagine how Indigenous people used Rosedale Valley for transport, passing immediately beneath the site of the future blockhouse. And looking further still, we can see how melt waters from receding glaciers cut the deep ravine that would later become Rosedale Valley.

What we see depends entirely on how long we leave the shutter open.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Introverted Landscape

Sometimes a landscape presents to me as extraverted. At other times a landscape will approach me with a cautious reserve.

My encounters with landscape remind me a lot of my encounters with people. I think of all those times I’ve sat in a meeting and there’s that one person who goes on and on, and in the midst of it their bluster seems persuasive, but afterwards, when I’m reviewing the minutes, I realize that, despite the torrent of words, the person has said nothing of substance. Meanwhile, there is that one person who sits quietly in the corner, unable to get a word in edgewise, who later sends an email or phones me, and I discover that their head is brimming with helpful ideas and creative solutions.

Landscapes can be like that. Some landscapes smack me full in the face with an immediate impact and I say: Wow! A lot of sunset shots affect me in that way. Then I look more closely and realize there isn’t a whole lot going on in the image; it’s the photographic equivalent of a vapid blond Fox news anchor. Or, to borrow a phrase from MacBeth, it is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Meanwhile, lurking in the corner of my lightbox is an understated image that doesn’t seize my immediate attention but nevertheless lingers in my memory.

Try an experiment sometime. Take an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of white paper and mark it with a single black dot, then show it to friends and ask them what they see on the page. Almost invariably, they will point to the dot while ignoring the overwhelming whiteness of the page. When we look passively, we are keyed to see certain things, like bright colours and stark contrasts. Only when we look actively do we begin to notice subtlety and nuance.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Photographing in the Divide Between Order and Chaos

I was walking down the street when a youngish man approached and offered a piece of paper. You never know what you’re going to get when a stranger offers you a piece of paper. It could be a notice about a closing sale. It could be a rant about how Covid is a psyop mind control experiment. Or, as in this case, it could be a pamphlet promising eternal life with an old geezer in the sky above if only I surrender myself to the path laid down by a bronze age rabbi.

There are any number of reasons why I might find contemporary proselytism offensive. Chief among them is that Christian proselytism is intimately tied to a long history of Western colonialism and has been used to rationalize the exploitation of both people and resources. In my estimation, it hasn’t even begun to atone for its many sins, and will never begin that process until it allows a measure of humility to enter into its teachings. I receive the strident certainty of its tone as confirmation that it is deluded.

But in this instance, I didn’t even make it to that primary concern. I was too distracted by two grammatical errors. To my way of thinking, the function of grammar is a lot like the function of religion: it brings order to chaos; it makes our world more meaningful. A religious tract with grammatical errors is like a book of laws for criminals. It embraces a contradiction that not even faith can overcome.

I confess that I tend to take the same approach to the world when I have a camera in hand. I choose subjects and frame photographs and gravitate towards narratives that reinforce a world view in which order triumphs over chaos. In the distance, the world may swallow itself in fog. But here, right here, I see the world with clarity and that reassures me. Like the proselyte on the street corner, I want to share my view of the world with others. My photos may not have the same heft as a passage of scripture, but my aims are the same. More troubling is the fact that when I insist you look at the world exactly as I have looked at the world, I am replicating the colonizing tendencies of my proselytizing brothers and sisters.

Maybe my photographs would benefit from more chaos.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Fog and Intimacy

Lone Tree in Fog, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

There is something about fog that produces a sense of intimacy. Our view of what lies in the distance fades almost to nothing. All that remains is whatever stands in the foreground. I made this photograph on New Years Day. I make a habit of rising to greet the sun on the first morning of the new year, but when I got up on January 1st, 2022, I found the world shrouded in fog. After nearly 2 years of a global pandemic, attended by a growing cloud of disinformation, fog may be an apt way to start a new year.

