close your eyes and hope for the best

Cedar Rail Fence. Winter near Huntsville Ontario Canada. (click image to enlarge)

There is not a better feeling on a cold February day than the slow seepage of 3º Celsius water making its way into your hiking boots.

Out of the corner of my eye I spot this cedar rail fence trailing off into the blurry distance in a white field of snow. Of course this is all happening in seconds as I am cruising down a country road, doing about 60km an hour. Pull over quickly, look in the rear view mirror and back up the few hundred meters travelled since seeing the scene. I jump out of the car, grab the camera and tripod and plunge into a slush filled ditch, camouflaged quite nicely by fluffy clean white snow. There is not a better feeling on a cold February day than the slow seepage of 3º Celsius water making its way into your hiking boots. Funny, you think you would learn from your mistakes but last year I did the same thing except it was a field of flowers in the Kawartha’s and yes there was a ditch, a very deep ditch. And that time it wasn’t snow but long grasses that camouflaged it. Well this time I completely disappeared much to the shock of my partner, emerged on the other side of this mini abyss and calmly set up my tripod as if nothing had happened.
Generally I am pretty good about checking out the terrain before I make my way over to get the shot but today the canvas was set and I just didn’t do my usual due diligence. Oh well. Cold wet feet. C’est la vie! The lengths to which we go to get an image.

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Skull. Kekerton Island Whaling Station. Nunavut Canada.
(click image to enlarge)

Who are you? Are you British or Scottish or American? Inuit perhaps? What happened to you? How did you end up here?

I would have found it difficult to believe if someone had told me that there is a place in Canada where human bones lie scattered on the ground. That there is a cemetery where many coffins have been broken into and the bones have been scattered; most likely by predators. But there is such a place.

Kekerten Island Whaling Station is a National Historic Site. It is eerie and wild. It is hard to put into words because for me, so much of what makes Kekerten “Kekerten” is its spirituality. People that know me well would say that I am not religious in any traditional sense. I have never seen a miracle. I have never seen a ghost. How does that expression go? “I’m from Missouri. Show me”. But if there are spirits walking the earth, they might be found here.

Picture yourself strolling across the Canadian arctic tundra. Suddenly someone in your group gasps, “Look ahead”! Or was that, “Look! A head!”? In the distance you notice a starkly white object lying on the ground. It is in sharp contrast with the rest of the landscape. As you approach, it becomes obvious that it is a human skull. We were about two kilometres from the old whaling station. The experience is strange. It’s not how we are accustomed to dealing with the dead or with death. It’s certainly not in my lexicon of experiences. Maybe my humour is my way of dealing with a strange and impactful experience, but talk about losing your head! (Okay. No more really awful puns.)

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Peterbuilt truck shot for calendar. (click image to enlarge)

This last fall I was asked by a client to come up with an interesting image that featured a transportation company’s truck for a yearly poster size calendar. We talked about some nice scenic shots with fall colours and waited for approval. Well, things got busy for everyone and unfortunately there was no groundhog to tell us that winter was to arrive early this year.

For a minute, I thought of the possibility that the camera and I could somehow bounce out the back of the van and into the path of the tailgating semi…
I only had enough seatbelt for either the camera rig or me and in the end the $6000 camera got the belt. I could hang on to the camera if needed…

Before we knew it there was snow on the ground and the fall foliage was long gone. I didn’t think they were going to go for an 18-wheeler with chains on following a snowplow so I needed to rethink the original idea. The shot needed to have empty space reserved for the actual calendar (Damn!) so I came up with a sketch that showed a dynamically blurred road with a truck coming forward. The client liked the idea so we arranged to shoot a truck the next weekend. Time was running out. My idea was to drive my minivan ahead of the truck and shoot out the open hatchback at a high rate of speed to get some nice motion blur.

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Darrell Lecorre’s Grandma, Saskatchewan Canada. (click image to enlarge)

About a month later I went back to visit Grandma. I brought a few enlargements with me and was quite excited about seeing her reaction to the pictures…
I was so curious to witness her reaction I could barely sleep the few nights before.

The Saskatchewan ground was wet with rainwater from the night before, and with her fragile hip and legs I was concerned if we should even attempt a picture so early in the morning, perhaps waiting until the sun dried the soil a little and trying later in the day or even the next. When I brought that up to her she said, “don’t be silly”.

We arrived at the location around 6:30am. It was very near the land that she used to farm. Slowly we made our way to the spot I had marked the day before. The ground being soft and slippery, I ran back to the vehicle and grabbed an old shovel that I had grabbed from her shed, to give her something for extra support and balance. I handed it to her and walked back to the camera, and when I turned around I found her shoveling the dirt near her feat.

I asked, “what are you doing”?

She replied, “shoveling”.

I said, “I know, but why”?

She quipped, “what else do you do with a shovel”.

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