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.

Jacques Cartier Bridge

The Jacques Cartier Bridge spanning the St. Lawrence River along the south shore of Montreal.

Then and Now: St. Joseph's Oratory

Here's a picture my dad took of St.Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal in Montréal. It began life as a small chapel in 1904, but has grown and been rebuilt throughout the 20th century. The current configuration was completed in 1967. According to Dad's records, this shot would have been taken on Avenue de Somerled looking North-ish towards St. Joseph's in 1970.
Or was it? Below is the modern Google Maps view. This is Somerled looking North-ish, just south of Oxford. I'm fairly certain I'm in the correct spot. The cross street ahead is a one-street crossing left-to-right in both pictures, there's a brick house on the right corner that look similar (red brick with white windows, grey at ground level, with a small window in the grey area), and the street ends in just a couple of blocks. The only thing missing in the Google Maps view is, of course, St. Joseph's.
So either Dad got his street wrong, or a super-villain has kidnapped the largest Church in Canada. But Somerled is the only street that points directly at the side of St. Joseph's like that. And it's hard to imagine that the entire hill has disappeared. What is going on here?
There may be another explanation other than the nefarious machinations of Lex Luthor. First, the height of the Google Street View car picture is higher than the height of my Dad, so that may have affected the angle of view of the Google pic. I also wonder if Dad was using a telephoto lens which may have resulted in some foreshortening of the image, making St.Joseph's appear closer than it is. If I've got the right spot, St. Joseph's is still about 2 km away. And the Google folks would have been using a wide angle lens, making St.Joseph's appear even further away. An interesting illustration of how an image can be manipulated by the lens you choose.
On the other hand, that's a lot of missing hill and church to account for. I may just have to go back there one day to solve the mystery!




Addendum:
Reader Stephanie found this Google Map image from a little further up the street where you can see St. Joseph's poking up. The angle is nothing like my father got, but at least one can see the Oratory.

Then reader Blair found this image with a better view of the oratory which when cropped gives a view of the oratory remarkably similar to what dad shot. It is an interesting study of perspective and lenses. All the photos were taken within a couple of blocks of each other, and yet each have different views of the church.

Portrait

Here's a portrait of me that my day took, late 1960s, so I am probably five or six years old. I don't remember this picture being taken at all, so no story to go with it, but it's a nice, relaxed shot.

D'oh!

Me as a youngling. It's a little know fact that I invented the facepalm. You're welcome.

Camera Club Girls

My dad was a member of a camera club in Montreal 1960s. I wonder what sort of craziness happened at camera club meetings in the Swinging Sixties. Probably the same thing that happens at most club meetings now: spend five minutes approving the last meeting's minutes, then spend the rest of the time talking about girls. But at least at the camera club, girls actually showed up...and here's the photographic evidence to prove it. Interestingly, all these shots were on a single negative strip, and no other shots seem to have been taken at the meeting. This, of course, highlights the difference between shooting on film then and shooting digitally now, and how every shot on film will cost you money just to see if it worked out. If I was at the meeting with my modern camera, I'd be shooting dozens if not hundreds of shots, and all of them free.

Tree in the Snow

Here's a lovely snowscape shot that my dad took somewhere along the Ottawa River in 1965.

Snowscape

I have little information other than the obvious that it's a twig in the snow, other than it was taken in 1969. Is this twig the last holdout against a snowy winter onslaught? Or the first sign of an approaching spring thaw?

Fire Extinguisher

The title for this one is pretty self-explanitory. It's a fire extinguisher. I have no certain idea why dad took this picture, but there some notion in the foggiest reaches of my memory that he tried briefly to make a little money on the side with photography and this may have been a "portfolio" of sorts, a demonstration of a product shot for advertising. Or he could have just had an extinguisher fetish. One thing I do remember is him working on this shot in his home darkroom. He must have developed dozens of copies of this shot, and I remembered it to this day, and was quite pleased to find the negative.

Flower Friday!