Jackrabbits

This white-tailed jackrabbit lives in Princes Park, and he has a buddy that lives around the car park just down the street from us. He was chewing on a leaf for dinner when I disturbed him.

Full of Myself

The illustration at left shows what can happen if I am left alone over a long weekend without supervision. What I've done is taken a photograph and using the color range tool in Photoshop turned it into a graphic with black, white, and 50% grey. Then I stamped my name all over the place on it using a custom paint brush with the graphic being used as a mask. Finally I tinted it a bit.

Click on picture to enlarge it to see the detail. This is the original photo that I started with. There are directions here if you would like to try it yourself.

And that is how I became full of myself.

Things that strike me about the Alberta Landscape...

On a clear day, the Rocky Mountains are visible from many places on the Alberta prarie. But if you aren't looking West, it is wide open with grain as far as you can see in many places. There has to be a place to put that grain, and if you can see something on the horizon, there is a fair chance it is a grain elevator.

The picture at left is from the town of Nanton - still a thriving community. All along the old railroads they built grain elevators. And small towns, some of which are no more. And in between there are interesting old barns and farm houses, many neglected. I've posted some new pictures in the slide show or you can see them by clicking here.

Hey wait a minute! How did the starship Enterprise get in there? That is because the town of Vulcan has tried to build a little tourism off of it's name. The visitor's center has a sign with the following message out front:

WELCOME TO VULCAN
Information Trek Center

Live Long and Prosper

Internet Service Available Inside

One of the things I always try to do when I am in a new place is to give my blog a hit so it will show up on my map. And there I was in Vulcan and I didn't even go in the visitor's center and give my blog a hit. Guess I'll have to go back....

World Skills Calgary 2009

The other day I was out for a walk at lunch and stopped to listen to the fellow on the left who was talking to a small group of people about sculpture. Today I went back and photographed him.

It turns out he and two other artists, including the one posing on the right, had been commissioned by the city of Calgary to sculpt a work for the World Skills contest. Let me step back for a minute and explain that. The World Skills is a demonstration / contest of skilled trades that started in Madrid, Spain in 1950. Today it is a huge event held in different countries every two years and the skills include everything from florist to carpentry. The participants range in age from 17 to 22.

So, back to these two guys and their sculpure. They had a nice demonstration of how they sculpt, but the statute itself is the clever part. The statue is carving herself out of the stone. The part above the waist is finished with a mallet in one hand and a chisel in the other working on the lower half. The lower half is intentionally left rough and shows the stages of how sculpture is done - it is a statue demonstrating how statues are made.

They told me they make a full time living doing commissions, often for cities, but things had slowed a bit with the downturn. In Canada, a condition of building in many places is that public art be added - slow building, reduced commissions.

I was enthused enough by this that I decided to go out to the Stampede grounds and see the rest of what was going on. Turns out it was kind of like a cross between a huge trade show and career day for students. It was pretty neat, but I've seen plumbers brazing before (even tried it myself) as well as painting automobiles. It was my first time to see sculpture in progress though. It took about 3 weeks they said to complete the work.

BBQ on the Bow

There seems to be something going on most weekends down at the Bow River in Calgary. This week it is a barbeque competition so if you are a vegetarian you might want to skip this posting. I am actually quite sensitive in these matters myself as demonstrated in previous postings.

They were setting up for the competition, actually called BBQ on the Bow, when I went by this morning and stopped to talk to this fellow. His shirt is what caught my eye. Anyway, he said they had four types of competition: pork butt, pork ribs, beef brisket, and chicken (I think they also had a category for sauce). Cooking heat has to be supplied by wood or charcoal and the winner gets crowned champion of Alberta.

After having been here a few weeks now I am beginning to think Calgary should be sister city to Houston. After all they like to rodeo, like to eat barbeque, and everybody here is in the oil bidness. It is more like a twin city than a sister city....

View from the Terrace Pt. 5

I will get these views from the terrace out of my system eventually. This happens to be towards the city of course and is in the same direction as this night shot I previously posted.