I stood alone in a field with a solitary tree and the two of us communed for a time. To be honest, I can’t think of a better way to begin a new year. To be honest, I can’t think of many people I’d care to engage this way. I wish more of the people in my life would treat me the way this tree treated me. It didn’t challenge my thoughts and hint that maybe I’m a fool. It didn’t tell me I’m wasting my life on trivial pursuits. It didn’t tell me I’ve let myself go during the pandemic. The tree was a good listener and leaned in when I let my voice fall low.

I take it as a given that we can enter into relationships with trees. When I was young, my best friend and I built a tree house in a big maple. While we were still in the planning stages, we decided we couldn’t nail boards in place as that might hurt the tree, so we lashed everything with rope and twine. We discovered early on that we weren’t the only creatures to shelter in that tree. There were squirrels, robins, frogs, ants, beetles, lichen, and moss. That tree presided over our childhoods like a benevolent elder.

I have difficulty standing by when people cut down a live tree. It feels to me like an act of violence. I can understand why some people become tree-huggers, and I can understand, too, why industrialists adopt derisive tones when they use the term. A tree-hugger challenges everything an industrialist stands for. Despite the industrialist’s bluster, I’d rather be a tree than a chain saw.

Categories
Country Life

Picking Photos from the Flowering Image Tree

Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

All the good images are there for the taking; you can pluck them by the handful from the flowering image tree. The problem is that the flowering image tree only comes into bloom when normal people are asleep, which means that if you want any of those good images for yourself, you have to wake up early or stay out late.

Some mornings, when I’ve set my alarm at a ludicrous time, I wake up and my wife says: “Oh God, are you going out to the flowering image tree again?” And I turn off the alarm and fall back to sleep. An hour later, I get up and realize what I’ve done. It feels good to get an adequate night’s sleep. But when another night has passed and still I’ve missed the flowering image tree, I start to engage in all kinds of negative self talk. I call myself a lazy bastard. You’ll never get any decent photos, I say to myself, because you’d rather sleep all the time. Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins, you lazy bastard!

So it strikes me as a minor miracle that I manage to pluck much of anything at all off that flowering image tree. I picked this image on July 1st, 2016 at 5:35 am. Even today, when I look at the image, I can’t believe I really got up that early. What is wrong with me?

As an aside, I prefer shooting in the winter because sunrise arrives so much later. I can get a full night’s sleep, throw on my coat and boots, and still make it in time to catch the flowering image tree in bloom.

Categories
Country Life

Snow-covered railway tracks in Thunder Bay

Rail marshalling yard, Hardisty Street, Thunder Bay, Ontario

In Thunder Bay, the railway tracks come up alongside Hardisty Street North which is where I was standing when I made this shot. I was struck by the high contrast of white ground, dark rails running to the horizon, and dark utility pole set off against a gloomy sky. When I was done making the shot, I collapsed my tripod, strapped it to my pack, and walked over to Simpson Street. I was heading down to the Fort William side of town.

Because of the light, I made a lot of good photos that morning. Perhaps the most memorable photo was nothing special, at least not from a photographic point of view. I saw what I took to be a small derelict theatre and, without looking too closely, assumed that somebody had bought the building and converted it into a retail space. It wasn’t until after I made my shot that I noticed it was the local Hells Angels club house. I quickened my pace and hoped nobody had been watching me. I worried that if they saw my camera, they might think I was from a law enforcement agency. I’d vanish and people would later find my body in a boxcar off Hardisty Street.

As happens to so many buildings in Thunder Bay, somebody torched the Hells Angels club house almost exactly two years after I made this shot. The CBC article says the cause of the fire was unknown, but come on. This is the Hells Angels we’re talking about.

When I heard about the fire, my lawyer brain immediately wondered if the Hells Angels had insured the place. Given their efforts in recent years to carry on legitimate business enterprises, I don’t see why not. Even so, I tried to imagine the first time an insurance broker met with a Hells Angels rep to discuss insuring their place of business. How would an actuary even begin to go about evaluating potential risk?

Finally, I note that the street address is a fractional number, like the platform where aspiring wizards catch the train to Hogwarts. It seems that fractional numbers lead us into magical realms where we can alter our reality by eating gillyweed or shooting heroin.

