Water – horizontal
Water – vertical
Yes, I am waaaaay behind on my daily photo challenge!! A couple of words of analysis on this challenge: Vertical orientation = more about the fish. Horizontal orientation = more about the water. And that’s all I shall say about that… I’m rushing out the door (again! – this time to spend the afternoon sailing with friends…). If I don’t post this now I shall never move on to Day 4!!
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged #photo101, fish, fountain, iphoneography, photography101, Victoria, watercolor
I live on a rather small, quiet street – utterly unremarkable and (at least today) not one I felt inspired to photograph. I was casting my mind about for photos depicting street scenes and the one that came to mind was this one taken during our recent sailing adventures in the Caribbean.
Tourists are a funny breed…
Maho Beach on Saint Martin (and the road that runs along its length) are certainly more entertaining than our semi-rural neighbourhood here on Vancouver Island! People from around the world make a pilgrimage to this plane-spotting haven to watch jets drop in low over the beach and onto the extremely short runway at Princess Juliana International Airport.
A whole industry has sprung up to provide sun-baked, sand-blasted tourists with frosty beverages just outside the jet blast zone… If I had known then what I know now, I would have parked my backside under an umbrella and shot my footage from a safe distance!
I thought it was pretty cool to stand on the beach and watch the planes land, but the fun (not!!) really began when we decided to see what it was like to stand behind a jet plane when it was taking off.
What could be more fun than elbowing other tourists out of the way to get your best shot of an incoming plane? How about… standing in the dreaded jet blast zone as one takes off!
Yeah. I know. Who would be so stupid as to stand in a zone plastered with warning signs like this:
Danger! Danger! Danger!
In my defense, all I can say is that I figured if it was really, really dangerous, surely they would have closed the road. And the beach. And the pilot wouldn’t have waved at us in such a cheerful manner before, yes, he pointed his 707 down the runway and gunned his engines.
Positioned as we were directly behind the plane and across the road on the beach so we would have an awesome view and great camera angles, the roar of wind and that horrible ear-splitting wail of jet engines were the first things we noticed. Followed immediately by the stench of jet fumes and a wave of heat that carried with it a gazillion particles of sand and other debris travelling at velocities fast enough to embed themselves in our skin so deeply we were still picking stray grains of grit out days later!
Bodies flew past us and in the panic of people fleeing and being blown off their feet we lost track of my nephew who, it turns out, was knocked over, rolled down the steep sand bank and into the ocean. The worst part of that was he had his phone in his pocket and said phone did not survive the dunking.
The rest of us managed to stop our retreat before being plunged into the sea, but we all felt somewhat foolish and slunk away along with the other sand-encrusted tourists who had met similar fates.
Tourist Tip of the Day:
Talcum powder is a pretty good antidote when it comes to removing sand, say when you want to put your shoes back on after a stroll on a beach. It does little, however, to help when sand particles have lodged in your scalp beneath your long hair. Swimming off the back of the boat does not help. Neither does showering at the nearest marina. Nor does picking at your head with tweezers. Don’t even waste your time with a hairbrush or head shaking. Scraping bits of sand out with fingernails is a task worthy of Sisyphus. Best to just stay far, far away from the back end of departing airliners.
Posted in Blog, Photography, Sailing, Travel
Tagged #photo101, jet, maho beach, phonography, princess juliana airport, saint martin, street scene, tourists
Way back when I was a regular blogger I took up various ‘one a day’ challenges and found the discipline of coming up with a daily post both fun and useful. This month I am busy with a ton of writing assignments, so I thought it might be cool to participate in the WordPress Photography 101 course as, in theory, it might be faster to let those photos speak a thousand words on my behalf. The challenge today is to capture the idea of “Home” in an image.
Books – the cheapest travel tickets around…
Of course, the minute I started thinking about this theme I realized the answer wasn’t going to be quite as simple as photographing my front door. I currently call Vancouver Island my home, but for many, many years as I was growing up my family was constantly on the move. At some point when I was in my early 20s Dad and I sat down to try to count up all the addresses where I had lived and we came up with 53. Our homes ranged from a tiny cabin in Banff where a grizzly sow and her cubs went through our garbage every morning to an apartment above a Chinese restaurant in Ontario (by then I had left home and was working as a dog catcher). From England to Australia, Fort McMurray to Vancouver, Fort Lauderdale to Guelph my homes ranged from simple to fancy, in great neighbourhoods and not so great neighbourhoods, on islands, in cities, or in the countryside.
Though the view outside our front door changed on a regular basis (as an artist and a photographer, Dad and Mom were pretty free to live wherever they fancied), some things remained constant. One was our family (we were a remarkably stable lot, considering our wandering ways) and another was our dedication to schlepping boxes of books all over the world.
Whenever we moved into a new place I would feel somewhat ungrounded until I started to unpack my books. I still have one of the very first books I was ever given, the Daily Mail’s Pictorial Animal Book.
This one still has pride of place on the shelf, though it shares real estate with several thousand other titles…
![IMG_4375[1]](https://darkcreekfarm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/img_43751.jpg)
The idea of home and what it is and what it isn’t has long fascinated me and sooner or later, themes like this eventually find their way into my writing. Not long ago my daughter and I wrote a book called Take Shelter about the many different kinds of dwellings people live in all over the world. In the introduction I talk about my books and the way that unpacking them always made me feel at home.
Ironically, some of my favourite books are those with travel themes because even though a good chunk of my life was somewhat unsettled, I have always loved to be on the move. A well-packed suitcase is a kind of home away from home, the essentials of life neatly organized in a way my life in my actual home rarely is.
These days my suitcase is usually a little lighter than in the past. I no longer have to pack half a dozen books just to be sure I have something on hand to suit my reading mood – the miracle of the modern e-reader means I can travel with a veritable library. But I always pack a paperback of some sort anyway – batteries die, devices get dropped overboard, electronic devices get stolen. Books, in all their clunky, heavy, awkward, prone-to-sogginess-when-read-in-the-bathiness are solid between the fingers. Maybe that’s why I’m so fond of them.
If this post seems a little, um… illogical – that’s perhaps because these two sides of my life and personality are fundamentally incompatible. On the one hand I love, love, love my books – putting them on shelves, reorganizing them, adding to the collection, culling the collection – stacking, dipping, flipping, browsing, reading, delving, devouring those books which are also some of my longtime companions… On the other hand, there are few things I like more than turning my back on my bookshelves, and checking that my passport, my plane ticket, and my comfortable shoes are packed in my bag. And that paperback, of course. Can’t leave home without that…
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged #photo101, books, home, homestead, photography 101, travel
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