The Dam and the Barn

When I went out to look for a sunset, I didn't find a good spot or composition. I took a bunch but trashed them all once I saw them on the computer. I took this one in passing from the same spot with kind of a shrug of the shoulders, and it turned out that I liked it.

On the way back home, I was moved to pull into the parking lot of The Barn on the edge of our town. I have often thought that I needed to photograph it at night, but I never remember. This was serendipity and kind of saved my efforts that evening. (The Barn is used for events such as wedding receptions, but I am not sure how much it is used. During our 13 years here, various efforts have not resulted in total entrepreneurial success.)

The second shot above is my preferred one, probably because the sky is a little bluer and brighter. In general, I like blue skies with touches of sunset (or sunrise) orange. While I do tend to saturate a little in post, I don't alter the photos a drastically; they are more or less how I perceived them or how I think I perceived them.

About Town

I am trying to contribute to a community project, so I've been taking a few photos around town. While I have some similar ones somewhere on my hard drive, I though I would begin anew.

The view from our main street bridge (called Bridge Street) looking downriver, more or less east toward the former railway bridge.

Then it was off to the railway bridge to look back at the main bridge. There is now a fence because the trains no longer run and the old bridge is in the process of becoming part of a recreational trail running through town for now and eventually connecting with other communities.

And we need a picture of the local high school for this project.

This final image was not part of the shoot but taken a day later. I had noticed a loosestrife plant earlier in the day, so I returned with the camera in the evening to get the flower in the foreground and townhall in the background. It was a good idea, but the light wasn't the best, the wind was stirring the water, and there was a machine parked by the building. But I took the shot anyway because what's a guy to do? I may return on another evening, but I imagine that the machine will still be there for awhile.

The Excavator at Work

Once I had a better idea of how to go about it, I have put together another little slideshow of the excavator at work.

This time I figured out how to crop the images to fill the frame before putting my 53 images into a slideshow with each image displaying for 1 second, 1 second being the default timing from my software.

So, I have a bit of a fake timelapse. I say fake because a 54 second timelapse should have abut 1000 images or even more for smooth transitions.

My camera doesn't do timelapses natively, but Lightroom helps to give me that effect, at least a little bit.

Laying the Pipes

The town is putting in pipes along the main street that runs behind us. They've been at it for a long time because the process isn't easy with much digging and filling which takes a lot of time.

Bedrock is close to the surface hereabouts although it won't be seen in this section in the video that follows. Either this has been dug and filled before or right behind us, the bedrock is lower down. I think they had to break up a lot of it farther up though because it was taken many weeks for them to get as far as us, and it's not that long of a stretch.

On day one as they got nearer us, I took a few shots from the bedroom window. I merged two of them into one image.

On the left ↑ a backhoe scoops gravel. On the right it takes the load to the excavator, which will then turn and fill the part of the trench where the pipe has been laid.

But near the end of the next day, the work had shifted to just outside our window; being intrigued with the process, I took many shots.

Then I did something that I had no idea that I was going to do. Having tons of photos, I decided to put them all in one slideshow rather than string out a bunch of photos.

If I had known that I was going to do this, I would have done much more of a time lapse effect, but I didn't know at the time. If I get the chance I will do better later, but it's pouring today, and work has stopped.

The sequence that you will see goes something like this.

1. The excavator is digging the trench and dumping the load into a truck. This took many truckloads for just this small section.
2. The truck then takes the load around to the other side where the new pipe has already been laid, and then the bulldozer begins to grade it.
3. The excavator pulls the box into the new patch that it has just dug. Then it digs out inside the box more. Meanwhile, more loads are taken to the other side which is still being filled.
4. Gravel is put into the box and is tamped down.
5. The pipes are laid. This part goes very quickly, which surprised me a lot. 
6. More gravel is laid, and more tamping is done. Meanwhile, filling of the other side continues.
7. Day is done. The dirt will be filled in on another day to fill this section and begin a new one.
8. It rains prodigiously all night and continues on throughout the day. All they can do is pump the water out and wait for another day.

Sunset Across the Mississippi

You may recall some shots of the kids by the river last week, where JJ and I skipped rocks for one thing. I thought that it might be a suitable location for evening shots, so I returned on the weekend.

I set up the tripod and waited. These first two photos show the setup. I was trying to get the rock in the foreground. If and when I return, I may put the tripod in the water to get it closer to the rock.

For what it's worth: the shots. Although they are all similar (although cropped differently), I actually stayed for a half hour or more as it got darker and the light changed.

Up on the Rooftops

For the first time that I can recall in my many many years of blogging, Blogger ate a post. Or my computer did — probably the latter since it was behaving poorly earlier.

Our town has the oldest, continually operating canoe club in Canada. This leads me to suppose that there is an older club which perhaps shut down for awhile. But I don't know, and it doesn't matter.

They have a regatta every year, and it fell on last weekend this year.

A few of us local photogs were invited to shoot from a nearby rooftop — the former Hawthorne Mill.

Now, I'm not the most rooftopyish guy on the planet, but I was game to try. It was four flights up: four dark and dirty flights. When I say dirty, I am referring to the prodigious quantities of pigeon poop, which was even on the railings which we were forced to grasp. (Having a very good wash was the first item on my agenda afterward.)

It was a somewhat comical climb (and later descent) as both Bob and I are seniors with some difficulty with our legs. He has a bad knee while I limp around (a little) on a bad foot (and my knees are no great shakes either). But we made it along with two others.

The roof was slightly slanted with a peak in the middle, but the pitch wasn't great, so I wasn't too nervous. I was at pains to stay far from the edge, however. (iPhone pano shot)

Later, we went down to a lower roof. This is a shot looking form the lower to higher roof.

As it turned out, neither location was great either for sight lines or distance, but we snapped away anyway. These were all taken after the finish line, which was the best view that I had. I did take a few others of the actual races, but these were the better shots.

Oh, here is a finish line shot after all.

Shots of other things while I was up there.

Kids Week, Day 5

Final day for this round, but there will be three more next week and two the week after. We officially have the last three weeks of August off.

We've had a good week, and the final day was no exception. As usual we had another bike ride. JJ wore the GoPro once again, but since I've shown the trail twice before, I'll keep it short. There are also some of us in the clip as you can see by the cover image.




JJ and I played at skipping rocks, and I can still do it despite the sore shoulder that I am seen favouring in the clip.




A few more brief clips of the kids hanging out by the river, which is getting pretty low as we are verging on drought conditions once again. Normally that bedrock that they are on is under water.



We had another quick game of Monopoly in the afternoon, which Amma won this time. Buppa spends most of the game paying taxes and going to jail. It's crazy. It happened in both games this week and in both games that we played previously.