Hells Angels Club House, Thunder Bay, ON
636 1/2 Simpson Street, Thunder Bay, ON
Categories
Landscape Photography

February Photography Series: Winter Scenes

Tree in Blowing Snow, Wyebridge, ON

For the month of February, I’ll be presenting a series of photographs featuring winter scenes. Fitting given that, at least in the northern hemisphere, February tends to be the most wintery month of the year. Fitting, too, given that I’m Canadian and winter is intimately bound to the Canadian identity. Urban, rural, people, landscape, macro, sport, wildlife, anything goes so long as it’s obvious from the image that I shot it in the wintertime.

To kick off this series, I offer a landscape image, tree trunk in the foreground of a snow-covered field, line of trees in the background. Blowing snow adds an atmospheric effect. Whenever I’m out in blowing snow, I wrap my camera in a plastic zip lock bag with a little hole cut out for the view finder. Basically a camera condom for extra protection. When the weather gets extreme, I have a fancier “official” condom made from thick clear plastic. It’s like the difference between Saran Wrap and a Trojan.

As with virtually every landscape image I’ve ever made, I used a tripod for this one. However, I’ve discovered something interesting about using a tripod in snow. The guy who sold me my fancy Manfrotto carbon fiber tripod told me it would be the last tripod I’d ever own, implying that the materials are virtually indestructible. Guess what? I found a way to destroy a carbon fiber tripod.

Not far from the site of this image, I drove the legs of my tripod into a snowbank and the legs splayed, driven outward by a layer of ice hidden under a light dusting of snow. I heard a crack and one of the legs went wonky. On examination, I discovered that, no, you can’t crack a carbon fiber tripod transversely like a broken leg, but if you jam it just right, you can crack it lengthwise in line with the fibers.

Incidentally, I don’t want to be taken as dissing Manfrotto products. I immediately went out and replaced my tripod with another Manfrotto. However, don’t believe anyone who tells you carbon fiber is indestructible.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Container Ship

Container ship appears at sunrise viewed from the Ogden Point Breakwater, Victoria, B.C.

When I first arrived in Victoria this November and was still on Toronto time, it was easy to get up early in the morning and catch the sunrise from the Ogden Point Breakwater. Although B.C. has been tormented by atmospheric rivers and extraordinary rainfall, there were times when a little sunshine broke through to remind us of all the forest fires during the summer.

Here, massive clouds loom overhead, but a thin band of light appears on the horizon illuminating the mountains in Washington state. Meanwhile, an empty container ship chugs into the frame. The gears of commerce grind on, lending visual interest to photographs everywhere.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Fuck Sunsets Again

People in a boat at sunset on Bob Lake, Haliburton Highlands, Ontario

I hate photos of sunsets so much, I thought it deserved a second post just so you’d know how strongly I feel about the issue. Yes, I admit there are more important issues vying for our attention at the moment. There’s a global pandemic. An epidemic of nationalistic jingoism verging on fascism. Millions of displaced people who face violence at every turn. Even so, an issue is never quite an issue until it’s my issue. And this is my issue.

Here, I remedied the boring sunset shot with rocks silhouetted in the foreground and the chance appearance of a boat edging into the frame. I particularly like how the clouds direct the eye to the boat. We can imagine that Fredo is sitting in that boat, about to get his brains blown out. Fortunately, Fredo is made up, just like my issue.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Fuck Sunsets

Evening on Bob Lake in Ontario's Haliburton Highlands as a boat passes.

In my estimation, a sunset is the dumbest excuse for a photograph ever invented. And yet people go gaga over sunsets. I don’t know why. What do people think it means to watch the sun disappear as the Earth rotates? Is it a sign from god? Does it inspire awe at the wonder of creation? Does it serve as a reminder of our mortality?

