Lake Memphremagog

Sunset on Lake Memphremagog. Unless it's a sunrise. Or maybe a moonrise. Don't ask me, I wasn't even born yet.

Then and Now: Rockies Road

In the summer of 1976, my dad rented a VW camper van and the two of us drove around southern BC and the Rockies. There's a chance that I might have taken this one; I held his camera while he was driving and was taking shots out the window. But we did stop to take shots, so it's hard to know which of us took which shots as that knowledge has passed into the misty murkiness of failing memories. Regardless, it was taken somewhere on the road between Jasper and Banff, somewhere near the Columbia Icefield. What I love about this picture is the curving of the layers of rock. Can you imagine the force needed to bend those layers over time? Wow.

Clearly, this mountain made an impression on me, as in 2013 I took a new picture of the same mountain.

Then and Now: The Postcard Shot

The Empress Hotel 1971 as taken by dad:
The Empress Hotel 2014 as taken by me:

Then and Now: Mile 0

In 1971, not long after we moved to Victoria, Dad snapped this shot of the Mile 0 marker. This marker designates the Pacific terminus of the 8,000 km long Trans-Canada Highway. Sometime between then and now, the maker has been replaced. I took a picture of the new marker this past summer: And if you're dying to know what the backside of the marker looks like... Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that something has been added directly behind the Mile 0 marker.

Then and Now: Victoria Harbour 1971

This is a shot my dad took of Victoria's Inner Harbour in 1971, and below it is a shot of the harbour I took a few weeks ago. My, how things have changed.

In the foreground, the most obvious change is the rearrangement of the docks. Seaplanes still come into the harbour, but they don't dock in this part of it anymore. In the background, well, nothing's the same. All the buildings are gone, and the big piers jutting out into the harbour are gone. The MV Coho that dominates my photo docked on the other side of the harbour in 1971. The only building that remains is the old CPR Steamship Terminal building in the top left corner. In 1971, it was the Victoria Royal London Wax Museum; after recent renovations and seismic upgrading it's now the Robert Bateman Centre. Missing entirely now is the Undersea Garden (seen behind the seaplane in dad's photo). The Undersea Gardens was a long-time tourist attraction in the harbour. It's a 150-foot purpose built vessel where, according to Wikipedia, visitors "....descended 15 feet (4.6 m) beneath the ocean surface to look through the many viewing windows of the aquariums that surrounded the vessel and see the various marine life of coastal British Columbia, in their natural and protected environment." It was originally opened at the Oak Bay Marina in 1964, then it was towed to the Inner Harbour in 1969, but closed last year. We saw it this past January while kayaking in the harbour. It was towed to a shipyard where it sat waiting to be scrapped or sold.

Camera Club Girls III

Another session with a model at Dad's camera club in the 1960s in Montreal.

Dad

Dad would have been 91 today.

Then and Now: Across the Harbour

A 1971 shot looking across Victoria's Inner Harbour taken by my dad.
As we can see from a recent photo that I took below, from this angle the harbour looks like it hasn't changed much with the exception of the addition of the looming Grand Pacific Hotel. But looks can be deceiving; this is probably the one view, towards the Legislature whose blue domes you can see in the trees, that hasn't changed radically through the years.

Camera Club Girls II

Here's another assortment of pictures that Dad took of a model at a camera club meeting in the late 1960s in Montréal.

Ann

My sister Ann would have turned 69 this week. Here she is at 18. Dig that beehive!

Bee Fly

This is a bee fly. Not a bee, but a bee fly. A bombyliidae, if you like big-sounding words. They are not particularly well-known or understood and are often mistaken for, well, bees. Dad snapped this shot in the backyard in Victoria some time in the 1980s. We were stumped as to the identity of this creature for a while, until dad showed the picture to an insect expert at the Royal British Columbia Museum who supplied us with the answer.