What is different? The time of day of course, this being late evening along with different framing. Also, I took it with a Kodak Signet 35mm camera approximately the same age as myself and had the image scanned so I could post it here. The nice saturated colors are courtesy of modern Kodak 200 film with Fujicolor C-41 processing.

Kodak Signet 35

This is my "new" camera, a Kodak Signet 35 from the early 1950's. It is a mechanical work of art that was made in the USA by Kodak - no batteries needed or accomodated. Back then, the really good 35mm cameras were made in Germany and most people weren't yet aware of Japanese quality, but this was top of the line for the USA.

It sports a single coated f/3.5 44mm Ektar lens that stops down to f/22. The shutter has to be cocked manually before each shot and has speeds of B, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, and 1/300. The rangefinder apparatus still works fine for focusing down to 2 feet or all the way out to infinity. It winds with a knob, has a film frame counter, and features double exposure prevention.

Of course there isn't a meter, but there is a neat multi-slide scale on the back that can be adjusted for the film (Super-XX, Plus-X, Pan-X, or Kodachrome) and light conditions. By the way, none of those films are made anymore but by knowing the film speed it still works and is easy to use but I cheated and used my Nikon D3 from time to time as a very expensive light meter. It has a case with a leather strap that I need to fix. The lens is plenty sharp for snapshots and the internet. The ergonomics aren't great but it is fun to use. I've posted a photograph I made with the camera here.

The best part, I only paid $17.50 for it. Of course that is quite a bit more than I paid for my Agfa Optima 1a. But what is really expensive about these cameras is the film. It costs at least $10 to process these days, not to mention the film cost itself. I'm spending more on film and processing than I am on the cameras....

Lake Louise

Lake Louise is in the Canadian Rockies and a beautiful place. It is a natural lake formed by the glaciers above it and there is a beautiful hotel located just behind where I took this picture. We'll be back for sure....

V=16,061

Seagulls

I guess I had never thought about seagulls so far from the sea. But there are a lot of them here on the Bow River in Alberta.

There is a definite family resemblence between this fellow and the Aussie gull I put on my Christmas card a while back.

Black Grey Squirrel

According to my extensive research on Wikipedia, black squirrels are a melanistic subgroup of the eastern grey squirrel. I have seen a few of them before but never as many as I've seen in Calgary. That is all I've seen here.

Wikipedia says that before European colonization they may have outnumbered the grey variety. They are still locally common, especially in the North where the coat may be beneficial in colder climates by absorbing heat.

Sorry for the crummy picture. they won't let me near them and they are quick. The urban squirrels in Texas are a lot less wary.

World's Biggest Dropped Rock

The name of this rock is Okotoks, derived from the Blackfoot name for rock okatok.

It is sitting here on the edge of the Alberta prarie after origininating in a landslide that fell on a glacier somewhere between 10,000 to 18,000 years ago (I am not sure exactly when :-). The glacier flowed out of the Canadian Rockies at Jasper, turned South, flowed past Calgary, and when it got warm again dropped the rock here.

Rocks deposited this way are called glacial erratics. This one happens to be the biggest one in the world at 16,500 tonnes with dimensions of 41 x 18 x 9 meters.

View from the Terrace Pt. 4

Here is another sunset view from the terrace.

Calgary's Finest

The Calgary Police were in the air protecting the city in the Eau Claire area down by the river. There is a helicopter pad where they landed for a moment and the photo shows them taking off.

The Calgary Fire Department patrol the Bow River in a jet boat making sure nobody gets in too much trouble there. We don't have a Navy, although we do have the Naval Museum of Alberta (question: why is there a Naval Museum in Alberta?).

Rafting on the Bow River

Today was a day for rafting on the Bow River. There are almost as many people floating the river here as on the Elk. We also had the Bow Flow which was a mini festival along the North bank in this photo and a Bike Fest just below the apartment.

Cricket

and today was a day for playing cricket in Calgary.

A Midsummer's Night Dream

The Shakespearean plays on Prince's Island are free as I've said before and they are also "dog friendly." This means you can bring your dog with you to sit and watch the play. Or your kid.

