AUGUST 1 TO 15: GETTING READY


#32 – FAiRY BRIDGE – 1 AUGUST 2017

For my birthday, I asked Ruth for a book by renowned Canadian photographer Freemen Patterson. I got the book, I unwrapped it, I opened it. Shock. Inside was a receipt for a week-long residential photography workshop with … the said Mr. Patterson and co-host André Gallant. Ruth explained: “You would never have signed up yourself. You would have come up with 1,000 excuses, about not being ready, never being good enough, not affording it, learning best on your own. So I did it for you.” Once again: Ruth is the greatest. She is my magic fairy bridge to this adventure (and she came along too).  T minus 22 days; practice time.


#33 – WAKE UP SLOWLY  – 2 AUGUST 2017

Three weeks to keep taking pictures and hopefully get “good enough”, whatever that means. In fairness to the workshop leaders, the very first thing they said is that there is no “good enough” requirement other than a knowing how to operate your camera. But try convincing self of this as you prepare to meet a roomful of strangers and their glittering gear for the first time. Here I am at a friend’s cottage in the early morning light on the lake. Ruth is sleeping in. I am practicing.  Should the foreground be brighter?  Is that practicing or just second guessing? Should I be unpracticing second guessing?


#34 – WATERCOLOUR – 3 AUGUST 2017

Editing images with a program like lightroom is remarkably parallel to mixing music with a digital audio workstation. In both cases you start with something (light, sound) and use a variety of tools to texture and shape it. Contrast is to images as compression is to music. EQ is to music as colour balance is to images. In both effects sliders can be finessed for subtle alterations that still look or sound natural, or shoved to the corner for an extreme effect. With both, you have the power to end up with something really bad if you lose the thread.


#35 – MOTIONLESS – 4 AUGUST 2017

For fun I turned this upside down (unlike the original Instagram post which is right side up) and made the bottom a little darker than the top. This makes the two halves androgynous. Which is the reflection? Are they both illusions? Once you have made an image of something, all is a reflection, really, of choices made and of techno-artistic interventions and of self. All is an illusion. On the left hand side of this image, two states of reflection bleed into one another.  The longer I look at this, the more disconcerting the whole thing becomes.


#36 – QUICK SKETCH – 5 AUGUST 2017

The previous (motionless) image was the second last time I used my 40 year old tripod to steady the camera. I finally had to admit to myself that its time was done, as it would not stop randomly rocking regardless how hard I screwed it down.  Today’s pan was its very last engagement – camera was still on the tripod, but I was letting it have its (s)way with me.  A lovely new tripod was bought shortly thereafter.  Carbon fibre, ooh la la. Sadly, that leaves only seven things in my kit that are 40+ years old: five lenses, my ratty old camera bag, and me. Then again, carbon fibre was invented way back in 1958, only a year after I was born.


#37 – PEEKABOO – 6 AUGUST 2017

The card on the dash (you can see it in the near corner) says: “This is Gadabout. She is a 1990 Subaru Sambar Right Hand Drive Kei class micro van.  She was made in the factory in Japan to look like a VW Bus.  VW didn’t like Subaru copying them and sued.  Despite the ruling, Subaru continued to make these microvans for 18 months after the order to cease and desist.  Gadabout is one of those little rebels.”


#38 – BOTTOM OF THE STREET – 7 AUGUST 2017

This is  the bottom of my street. Ruth and I are blessed to live here. It’s a twenty minute bike ride from Yonge Street, the centre of town that divides Toronto into East and West (and was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest street until it was discovered that we had stretched the truth a bit in making the claim). Yet it is a universe away. There will be, during the course of the year, more images made here than anywhere else. The best thing about local imagemaking is recreating and re-experiencing one’s own back yard, one’s own daily life, in ever new ways.


#39 – GO ON – 8 AUGUST 2017

Again at the bottom of my street. What more can I say?


#40 – FIREFLIES – 9 AUGUST 2017

Our porch in the glow of a summer evening. The lanterns are an IKEA hack — explained here.  This image was remarkably simple to make. I just eased the camera off the (new!) tripod for the last few seconds of the calculated exposure and swung it around in a circle. No double exposing or comping in the computer required. I think it captures the mood of sitting out here on a summer evening. You can see the road towards the bottom left of centre … the lake is just down it. We are renters: hope this arrangement lasts and lasts!


#41 – Shiny Baubles – 10 August 2017

And then … there’s downtown. Lots of bejeweled glass behind which are hiding lawyers, bankers, and a myriad of businesses that need and can afford the services of lawyers and bankers. Decades ago, in a fork in the road moment, I articled at one of those law firms. What would my present be had I stayed down there? How would I have ended up? With whom? Would I be a fundamentally different person? Would I be working on this website? Or is it because I am who I am that I did not go that route? I have no reliable answers.


#42 – Sentinels – 11 August 2017

Down at the end of my road again. I see this stretch of beach every day, and it is always new.  Ollie the dog has peed there thousands of times (Math on this: Maybe 8 pees a day for 10 years = 8 x 10 x 365 = 29,200). Always in a new spot not exactly like the one before. Now that I am bringing the camera down, we are paying even more attention to every new day and every moment in it. If you gave me just this place to make images, nowhere else, I believe I would never run out of new and beautiful things to make.


#43 – Golden Rings – 12 August 2017

I use microsoft word and excel at work. The feature sets for these are endless. After many years, there are countless functionalities I don’t even know about. If I had tried to learn them all methodically and in advance, I would have bogged down. The better strategy for me was always to conceptualize what I want to accomplish on a given project, and then research how to do that thing. Guaranteed, some generous person has produced a youtube to show me how. So too with Lightroom or Photoshop or other packages. To try to learn them methodically and in advance is overwhelming. There are too many variables. But if I look at this image and think “I want the rings to be golden rings that pop”, then I have defined a focused, goal oriented learning mission.


#44 –  Pink – 13 August 2017

Now we are in my work neighbourhood – which for me is the Toronto Star building (a formerly gigantic but now ever shrinking Toronto newspaper) at the bottom of the aforementioned Yonge Street.  This neighbourhood has turned into a condominium tower jungle. But there is one port business held over from the old days: The Redpath sugar refinery.  Ships, like the one in this picture, deliver cane sugar from the Caribbean and Brazil, and are unloaded dockside.  There is a sweetness in the air.  Umbrellas by Claude Cormier.


#45 – 2 4 6 8 – 14 August 2017

Do you know what this is?  Or is it just some colours and textures, symbols and rust? How important is it that you know? Is it distracting not to, or does it help you engage with the image in some other and new way? Perhaps the way it makes you feel? Once at a party a friend of mine asked me how I felt about something that happened at work. By way of answer, I gave a detailed summary of the events as they had unfolded, and what others said, and what I said in reply.  My friend waited patiently for me to finish, and then asked “yes, but how did you feel?” I had missed the boat (hint there) completely, turns out. Feelings.


#46 – Day Off – 15 August 2017

Someone is clearly having a day off. I have not felt the need for one yet, after a month and a half of daily image making, woven to fit into the rest of daily life. This is not by way of boasting of a feat of iron discipline in the face of adversity. The doldrums stage of this project and how to push through them will come in waves through the year. For now it is still pure fun and adrenaline and discovery. New can be hard but, being new, it is at the same time also easy. One does not yet know where the limits lurk. But in another sense this day is a day off for me: the Patterson workshop is in St. Martins New Brunswick.  We are on the road starting today, doing a few days of maritime Canada touring before we arrive at school.


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