In strict visual terms, a sunset is as boring as all fuck. If you plunk your camera level with the horizon and take shots of the sun sinking below the horizon, then what you’ve got is a photo of nothing much happening. The only way to counteract that is to plunk your camera level with the horizon when you think something else might enter your frame. Like a dinosaur. Except dinosaurs are extinct. I’ll settle for a boat.

What I like about this photo is that the guy steering the boat agrees with me. He could care less about the sunset. He wants to know why there’s a guy standing on a rock with a long lens mounted on a tripod.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Milarrochy Bay on Loch Lomond

Tree on Milarrochy Bay, Loch Lomond, Scotland

Any photographer who has visited the eastern shore of Loch Lomond in the Trossachs has taken a shot of this tree sitting all by its lonesome. It’s an obvious shot that cries out to virtually everyone who wields a camera. The unfortunate consequence is that this scene has become a bit of a cliché. Just go to google images and do a search for “milarrochy bay tree” and you’ll see what I mean. That’s one of the hazards of the craft, I guess.

Speaking of clichés… We’ve all heard the song. I’m sure you’ve heard it. The chorus goes like this:

O ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland a'fore ye,
But me and my true love will never meet again,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.

Thanks to that song, Loch Lomond is one of the most famous lakes in the world. And yet, to stand on its banks and gaze across the water is something of a disappointment. What can I say? I come from a place that has shoreline on four of the Great Lakes, including Superior which, according to my calculations, has a surface area that is 1,156 times the surface area of the fabled Loch.

The closest we’ve got to “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond” is Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. With all due respect to Mr. Lightfoot, if I want a song to lift my spirits, I’d sooner take the high road.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Lighthouse of Portpatrick Harbour

Evening light falls on the lighthouse in Portpatrick Harbour, Scotland.

Evening light falls on the lighthouse that stands at the entrance to Portpatrick Harbour. Situated on the southwest corner of Scotland, if you look out across the water, you can see Bangor and the Belfast Lough. And if you hike further down the peninsula, it’s just a short skip across the water to the Isle of Man.

Continuing my virtual Scottish junket (as a hat tip to Cop26), I find myself dwelling upon the fate of coastal regions as sea levels rise. This Guardian article suggests that by 2050 sea levels will have risen by between 2 and 3 feet, and between 20 and 30 feet within the next century. It is conceivable that within the next century the scene I have captured here will no longer exist. A future photographer will still be able to reach my position, but they will confront a very different scene. Maybe open waters and the mostly submerged ruins of a once vibrant coastal village.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Barnum Creek Nature Reserve, Haliburton, Ontario

Forest scene overlooking Barnum Creek in the Barnum Creek Nature Reserve, Haliburton, Ontario

This is an appropriately autumnal photo I shot at the Barnum Creek Nature Reserve just weeks after it opened to the public in 2020. Presumably, the water in this image is Barnum Creek. It is located in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario in the prosaically named township of Dysart et al. Yes, Dysart et al. The et al appears on all the official signs.

If I were a philosopher (I’m not, but if I were) I might wonder about what it is that makes a creek a creek. When I talk about Barnum Creek, what defining feature gives it its distinctive creekiness? It can’t be the water. In a variation on a theme by Heraclitus (you can’t step in the same river twice), the water in a creek is never the same from one instant to the next. This photo captures an instant in time, but if I released the shutter again a few minutes later, most of the water in the photo would have been replaced by fresh water flowing from upstream. Some of the water in this photo might go on to Kashagawigamog Lake then into Lake Ontario, St. Lawrence River, and the Atlantic Ocean. Some of it might evaporate and quickly recirculate through the hydrologic cycle. And some of it might sink down to the water table and lurk in deep aquifers for hundreds of years. I can’t say for certain what would happen to any given water molecule, but I can say for certain that none of it would stick around to pose for another photograph.

What is true of the water is true, too, for the leaves, the soil, the trees, even the rocks. Like the water, it all flows, but on a different time scale. Whatever we call Barnum Creek and fix with pins to our map is only a provisional naming. I’m certain indigenous people living here named it something else. And people yet to come will name it something else again. And then it will vanish.