Tag: Winter

Categories
Country Life Landscape Photography

Fence in Foggy Field

Fence Post in Fog, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

The chief merit of this post is the alliteration in the title: three “F” words in a row is irresistible. I could have added a fourth, but then I’d be giving up my family friendly rating. But enough about rhetoric.

This is a variation on the theme of Kanso, which I’ve previously mentioned here and here, creating a scene of calming simplicity by removing elements from the image one by one until only the essential remains. Although photography in the real world often makes it impossible to remove elements from a scene (Photoshop notwithstanding), nature itself sometimes steps in and lends a hand.

In previous posts, I’ve shown how a backdrop of pure snow can render an utterly simple photo. In this instance, I turn to fog as my natural assistant. It isn’t perfect, but it helps. The fog softens the background just enough that it doesn’t distract us from the foreground, a single fence post. We can trace the line of fence posts that recedes across the field and disappears into the foggy distance.

I shot this on New Year’s Day, 2022 at Williams Farm in Wyebridge, Ontario. The scene arrived like a gift and, although I wouldn’t call myself a superstitious person, I took it as a portent of the year to come. At least as far as photographs go, I expect 2022 will be an excellent year.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Snow Fence on Balmy Beach Overlooking Lake Ontario

Balmy Beach, Toronto, ON

In making today’s featured image, I approached the scene from the far side of Kanso. In an earlier post, I mentioned the Japanese aesthetic of Kanso, which can be understood as simplicity or clarity. As a process, it demands that the photographer remove from an image everything that is unnecessary until only the essential remains.

However, in this case I started with a simple image—a snow-covered breakwater extending into Lake Ontario (shown below)—and decided it needed something more. I moved further down the beach and positioned myself with a snow fence in the foreground. To my way of seeing, this is more satisfactory for a couple reasons. First, it adds a sense of depth to the image by creating a crisp foreground. And second, the reddish brown of the fence slats complements the blue-green of the water; the resulting contrast is more dramatic.

I don’t know if the Japanese have a name for a simple, calming image produced by adding features until we arrive at a satisfying sense of balance. If not, let’s make one up. How about Osnak? The opposite of Kanso.

Ironically, although the point of the exercise is to produce a sense of calm through simplicity or clarity, I was anything but calm when I made these photographs. There was a biting wind blowing snow and ice pellets from the west. Ice had crusted on my eyebrows and my fingers were stiff with the cold. We see none of my personal discomfort reflected in the image. The problem with Kanso (or Osnak) is that it hides the personal sacrifices I made to produce the image. Yet there are times when I would prefer it if everyone knew how much I suffer for my art. 🙂

Balmy Beach in winter, Toronto, ON
Categories
City Life

R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant: Palace of Purification

Silver Birch Beach, Toronto

Located where the ends of Queen Street East and Victoria Park Avenue meet at the east end of The Beaches in Toronto, the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant is without doubt one of the most remarkable buildings in the city. I first encountered this Art Deco monument to human effluence when I dove into the pages of Michael Ondaatje’s early novel, In the Skin of a Lion. The facility is named after Roland Caldwell Harris, Commissioner of Works for the City of Toronto from 1912 until his death in 1945. Harris was responsible for another of Toronto’s landmark constructions, the Prince Edward Viaduct, the bridge which spans the Don Valley. It, too, figures in the Ondaatje novel: a construction worker saves a nun from falling from the yet-to-be-completed bridge. Clearly, there is something about R. C. Harris’s massive engineering projects that Ondaatje found compelling.

The first time I saw the building, I was walking east along Balmy Beach at sunset. This is an unfamiliar neighbourhood, so I had no idea what was waiting for me as I rounded a bend in the shoreline. There, lit in orange and gold, I beheld a magnificent structure that I assumed was a cathedral or an abbey. Why had I never heard of this place before? It wasn’t until I stood on the grounds that I remembered reading about it in Ondaatje’s novel. I have to confess that the words I had read did not prepare me for the building’s scale and splendour.

I returned six months later to capture the building in the midst of a blustery snow storm, altogether different conditions, but no less striking. The irony of this place is that even after you understand its purpose, its grandeur still has a humbling effect. You feel that when you talk, you should do so in whispers. It makes you want to prostrate yourself on the ground and greet the rising sun in the east. You wonder if maybe this is holy ground.

