What happened was, I went to Saskatchewan to keep my mother company, and got a little obsessed about photo composition and complexity. Which in these troubled times is a relief.
This got started just after take-off from Vancouver. As the plane climbed over the city I thought “That’s a nice angle” and pointed the Pixel through the plexiglass.
You might want to enlarge this one.
A couple of days into my Prairie visit I got around to processing the photos and thought that Vancouver aerial had come out well. No credit to the photographer here, got lucky on the opportunity, but holy crap modern mobile-device camera tech is getting good these days. I’ll take a little credit for the Lightrooming; this has had heavy dehazing and other prettifications applied.
A couple of days later I woke up and the thermometer said -36°C (in Fahrenheit that’s “too freaking cold”). The air was still and the hazy sunlight was weird. “There has to be a good photo in this somewhere, maybe to contrast that Vancouver shot” I thought. So I tucked the Fujifilm inside my parka (it claims to be only rated to -10°) and went for a walk. Mom politely declined my invitation to come along without, to her credit, getting that “Is he crazy?” expression on her face.
Her neighborhood isn’t that photogenic but there’s a Pitch-n-putt golf course a block away so I trudged through that. The snow made freaky squeaking sounds underfoot. At that temperature, it feels like you have to push the air aside with each step. Also, you realize that your lungs did not evolve to process that particular atmospheric condition.
Twenty minutes in I had seen nothing that made me want to pull out the camera, and was thinking it was about time to head home. So I stopped in a place where there was a bit of shape and shadow, and decided that if I had to force a photo opportunity to occur by pure force of will, so be it.
It ain’t a great city framed by coastal mountains. But it ain’t nothing either. I had to take my gloves off to shoot, and after just a couple of minutes of twisting around looking for angles, my fingers were screaming at me.
The two pictures are at the opposite end of the density-vs-minimalism spectrum but they share, um, snow, so that’s something.
Anyhow, here’s the real reason I was there.
Jean Bray, who’ll be turning 95 this year.
I find photography to be a very useful distraction from what’s happening to the world.