Here the actor's are "going to sleep" in A Midsummer's Night Dream. Besides staging it in a kind of modern manner, they sometimes stick a bit of modern music in the plays as well. Just before they went to sleep, one of the characters lip synchs a bit of Madonna from Like a Prayer:

Like a child you whisper softly to me
You're in control just like a child
Now I'm dancing It's like a dream, no end and no beginning
You're here with me, it's like a dream
Let the choir sing

Pretty clever if you know the story...

Empty Stage

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

William Shakespeare
As You Like It Act 2, scene 7, 139-143

The Bow River runs through Calgary

Today was a beautiful day in Calgary.

Joe's Mobile Bicycle Garage

Joe is a bicycle mechanic who has a mobile garage. Every day he peddles in from Kensington and pops up his awning in the park along the Bow River in the Eau Claire district of Calgary where we live. It looks like it would be a pleasant place to work in the summer...

Shakespeare in the Park

There has been a free Shakespearean play every evening this week in the park across from the apartment and this is the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.

View from the Terrace Pt. 3

Yet another view from the terrace. Actually we have two terraces and this is the one by the bedroom and things are visable a bit further around to the west there. Click on the photograph to enlarge it to see the tower with a ramp on the horizon about a 1/3 the way from the left border. That is the 90 m ski jump tower at the Olympic Park used in the 1988 Winter Olympics. The park is also the location where the Jamacian bobsled team competed and the film "Cool Runnings" is based on their story.

View from the Terrace Pt. 2

I watched the sun go down again today from the terrace here in Calgary. This view shows the Bow River with the Canadian Rockies visible on the horizon on the left side of the frame. I'm having trouble capturing the colors and not blowing out street lights and stuff but will keep trying...

View from the Terrace Pt. 1

A view towards the city of Calgary from the terrace just after sunset.

Calgary Street Performers 2

I like this photograph. I almost put it in my Photograph a Week Blog because I thought it was probably the best picture I got this week.

The subject is an accordian player in Eau Claire who was playing in the mall. I like the way he sounds and I think the photograph captures how expressive he is when he plays. I've seen him around a bit - good street musician - and I've seen a bunch of them. (Yes Megan, we gave him a donation).

I shot it with my new Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 (gift to myself which I richly deserved) wide open to blur the background. It didn't blur quite as much as I wanted so I cheated and blurred it some more in Photoshop.

Land of the Dinosaurs

This might look a bit cheesy but that is only because it is. The town of Drumheller, population 7,000+, north and east of Calgary is now mostly a tourist destination with a couple of claims to fame: dinosaurs, the "badlands", and a history of mining.

The dinosaur connection is from extensive fossil remains found in the area. It was once a shallow sea with semi-tropical climate. Not today. Anyway, there is is a museum and the town is full of fake dinosaurs, including this one, the "largest dinosaur in the world". We didn't make it to the museum, have to do that later.

To give you a taste of the area I've also posted a slideshow. Just click on it. You can see all my slideshows in the list at bottom left.

Brothers

from a statue depicting brothers
by the sculptor galts
in calgary

it reminds me of picasso
i didn't like the background behind it
so i superimposed it on a photo of some coarse bricks

Calgary Street Performers

So far I haven't been too impressed with the street performers in Calgary but this guy (Angel of Prosperity) was worth a picture. He is supposedly collecting money for the arts rather than his own pocket. There was one guy with a violin that I was ready to offer money for him to stop. Prince Island has some arranged concerts and theatre that promise to be good. For example, they had Shakespeare in the park this last weekend and that was free.

All I need now is Black Socks

This is how I've been wasting time this week.

I bid on this camera on Ebay and I won it! For only $6.01 this beauty from the early '60s is mine. It came with a real leather case and uses real 35mm film. It can be reloaded over and over again and doesn't need any batteries!

The Agfa Optima Ia is the ultimate in retro cool. People knew you were somebody when they saw you with a camera like this in 1962 instead of a Kodak Brownie. The height in family vacation style was a German camera, bermuda shorts, white T-shirt, and black socks at the beach. Ah... the good life.

A shot from a roll I shot this week is featured on my One Photo a Week blog.

Agfa Optima 1a

For those who want a closer look at the camera itself, here you go....