Categories
City Life

Winter Scene: Demolition of a Building in a Snow Storm

Demolitions of building on Yorkville Ave between Yonge & Bay, Toronto

Nowadays, everything is disposable. Diapers are disposable. Phones are disposable. Cars are disposable. Buildings are disposable. Even thumbs are disposable.

Weather is no impediment to building demolition, as illustrated by the above photograph of a parking garage on Yorkville Avenue in mid-town Toronto. Developers will replace it with a pro-forma glass tower 60 or 70 stories high where people will huddle in 500 square foot units, 8 to a floor. To be honest, I’m not opposed to intensification in Toronto’s downtown. It produces a vibrant pedestrian life which is the opposite of ghettoization and promotes safer streets.

I’m more concerned about the fact that many of these building are, in effect, landfill-in-waiting. Development becomes a way to defer the transfer of raw materials from their sources (mines and factories) to dump sites. I’m further irked by the fact that many of these temporary waste transfer sites (otherwise known as condominiums) take their blueprints from the same boring-as-fuck cookie cutter design mill. Toronto has become a glass tower yawn.

To change the subject, here’s a joke. An architect points to a condominium in downtown Toronto and says to his friend: “There’s a building I designed. It has 59 floors. It used to have 60 floors, but that’s another story.”

Categories
City Life

French Word For Toilet

Cold Toilet, Parkdale, Toronto

My dad tells the story of how, when he was little, he thought his mother spoke French. Admittedly, she had a distinctive accent, but it was the sort of accent that came from Boston, not from Rimouski. My grandmother had that classic New England accent that does strange things to the letter “R”. It removes “R’s” from words where they belong (Hahvahd instead of Harvard), and adds “R’s” to words where they don’t belong (especially at the end of words that end in a vowel). To my grandmother, everything was a good idear. If you’ve ever listened to Major Charles Emerson Winchester, III from M*A*S*H (David Ogden Stiers) then you have a good idear how my grandmother spoke.

However, my grandmother developed some linguistic idiosyncrasies, maybe because she married a Canuck and moved north of the border. My grandfather was a minister and one of his early charges came with a manse that had no indoor plumbing. My dad doesn’t appear to have been traumatized by the experience. Nevertheless, he does recall one odd feature of his early toilet adventures. Whenever it looked like he might have to go to the bathroom, my grandmother would ask him if he had to go to the pouchaud and point to the outhouse.

This explains why my dad thought his mother spoke French. He had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded French, and he naturally assumed it had something to do with the outhouse. It wasn’t until later that he realized what she was saying: Do you have to go to the push hard? With her tendency to run words together coupled with her inability to say the letter “R,” she had effectively invented a new word, pouchaud. I don’t suppose it will ever find a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it has an honoured place in our private family dictionary.

Categories
Wildlife

Barred Owl on Bob Lake

Barred Owl, Bob Lake, Haliburton, ON

There is no universe in which I make a credible wildlife photographer. I don’t have the gear. I don’t have the requisite knowledge. And maybe most importantly, I don’t have the patience. Even so, every now and again the photography gods favour me, as they did when I visited friends at their cottage on Bob Lake in Ontario’s Haliburton Highlands. This, my friends, is a barred owl (Strix varia).

Looking through my archives, I see I have dozens of photos of this owl, all with blurred twigs transecting the body or obscuring an eye. The owl would perch on a branch for a while, then swoop to a branch on another tree. I followed it all the way down the long lane to the property where we were staying until, at last, it landed on a branch with an unobstructed view from my position. As you can probably tell, the owl knew I was following it. However, it was high enough and far enough from me that it could safely discount my presence as a threat. It sits at the top of its local food chain and, with the exception of photographers, humans leave it pretty much alone.

I shot both these photos using a Canon 70-200 mm lens. With the image above, I used a 2x extender, giving it an effective focal length of 400 mm. Unfortunately, a 2x extender cuts the speed in half which makes it harder to capture anything in motion. That (and my lack of patience) explains why I don’t have any photos of the bird in flight.

Barred Owl, Bob Lake, Haliburton, ON
Categories
Street Photography

Snow Selfies

Person takes a selfie on Bloor Street East, Toronto

I’ve noted in a preview post that when people encounter one another during a snow storm, they tend to be happier, friendlier. Snow storms elicit another (possibly related) response. People love to take selfies against a snowy backdrop and then share them with friends and on social media accounts. Almost invariably, they don’t post the photos to complain about how miserable the snow makes them feel; they post to share their excitement.

