Bannister

I'm finding many of Dad's photos are not as well documented as others. I can't tell you anything about this one, other than late 1960s. It appears to be part of a series that Dad took of a house or small apartment building. His documentation is really odd, like he's gone back to record everything after the fact, but in many cases it seems like he made no effort to sort things out before recording them. Some backyard family party pictures will be next to a school fire in the negative book, yet one last picture from the party will be hidden away on a different negative strip in another book, so it's all very mixed up. I like the shadows here, playing against the brightness of the bannister pole.

Christmas 1964

Almost two, here's me taking my new friend for a walk down the hall 50 years ago today. Apparently, I walked him down the hall for hours.

Camera Club Girls IV

Another selection of Dad's photos of models from his camera club in Montréal. It's pretty easy to understand why he was a member.

Peddle Car - The Sequel

Obviously, I must have loved this peddle cat -- I published a previous picture by my dad of me riding in it. In this photo, I seem to be taking it a lot more seriously. Maybe in this one I haven't got my licence yet and I'm still studying the rules of the road.

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.