Almost Like Art | Yellow Flower Purple Ground

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Gabriel

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Occasionally I manage to take a photo with some artistic value… surely if the concept of “art” can be stretched to include paint thrown onto a canvass by an elephant, it can apply to some of my photography.

Technical Stuff: Mostly I looked down… at some point I must have moved my feet out of the way. I honestly do not remember the ground being that purple. I know it wasn’t a topsoil kind of black, but this off-colour thing is more accident than anything else. Which is totally cool, I think most of those elephant artists accomplish their work the same way and I’d definitely hang their stuff on my wall.

I like the little dash of red on the left hand side and the patterns in the purple soil. I think it’s actually that little purple half-smile swirl around the flower that gives the photo a little more energy than it otherwise would have had… look at me going on like I was an artistic elephant. I did do a pretty good job at centring the big fluffy yellow thing against the huge dark background. That’s a step up.

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Lilly The Robot Has A Huge Thumb

Posted on September 3, 2008 by Gabriel

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Mostly this picture is cool because her thumb is screwing up my light meter. She was following the beeping sound my camera makes when I have it set on multiple exposures. Either children are naturally attracted to electronic beeps or Lilly’s a robot looking for a friend. Sorry… that’s all I’ve got, it’s really hot and I’m messed up on Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi. I think it’s the sodium benzoate that makes my palms numb.

Technical Stuff: Lilly is actually the first baby I’ve ever had as a subject. I took semi-professional photos of Lilly and her parents a few months before I took this shot, one of which they used as a Christmas card… which they never sent me. Did you hear me sob right there? I think her name is spelled with two L’s… if they had sent me a card I’d have it in writing so I’d know for sure.

The worst type of photo is the shot of a kid not doing anything. Get them doing stuff, then take the photo and please, please, immediately store it away in a giant box with all the other photos that look exactly like it and never, ever, take that box out to show your friends or family.

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Posted in Entertainment, Favourites, Friends, From My Wall, Humor, Humour, Photography, Vankleek Hill Photos | 1 Comment

That Morning The Aliens Came

Posted on August 31, 2008 by Gabriel

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If you’ve ever seen the excellent documentary called Close Encounters Of The Third Kind you’ll know most of the time a spacecraft flies off, or drops down, the clouds roll and expand around it, kind of like how this cloud looks. Independence Day with Will Smith (based on a true story) had the same effect but with a little more oomphf.

Technical Stuff: I think I had the camera closed one stop, but this was like a year ago and there was a lot of crazy stuff going on… I had just switched conditioners, there was the thing with the monkey and I was still leaning pretty heavily on the Diet Pepsi. I was really in no shape to be logging my settings. I do know I used my little Kodak EasyShare C533, it was really early and this is from my balcony.

Pretty close to the end of “Close Encounters”, when the Mother Ship finally appears, there are two things you should watch for: 1. R2-D2 hanging off the spacecraft, and; 2. the massive space-city doesn’t descend from the clouds, it rises from behind the mountain… like it was hiding back there with Richard Dreyfus and Melinda Dillon the whole time.

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Posted in Entertainment, Favourites, From My Wall, Humor, Humour, Photography, Vankleek Hill Photos | 2 Comments

Murder Suicide

Posted on August 28, 2008 by Gabriel

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Sure, you can believe flowers are all joy and sunshine and fizzy pop, but that’s what Big Floral wants you to think. That’s what the Floral Industrial Complex has brainwashed us to believe. But here’s the photo that proves flowers are not the friendly harmless gift FTD wants you to think they are.

Technical Stuff: Unless you’re doing something crazy-cool with the lighting, flowers are not really a very interesting subject. The idea is to find something out of place, like an odd colour or two dead flowers connected like one’s sucking the life out of the other. At least they’re fairly easy to find and set up, all you need to do is walk onto some old lady’s property and hope she doesn’t have a gun. Most of them don’t.

I took this photo last year… this was pretty much when I started carrying my pocket digital around with me everywhere I went. I can’t really think of anything else to say… it’s two flowers in a cool state of disintegration and the photo pretty much captures the relationship I have with my mother. Other than that, no big deal.

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Posted in Entertainment, Favourites, Nature, Photography, Vankleek Hill Photos | 4 Comments

Something Really Long And Hard This Way Came

Posted on August 20, 2008 by Gabriel

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It’s a little weird, but we do get a lot of large, grey, cylindrical objects passing through our town. There’s a company in Quebec which makes those giant windmills and its distribution route to the United States and Western Canada goes straight past my windows. It’s almost as exciting as it sounds, just not after the fiftieth time. The load on this truck, however, has nothing to do with alternative energy… it’s also going in the wrong direction.

Technical Stuff: Mostly I walked around aiming my camera at a giant steel tube. I think I had the camera’s exposure settings open one stop to let more light in…

This is what a giant steel tube looks like when you move it to a new, more receptive area where the tube can be accepted for what it is…


…a giant grey steel tube. Watch the dude on the back turn the truck…

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Posted in Photography, Vankleek Hill Photos | 5 Comments

Almost Like Art | The Farm Road

Posted on August 9, 2008 by Gabriel

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Occasionally I manage to take a photo with some artistic value… if we were to stretch the definition of “artistic value” to include “things that are in focus”. I really like this shot. There’s a kind of menace to the closeness of the trees, and the trees to the road. And the thick greens fading from black to white is really cool too.

Technical Stuff: I can remember using a camera… it must have had a lens. Come on, this was six years ago.

I planted most of these trees with my uncle and my grandfather. This is the road to his farm. There was some government program that basically paid farmers to turn their pastures into forests. So we planted a little more than 80,000 trees over a couple of years. Of course we planted them way too close together and now the fields of pine trees are a major fire hazard… but that’s how we figure we can get the fields back and maybe get more cash to plant more trees. It’s the cycle of life.

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Posted in Entertainment, Family, Favourites, From My Wall, Humor, Humour, Photography, Pre 2004 | 2 Comments