A Return to Moments
Taking a step back and playing catch up on some moments of beauty.
I want to start this post by explaining some recent growing pains. Reviewing the past year of Substack posts, I see that up until the end of June of this year, I managed to publish a post nearly every week, and in June twice that, but for the past two months, my publication schedule has fallen off dramatically.
In retrospect, I believe I needed to break away from my own expectations and to be honest, the idea of framing posts as stories with beginnings and ends was starting to wear a little thin on me. The device has occasionally pushed up against my desire to post only the very best images I am capable of, settling instead for the best of the day.
Granted, not every picture can be a winner, and the role of support images is important in telling stories, but the whole idea of story telling through multiple images is a new one to me. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but I want to break out of this constraint and I have been struggling to adapt my weekly posts to accommodate this. Then agian, there are times when the story has more pictures than I feel I can justify putting into a single post.
My preference is to shoot unencumbered by expectations especially self-imposed labels. Photography for me is a form of play and to be playful is to give up expectations and just go with the flow. The self imposed schedule I had set for myself and grouping photos into themes has been stifling my creativity.
So this week, I am stepping out of that expectation and catching up with the images that got left behind in the last few months. Beyond storytelling, my main drive when operating a camera is to see and capture glimpses of beauty, usually in natural outdoor settings. There is a spiritual aspect to this for me which pervades all of my work.
As beauty can’t be scheduled and when it arrives, is often fleeting, some days, groups of images or storylines that tie individual images together can feel forced. There is a natural inclination for me to group images by location or event, but I can’t help feel I am being contolled or at least cnstrained by these.
I want to get back to the purity of beauty as my prime motivation. No travel to postcard places is required for my style of shooting. Beauty is all around me wherever I find myself. I only need to slow down, open my eyes and fully see what is in front of me.
Sometimes images appear fully formed and all I need to do is lift my camera and release the shutter. Other times, I have to go searching. To work the scene, moving around the subject, constantly observing and refining what the subject is and changing my perspective until the essence of what is in front of me reveals itself. Photographing this way is a form of meditation.
Beauty is fleeting. Blink and it will be gone, disappearing down a back lane or stepping out of frame into the hidden beyond. It is rare to see such a young fawn out and about with its mom, who seems to have sensed my presence even through a distant bathroom window on a misty summer morning. The magic of photography is to capture such moments and hold them up for others to see.
My return visit to A.K. Sculthorpe Woodland Marsh in June was all about the birds, but there was more going on that day than that.
Being sensitive to my audience, I decided there was no room for the three images above in my story, which was a shame as they capture the essence of early summer in the wild botanicals that line the marsh walking trail from which I was shooting.
In August I combined two concert events into a story about the Warkworth Music Fest, but some of the images of Rayzor’s Edge from that post had been repurposed from an event held in Tweed the week before. There were just too many images to fit into a single post, but there were a few gems of Jake Whalen and the band that I am happy to share here now.
I had to be quick to capture this shot of Jake Whalen, who, running across a large area between the stage and the audience and belting out Road House Blues, suddenly turned and pointed directly into my camera. I had only a split second to capture the moment. Audience engagement is what Jake is all about and you can see the passion he brings to performing in these photographs. Here are a few more shots from the Tweed concert I haven’t published before on My Photo Journal.
I enjoy shooting concerts. I like to capture peak moments of action and reaction within the broader timeline of a concert event. I enjoy shooting by natural light so daytime concerts like this are ideal.
Left to right and from top to bottom; founding member Ray Petrasek on rhythm guitar and harmonica, Jake channeling Gord Downie, Jake and Carly Savery in the zone with Sam Donnelly in the background keeping the beat, father and son guitarists Adam (bass) and Marshall (lead) Stoner, a young fan gets a hat, an over enthusiastic fan, Sam Donnelly on drums, two young women cheering on Carly during her solo number, and Carly feeling the love.
Speaking of the 2025 Warkworth Musicfest, there was one shot I got that day which I thought was kind of neat, but didn’t make the cut of images for that post. Technology around photographing concerts is constantly in flux and drone photography is now a standard way to to provide B-roll footage around concert events.
The image shows a drone operated by Tim Gauthier of FG Music & Media capturing footage of the Matthew Holtby Band at the outdoor event. Tim and I have met several times and bought some camera equipment from me about a year ago. He’s another photographer who has covered a number of concert venues for Rayzor’s Edge.
