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

The Apocalypse Car

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Gabriel

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People get their artistic rocks off in all kinds of ways… landscapes, abstracts, LOL Katz. My favourite piece of art is a 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am with The Book of Revelations scrawled into its black paint by an artist using a nail.

Technical Stuff: Taking a camera into a gallery is usually against the rules. Funny enough most artists don’t want their work photographed or reproduced. But in large galleries there are usually some exhibits which are cool to shoot. For the others I suggest waiting until the security guard leaves the room. I used a real camera and real film (400ASA) for this shot.

This is an installation at the National Gallery of Canada. The artist had eight paintings surrounding the car, each one was a vision of the Apocalypse. But all I saw was Burt Reynolds driving 300 horses as the vanguard of The End Of Days. I don’t even know the artist’s name, and I’m pretty sure “The Apocalypse Car” is not even the name of this work.

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Posted in Entertainment, From My Wall, Photography, Pre 2004 | 11 Comments

Riding Out The Storm

Posted on July 29, 2008 by Gabriel

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I have always, always wanted a camper like this one. I’ve been hooked on the idea of living in a camper ever since I first saw Dr. Gonzo step out of his own camper and walk across the parking lot to the San Francisco hospital where he worked as a surgeon while overcoming the demons from his time working in a MASH unit in Vietnam using nothing but his sure hands and dark sense of humour… and totally nailing every nurse in the joint.

Technical Stuff: If it wasn’t for the blood work to monitor my medications I wouldn’t be walking through this parking lot to get to the clinic every other week… so to get a shot like this it’s probably important to have a disease that requires medications which need to be monitored. Actually, I guess pretty much any reason for regular blood testing would work. I woke up that morning and totally planned on having the clouds hang there like that.

Ah, the life of a camper driver… travelling from city to city stopping only to break hearts and fight crime, stealing gas from the rich with a hose and a bucket and leaving behind notes scrawled on their cars with a sharp piece of metal warning them of some vague “consequences” if they approach the authorities. I think I’d sign them “Trapper John” just to complete the circle. Man… I can almost smell the fresh air from my open window.

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Posted in Entertainment, Humor, Humour, Photography, Vankleek Hill Photos | 3 Comments