Selection from the Archives

With a little time on my hands, I’ve been looking back through my photo archives. I’m doing some clean-up of the files and looking for the better ones to include in an “Archive of Favourites” I’m creating. I have almost 28,000 photographs on file, dating back to 2004. My expectations have changed and it’s evident, looking at those many pictures that I can trim the number back quite a lot.

As I browse along, I am finding many old favourites and I’ve decided to publish a few that were taken before I began this blog in 2010. As such, very few if any have made a prior appearance.

I begin with this winter scene of Elbow Falls, located near Bragg Creek on the Elbow River. It’s a small, but pretty waterfall. It has changed a little since this photo was taken in late December of 2010, altered by the flooding in 2013. I visited this location in the company of Howard Dingle, a longtime photo companion.

In 2008, Rolande and I spent Christmas in Arizona and one of things we did was a road trip from Williams to Lake Havasu, AZ on the historic US Route 66, aka “the Mother Road”. Much of the original highway, extending from Chicago to Santa Monica has been replaced by Interstate highways. Arizona maintains the longest remaining stretch, now designated AZ66, a distance of 385 miles (620 km).

This picture was taken at Hackberry, AZ. It’s the remnants of an old general store, a tourist attraction and monument to the area’s past.

This picture is a favourite, taken on frozen Abraham Lake in central Alberta. I’ll never forget the experience of being out on the ice early in the morning, photographing the sunrise. I vividly recall the wind and imagining my camera and tripod sliding away, across the wind-polished, slick surface of the ice. One of my most memorable experiences.

In June 2007, Rolande and I traveled with our daughter Jaime to Europe to visit her good friends, Sapna and Teshu, residing in Geneva at the time. We spent a few days at a rented Villa in a mountain-top village, Sommocolonia in Tuscany. This isn’t it. This is a nearby home that I found appealing as a photographic subject.

Back to Alberta. This photograph captures the moonset over the Upper Kananaskis Lake in late October of 2007. Once again, Howie Dingle and I braved the morning cold to capture this scene around 7:30 am.

This last picture was taken in 2009 at an area in Banff National Park, known as the Sawback Burn. Controlled burns are conducted to eliminate deadfall from the forest floor. Accumulated fallen trees and brush are a potent fuel, best removed under controlled conditions. Many trees are still standing almost 30 years after the burn in 1993. They add a stark beauty to the landscape, one that I always enjoy photographing.

I enjoyed putting this patchwork of photographs together. I hope you have enjoyed viewing them. It’s fun to go back and relive those experiences but I’d rather be out enjoying some new experiences, hopefully soon.