The shot above was made from inside my house looking out at a number of American Goldfinch at the window feeder attached to the exterior of my living room window. It shows the dominance of the three males (bright yellow) over the two females (yellowish green). Stories like these can be held within single images. Like a flying camera, the constant jostle for position of birds at a feeder or the joy of a robin having a bath in the midday sun while the cats are asleep.
Sometimes an entire day can be wrapped up in a single seemingly unrelated photo which only those who were there and can appreciate the significance of can remember. This was a good day, a quiet day, that Odie was a part of.
I have been to a lot of Northumberland Land Trust property walks in the past year. They are great excuses to get out in nature. Walking new to me properties brings a freshness to that experience which helps to build knowledge of our natural environments and can place me in proximity to new flora and fauna. But not every walk can lead to a photo essay and the expectation that it might do so reached a climax this summer causing me to pull back on these types of posts. Here are a few images that didn’t make it into My Photo Journal previously from a look more closely event held at Lone Pine Marsh.
Over the past year, I’ve gotten to know a few people from the Marsden Global Theatre Chatroom, several of them who subscribe to this newsletter, and a few who live close enough to me to meet up for coffee on occasion. One day this summer, theatre seatmate Jannx and I got together in Hastings, Ontario. As wel as being a music lover, he’s a fine photographer in his own right and I am pleased to welcome him to my new circle of friends.
We trespassed on a proper snotty property development allowing me to nab the shot below of Fowlds Mill, an iconic Hastings landmark, before being thrown out by security and heading to the outdoor patio of McGillicafey’s Pub and Eatery across the street.
Coming home late through Campbellford one night, I was entranced by the lights on the Trent River. I stopped on the road north of town to capture this image of light and darkness across the other side. It was hard not to imagine some sort of science fiction scenario taking place there.
A little further into town and I stopped to capture the bridge and lights of the small town’s downtown. Everything looks so different in the wee hours of the morning.
A few days later, I was travelling the same route and caught the view looking north from old Mill Park. Boats, some of them luxurious yachts, often moor overnight in the town as they travel up and down the Trent Severn Waterway which runs from Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay through a series of locks.
The old woolen mill has long gone, replaced by a park with a gazebo where bands play on weekends and our particular brand of roadside attraction, a giant replica of the Canadian two dollar coin, which sits exalted in the centre of the park. The giant “toonie” as it is called, is the design of local wildlife and landscape artist Brent Townsend. The attraction was fully constructed by local craftsmen. The attraction provides a focal point for local tourism and is indeed popular with people visiting the area. Even after midnight, there were people posing with the monument on a warm summer evening.
The flip side of the coin features a portrait of the Queen Elizabeth II as does the legal tender we carry in our pockets and so the monument required the Queen’s royal consent to reproduce it. As such, it remains unique and can never be duplicated. I thought it looked particularly interesting in the glare of the park lights.
A day trip to Callaghan Rapids resulted in a few nice images along the shore of the Crowe River north of Campbellford. A raging stream in the spring, by mid summer, the lack of rain this year had slowed the flow to a crawl, leaving the river only several inches deep and allowing people to wander up and down its course wearing waterboots. You can see how shallow the river has become in the photo below.
Okay, I think that’s a pretty long post already, so I guess I’ll break this update here with more coming in the next post as I catch up with the summer of 2025.
If you are still with me after this long rambling post, thank you very much. In part two, I will hopefully catch up from my long absence and be able to set some new goals for My Photo Journal going forward. I do want to get more into printing and perhaps creating some books. That may mean switching to profiling images from the past, something I have also been meaning to do for some time.
Of course there is always another shoot right around the corner with new things to see and photograph.
As usual, I will leave you with a tune. This is Ramble On by Led Zeppelin featuring John Paul Jones on bass.
These images are spectacular and I’m so glad you decided to post them. It is often hard to get to some of these locations so I felt like I was able to see them through your lens. We share a similar worldview in that finding beauty is always the guiding principal. I also find photography to be a spiritual endeavour and often am guided to beauty intuitively. That incredible night sky will haunt me for some time…it is a special image. Thanks John.
Heh.. who is that guy with the "loud" shirt anyway?? Wonderful set of 'nature photography' images John C. You've got a way with a camera for nature and people. Keep it up. Coffee soon, eh?