Victoria (February 14, 2002)

Taken from the plane window, near the end of a flight from Calgary to Victoria.

Boulevard René Lévesque (April, 2001)

Montréal, where else. Which is where I'm headed today, on the train!

Guatemala Fundraiser (October 28, 2006)

AGO in Sunlight (June 4, 2009)

The new Art Gallery of Ontario building, which I believe is much more of success than the recent addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (the somewhat infamous, and overpriced, "crystal" that now seems to dominate most publicity shots of the museum, sadly enough... and which looks, to me, as if some giant-sized rock-collector accidentally dropped a prize piece onto an otherwise nice-looking old building). Oddly, there seem to be very few pictures of the completed AGO building available online, and hardly any that do its design any justice. I have taken a number of photos that I hope will reflect these things more effectively, and I'll post more of them eventually.

The more time I spend staring at this image, the more surreal it becomes. One of the really interesting effects of the light hitting the roof here is that the roof takes on something of the visual quality of tin, if you get close to the metal and the sun is reflecting off it. If you look closely at it, tin (in sheets) has a lot of little patchy bits as a kind of surface patter, and they all catch the light in slightly different ways. The roof of this building, right where the sun hits, is doing something similar--but here the reflective material comprises panes of glass mosaicked together to form a curved surface.

Communist Toilet (August, 2003)

The brand name here is indeed "Red Star" (902-768-3452), which I thought was evocative.

The toilet was near a river, which was encountered on the drive to Lake Erie, Ontario.

Matt, Lucas & Duck (October, 1995)

This photo was taken at Halifax's Public Gardens, which are a small downtown fixture (though apparently they suffered some serious damage after extreme weather than Nova Scotia has dealt with over the past decade or so; it's been almost that long since I visited).

I believe this picture came about because we were discussing how Lucas had, in the past, successfully picked up a duck and held it with no problems. This time he did it while I had my camera handy.

Garden (May, 2005)

This was the first full summer with this garden, and it started to look rather nice. The herb garden by the fence here was initially half that length, but we moved the sleepers (logs) over from the back part of the garden and used them to build another log-length's worth of space for the herbs. that we filled with rotten leaves and dirt from the back garden, then planted the herbs. Flower pots I found in the shed, which looked as if it hadn't been touched for many years.

This garden never got a lot of sunlight, but I always loved the way the late afternoon sun would slant through the back trees, only as it was on the verge of setting, and then the red light would come through the kitchen window.

Happy Birthday, Kittens (December 10, 2008)

The title of this post refers not precisely to the photo, but to the fact that my cats are actually one year old today. Over time, their age has become somewhat of a joke considering the rapid rate at which they grew from these tiny fluffy little balls of cuteness into... rather large, much-larger-than-expected piles of fluffy cuteness (it never diminished, really). In short, they're very big cats, and very affectionate.

The photo itself was the first picture I caught of the two of them together, which was shortly after I got them in December last year. I named them for characters from Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice". Mr. Darcy is at top-right, and Mr. Bingley is below, staring into the camera.

Prairie (February 14, 2002)

Taken from a plane coming in to land at Calgary, Alberta. I took a series of aerial shots during the flight into Calgary, many of which turned out as fabulously as this one, thanks to the incredibly crisp prairie sunlight, cooled to clarity by the February chill.

This was one of my favourites from that day. The land and sky meet at a pressure point at the horizon, pushing together where the air seems to brighten and turn white below the clouds. The simplicity of the image highlights all other features, gives the prairie flatness an intensity of compressed browns and tans and beiges, and the sky the look of a canvas sliced across with soft brushstrokes of watercolour cloud. The deep blue at the top of the picture only serves to heighten the sense of space, hinting at a celestial vastness that echoes the land infinitely.

Proof-Reading (October 12, 2008)

During work on the campaign to elect Gerard Kennedy as MP for the parkdale-High Park riding in Toronto.

There was always proofing going on during this campaign, except on election day (which is called "E-Day" by anyone heavily involved). Gerard is extremely attentive to all details in his political literature, and this sometimes meant returning multiple fully-finished drafts in sequence, all of which needed changes ranging from the minor to the substantial. Of course the end result was generally worth the process of re-working that took place.