Merritt clay banks

Picked up some clay along the Nicola with my dad. He’s been making his own ceramics since he retired from teaching and moved to Merritt 10 years ago. The banks are slowly being eroded by the river, but there’s some nice clay deposits there if you pick through the silty stuff.

The View

My wife Krista and I have a dream to buy The View in Lytton. Friends in town have told us the property is in a legal nightmare, so it’ll probably only ever be just a dream. It’s called The View because it is the most spectacular view in town, perched up high on a bank. I remember getting freezies there in the summer between innings of T-ball games.

Fraser Canyon photos

A few other photos from this series of photos that are being sold at Klowa in Lytton.

Technically only Alexandra Bridge is in the Fraser Canyon, Hope is at the end of the Fraser Valley, and Nicomen is actually on the Thompson before the confluence, but ever since I was a kid growing up in Lytton I’ve thought of the Fraser Canyon starting at Hope and going to Spences Bridge.

All the photos are shot on 120 film, cropped to fit 1.25 ratio (8x10” & 16x20”).

Fraser Canyon photos

My friend Meghan has a shop called Klowa in Lytton and has been selling some photos I’ve been taking around Lytton and the surrounding area.

I grew up in Lytton between 1980-90, and it’s amazing how little that stretch of the Trans Canada has changed since I left as a kid. Growing up later in the Fraser Valley, and then spending the majority of my adult life in Vancouver, it’s strange see these communities that I remember so vividly between Hope and Spences Bridge shrinking, especially when these urban and suburban areas are continue to expand.

All the photos are shot on 120 film, cropped to fit 1.25 ratio (8x10” & 16x20”).

Basement Workshop

Photographed on expired Kodak 64T 4x5” film.

20161103_DeVries_basement.jpg

My wife and I were staying with some family friends in the autumn of 2016 while she completed her first semester of medical school at UBC in Vancouver. Jan DeVries had been a professor at UBC and had built the West Point Grey house in the 1960s. Coincidentally, he had been my wife’s father’s professor in agricultural science when he was a student at UBC. An even stranger coincidence: the basement suite that my wife and I stayed in was the suite an ex-girlfriend had first moved into in 2001 when we had both moved to Vancouver to attend Emily Carr. Many of the older houses, especially the more modest-sized ones, were being torn down around Jan’s house. Since he had lived there for decades, Jan had collected a lot of things like bikes, tools and other things that had accumulated in and around the house. The richest area of accumulation was in the basement where Jan had his workshop.

Stag

Before my wedding, I went with my brother-in-law, Gary, along with Pietro and Genta, a couple of friends from the city, to a cabin my parents share with their friends on Peterson Lake, just off the 97C. The lake is close to Pennask Lake, a popular spot for fishing, and Rouse Lake, which is a short walk away on an old forestry road where they keep an old rowboat locked up. The second day we were there, Dwayne and Braden, a couple of old friends came with Braden’s giant canoe, that had been used at the 2010 Olympic opening ceremonies.

Camera Test

Super 8mm camera test, shot around Bloedel Conservatory in April 2016. Camera is a Bell & Howell, not sure about the model, but it has a faux-wood panelling on the body, and it’s fully automatic. Shot this test on 50D in the late afternoon on a sunny day, so not sure if that’s why the film looks overexposed or if the auto-exposure function doesn’t work anymore.