Snow does that to people. For me, snow draws up feelings of nostalgia. It reminds me of my childhood, especially my winter visits to my grandparents. One set lived in Montreal and the other in London and both locales got far more snow than my hometown (Toronto). We built forts, and went tobogganing, and poured rinks in the back yard. One year, my parents even took us to Quebec City Carnival and we got to watch people drunk on Caribou fall unconscious into snow banks. Ah, memories!

Years later, whenever it snows, I find myself drifting back in time to childhood moments of sheer joy and, like everyone else around me, I want to capture that feeling. Spread it around. The world can always use more joy.

Selfie at Toronto's Icefest
Selfie at Toronto’s Icefest
Categories
Country Life

A walk in the woods

Looking up at the trees, winter in Wye Marsh

We went for a walk along a trail near the Wye marsh. I had to answer nature’s call and when I was done and had turned around, everyone else was looking, though not at me. They were looking up into the trees. I don’t know what they were looking at. For all I know, they might have been suffering from a shared delusion and thought the tree people were calling them. That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

In a sense, this forest is haunted. Since the glaciers receded after the last ice age, this land has been continuously inhabited by the people we’ve come to know as the Wendat. They’ve been passing through these forests for nearly 10,000 years. If you pause and listen, especially in the stillness that a layer of snow settles upon the place, you can feel their presence.

I believe in ghosts. Maybe not the ghosts of campfire stories but ghosts all the same. Our landscapes are haunted by people and animals that have gone before. We need only look and listen.

Categories
Country Life Still Life

Minimal Winter Photos

One of the things I love about photographing in the wintertime is that if you angle your camera downward against a rising slope, you can isolate the subject and produce an absolutely simple shot. Call it what you like—minimal, clean, uncluttered, Zen—the effect is the same: an image that calms the spirit and settles the senses.

I wonder if Marie Kondo gives photography workshops. Declutter your images. Leave in only those parts that give you joy. It’s not surprising that a contemporary “influencer” of the uncluttered space should happen to be Japanese. Traditional Japanese aesthetics lists seven principles necessary to achieve Wabi-Sabi which is a state of mind that emerges in the presence of beauty. One of those principles is Kanso which means simplicity or clarity. Kanso might also be understood as a process to the extent that it engages us in the practice of removing things from the frame until only the necessary remains.

Snow helps in this process by removing clutter in the background. In the case of the photograph above, that clutter includes dirt, grass, and shriveled wildflowers. In the case of the photograph below, that clutter includes a pond and the line of the far shore, all of which has turned to ice and been covered by a deep layer of snow.

Cattails
Categories
Street Photography

Don’t stick your hand in a snow blower while it’s running

When I was little, I was fascinated by the fact that my uncle Bill had lost his ring finger. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of stories about how he lost his finger. That side of my family is full of storytellers, gossips, and bullshitters, so I have no idea which of the stories is true. Instead, I’ve opted to believe the best (i.e. most gruesome) of the stories and truth be damned. In the spirit of bullshit, Bill is not his real name.

The story goes that my uncle Bill served in Korea as part of the US medical corp. Yes, he was in a M*A*S*H unit or something like that. One day, they had to bug out because they were under fire from the commies. My uncle Bill leapt onto the back of a moving truck and caught his wedding ring on something. So there he was, dangling by his ring finger with his feet dragging along the ground and the commies in hot pursuit. One of his fellow medicos grabbed his free arm while another pulled out a pocket knife and cut off his finger. They hauled him into the truck and escaped to safety. I reiterate that I have no idea if this story is even remotely factual. All I know for certain is that my uncle served in Korea and came home minus one finger.

Not to be outdone, his older brother Jeff lost three fingers. Incidentally, Jeff told everyone he was in the Navy; it’s even there in print in my aunt’s obituary. Despite that, I remember Bill rolling his eyes and saying it was just the Coast Guard. Jeff never saw any real action, not like Bill who also did a tour in Vietnam. Ahh, what fond childhood memories I have of my uncles engaged in military service pissing contests!

Again, the story comes to me like a game of broken telephone played by pathological liars, so I have no idea what really happened. Not even his name is real. Still, there are certain things I know to be true. For one thing, Jeff lived in New Hamphire where there is lots of snow in the wintertime. For another thing, he really did lose some fingers. The story goes that he fired up the snowblower during a storm and it jammed. Just to look at it, he couldn’t say why the snowblower had jammed. You might say it was a problem that stumped him. Without turning it off, he reached in to clear whatever was jamming it and that, as they say, was the end of his career as a concert pianist.

