Gibellini TCN45V2

March 22, 2024 No Comments

This past month I dedicated myself to getting back into the darkroom and making more B&W images. I’ve always wanted a top-of-the-line precision view camera and now I have one: a TCN45V2 field camera from Gibellini, in Modena, Italy. In addition to a rotating back, this field camera folds fairly flat yet supports a wide variety of movements: front tilt, shift, and swing, and rear tilt and swing. A fantastic platform to use with my collection of 4×5 lenses from Sinar, Rodenstock, Fuji, and Caltar.

Cerne Abbas

November 13, 2023 No Comments

In November 2023 we travelled to the ancestral home of the Paulley family, the quaint, quintessentially English village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, south-west of London. The name Cerne Abbas comes from the River Cerne and the original Benedictine abbey that was founded there in 987. The abbey was subsequently destroyed by decree of Henry VIII when abbeys were eradicated from England as King Henry abandoned the Catholic church and created the Church of England. The main church in the village, now Anglican, is dedicated to St. Mary and was built in 1317. It is in remarkable condition for a building that old, and continues to function as a church for the village. This home on Abbey Street was at one time inhabited by my great-grandparents. In 1880 my great-grandfather was killed following a fall from the roof of this home. In 1901, my grandparents left the village and moved to Fisherton Street, in nearby Salisbury, before emigrating to Canada in 1903. Cerne Abbas is famous for the Cerne Giant, a figure of a man carved into the chalk on

Royal Clipper: Rome to Sicily

August 12, 2023 No Comments

In May 2023 I was fortunate enough to tour Italy on a 21-day holiday that included a voyage on the Royal Clipper from Rome to Sicily (return). The Royal Clipper is a 439-ft steel-hulled five-masted clipper ship of the Star Clipper line, and registered in Malta. Today it is the largest square-rigged sailing ship in operation, anywhere in the world. On our voyage down the Amalfi Coast our ports of call included Sorrento (with a bus excursion to Pompeii), Amalfi, the Strait of Messina and views of Mount Etna, Taormina (on the island of Sicily), Lipari (in the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily), and on the return trip to Rome the town of Sperlonga, south of Rome and the site of Emperor Tiberius’s ancient sea grotto and the fabulous museum there. During the voyage we were treated to a becalmed Tyrrhenian Sea so that we were rarely under sail and relied on the ship’s diesel engines. Though we did not get to experience the full sailing experience while on board, the calm sea permitted an easy climb up the rope

Peterson Lake, Manitoba

July 4, 2014 No Comments

In July, 2013 we were fortunate to travel to Manitoba to vacation with our friends David and Kathy at their cottage on Peterson Lake, north-east of Flin Flon. The cottage is remote, to say the least. Starting from Cranberry Portage, we traveled approximately one hour by boat through the Cranberry Lakes to a portage on Third Cranberry Lake, then another hour by 4×4 vehicles through the bush on the abandoned Snow Lake railway embankment and what I would optimistically call a moose trail, and then finally unloaded everything into fishing boats at Peterson Lake and another 35 minutes’ travel east to the Lake’s eastern end. During our time in northern Manitoba we were treated to only a single day of brilliant sunshine – the day of our arrival – and after that a mix of sun and cloud. Unfortunately, the year before, that portion of the province including Peterson Lake had been ravaged by forest fires, with the cottages saved only through the use of sprinkler systems drawing water from the nearby Lake. I made many of these images to

Hostas

June 17, 2014 No Comments

My neighbour, Marg, has an absolutely wonderful garden in her back yard that she tends with the utmost dedication. One of her favorite plants are hostas, and she has a considerable variety: light green, dark green, blue-green, yellow-green, variegated, plain, you name it. Hostas make an interesting abstract pattern. I experimented with some images in my own backyard recently, simply using my iPad and post-processing the images using Google Snapseed, which my son Ryan suggested. A quick transfer to my laptop via Dropbox, and then to the website, and voila – here they are. I must confess that I am really happy with these images, though my preference would be to use either 120 or 4×5 Ilford FP4 and tone the results on warmtone paper. Perhaps a film project for a later date this summer, but before the hostas start to flower.

Emphasis in portrait photography

December 30, 2013 No Comments

Over the past few weeks I have been reading “The Art Spirit”, a 1923 book [1] by American painter and teacher Robert Henri. Henri’s volume was recommended by Lenswork magazine editor Brooks Jensen in one of his podcasts about two months ago. Henri was a painter, and the book is, unsurprisingly, largely about painting. Yet there are many things in the book that mirror issues with photography, and Brooks strongly recommended reading it for that reason. And if a book is good enough for Brooks, who am I to argue? Robert Henri loved both portrait and landscape painting – my favorite subjects, too – but felt that landscapes were beyond him since he believed a painter could do only one of them well. Here is an excerpt (pp. 112) with my substitutions for photography thrown in: In considering lines as a means of drawing composition, it is well to remember that the line practically does not exist in nature. It is a convention we use. I think I am safe in saying, until you became an art student, you never

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