I can’t help but speculate here. Given that my uncle Jeff ultimately succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease, I wonder if his tussle with the snowblower wasn’t one of its early symptoms. It’s the sort of thing I think about on a cold winter’s night as I wrap all eight of my fingers and my two intact thumbs around a mug of hot chocolate.

Snow Clearing on Ryerson Campus, Toronto, ON
Snow Clearing on Ryerson Campus, Toronto, ON
Categories
Street Photography

Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon: the case of the flying man

Man Runs to Union Station, Toronto

On a wet snowy afternoon, I went to the southwest corner of the Front/Bay intersection to catch people rushing down to Union Station to catch the train. I positioned myself a couple steps down where the stairs on the corner follow the slope of the street. That way, I could shoot lower to the ground which had turned wet with a light snowfall. I was after reflections of people walking across the reflective surface. That’s when I caught a man running so fast that he had enough lift to fly across the pavement. I have the proof. I captured a photo of it. A pox on your house if you try to refute the evidence of my unaltered photograph.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting photos of Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFO’s. Speaking of UFO’s (or UAP’s as the US “Intelligence” community calls them), I note that 2021 was a banner year for unexplained sightings. On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (US) released a report on 144 sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomenon” (sic) which it has assessed. Of the 144 sightings, the intelligence community has explained only one. It remains open to the possibility that these were sightings of airborne aliens. You can read more on CNN’s web site.

In November, defense officials announced that they would be establishing a new task force to investigate these and other related phenomena (wood faeries? bridge trolls?). Although this appears to have happened under the aegis of the Biden administration, in fact, it was the Trump administration that imposed the requirement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submit a report to Congress. Is anyone surprised?

Gazing into my crystal ball, I see a period, after Trump shuffles off this mortal coil, of interminable Trump sightings (think Elvis) supplemented with seances licensed of course by Ivanka & Co., the hereditary grifters.

In the meantime, I offer this image to the new task force as its 145th UAP. A man hovers above the ground. How is this even possible? Unless … maybe this is an alien disguised as a man.

Categories
Street Photography

Hug in a Snow Storm

Greeting in a snow storm, Carlton & Church Streets, Toronto

I’ve noticed something paradoxical about snow storms. Although people like to complain when a snow storm rolls through, if they’re actually out in it, most people I observe tend to be happier and friendlier. I find that strangers are more inclined to start up spontaneous conversations with me and, as illustrated by the photograph shown here, they tend to be more expressive.

According to an article in Vice, there may be psychological research that supports my observation. However, in reading the article, I find it doesn’t say anything explicitly about snow storms. So, for example, it mentions the positive feelings generated by the white noise effect of rainfall. But despite their colour, snow storms don’t produce white noise. Unless accompanied by howling winds, snow storms produce the opposite of white noise, more a muffling effect that creates a sense of intimacy.

Maybe it’s like a mild version of a shared trauma that, for a brief time, invites strangers into a connection based on their experience. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, maybe it’s like a mild version of a local sports team victory. In my hometown, the most recent victory was the Raptors NBA Championship in 2019 when millions of people crowded into the downtown core and shared their joy. That’s what a snow storm is like. For whatever reason, people find joy in it.

Categories
City Life

Dead Animals in Winter

Dead Raccoon - foot of the Chorley Switchback on the Beltline Trail, Toronto

Winter can be challenging for local fauna, and, for some, it isn’t survivable. As a matter of evolutionary biology, most animals have met the challenge of winter by developing migratory patterns. However, wherever humans have settled, they have disrupted those patterns, either by deliberately feeding animals or by generating enough garbage to sustain scavengers. Now, Covid-19 has disrupted the disruption. Where widespread lockdowns have been imposed, animals dependent upon humans may have to adjust to a sudden scarcity of expected food.

Or maybe nothing. Changes in human behaviour are temporary and short-term. Although difficult to measure, it is unlikely that Covid-related changes in human behaviour will have any lasting effect upon animal behaviour.

As for the photograph above, who’s to say why this raccoon died? Maybe it couldn’t find its usual heap of human generated garbage, or maybe it was diseased, or it was old, or it committed raccoon seppuku.

I think it’s worth noting that, in terms of the information they convey, virtually all photographs are anecdotal. This is a feature intrinsic to the medium. At the same time, perhaps for the first time in human history, we have been forced to engage in what might be described as an epistemological reckoning. While conflicts emerging in the context of Covid-19 present as political or ideological conflicts, if we step back from the fray, we find that they are really conflicts about how we know what we claim to know. We’ve never had to do this before, not as a global collective.

If you peel away the labels, the anti-vaxxers aren’t anti-science; they’re pro-science, but theirs is a science of the Newtonian variety. Cause and effect. Discrete interactions. All behaviours, whether on a cosmological or a subatomic scale, function like billiard balls in the rec’ room. Meanwhile, the WHO, epidemiologists, and public health advocates subscribe to a post-Newtonian science of probability where interactions are evaluated in the aggregate and discrete events are meaningless.

Photography is always a discrete interaction and, at least when deployed as a means to communicate information, has nothing to say about matters in the aggregate. A photograph of a dead raccoon doesn’t tell us anything about raccoons, or winter, or death, or disease.

In point of fact, I didn’t make a photograph of a dead raccoon to convey information in any of the ways we customarily think about information. I made the photograph for its affective force. How does it make you feel? Affect is another way we know what we claim to know, but it tends to get ignored in most of our public conversations.

Dead cat in snow, Lower Don Trail, Toronto
Categories
City Life

Snowmobile Parked in Front of Louis Vuitton, Bloor Street

Snowmobile in front of Louis Vuitton, Bloor Street West, Toronto

Here’s something I’ve never seen before: a snowmobile parked in front of Toronto’s Louis Vuitton flagship store. I include this image as a companion to the snowmobile image I posted earlier in the month as part of my “Winter Scenes” series. This snowmobile sat on a flatbed trailer hitched to a pickup truck that was (obviously) not from the city but had come into town to support Truckers in their so-called Freedom Convoy protesting vaccine mandates.

Typically, when we see photos that place something (e.g. a homeless person’s tent) against the backdrop of a high-rent retail shopping district, we tend to interpret the contrast as some form of social commentary. Wealth vs. poverty. Indifference vs. need. Style vs. substance. However, given the context of this shot, I’m not sure the usual interpretations apply.

What I see here may not be a contrast at all, just two different manifestations of the same tendency. This scene reminds me of my favourite book, or what was my favourite book until the age of five: Mushmouse and Punkin’ Puss, the tale of a city mouse who visits his more practical country cousin where he learns a thing or two about how to manage an aggressive cat. While the mice are very different, they find renewed kinship where cats are concerned. While a purveyor of haute couture may seem very different from a snowmobile owner, at least in this instance we can see how their interests might be aligned.

As I see it, this image is not a commentary of the style vs. substance variety. It shows us one style against the backdrop of another style. I don’t see anything of substance here. All I see are two different expressions of entitlement, one urban, the other rural, but cousins all the same.

Categories
Street Photography

Should there be a moratorium on umbrella photos?

Umbrella in Snowstorm, Bloor/Yonge intersection, Toronto

I recently read, although I can’t remember where, an established street photographer’s rant about all the visual tropes he felt had grown tired and tiresome. He made a list of all the things he would no longer shoot and he urged fellow street photographers to join him in his little boycott. One of the items on his list was photographs of people carrying umbrellas. In general, I agree that, as with good writing, so with good photography: avoid clichés. That said, I offer a couple exceptions.

First, aspiring photographers learn by shooting clichés. If you turn your rule against photographing clichés into an absolute prohibition, then nobody plays, nobody has any fun, and nobody discovers anything new. So hop to it. Make hay while the sun shines. Take no prisoners. Be your best self. Be a photography thought leader.

Second, there is no such thing as a photograph of an umbrella. I’m not flogging Magritte’s dead pipe (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) which I take to mean that a representation of a thing should not be equated with the thing itself. I’m getting at something more straightforward. The fact is: most photographs of umbrellas are not photographs of umbrellas; they’re photographs in which umbrellas happen to appear. They’re photographs of scenes in which the umbrella may have an important place, but most likely the umbrella is only one of a constellation of features that coalesce to produce the photograph.

In the case of the photograph featured here: is this a photograph of a red umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman holding a red umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman crossing a slushy road holding an umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman crossing a slushy road holding an umbrella while a red car approaches from the opposite direction? And so on.