Copyright & Vankleek Hill slideshow

Canadian Copyright Act, 6.:
6. The term for which copyright shall subsist shall, except as otherwise expressly provided by this Act, be the life of the author, the remainder of the calender year in which the author dies, and a period of fifty years following the end of that calendar year.

Chinese Copyright Law:
Realistically the only law recognized in China by the Chinese Government is the one that says no one outside the Chinese Government has any rights… so, if you’re living in China, have fun using my stuff, and please stop raping Tibet.

Emergency response round up

This is me catching up. I have photos in my hard drive that I’ve wanted to post… actually I have hundreds, if not thousands from the past few years, but I only post a few times a month. So, before they completely lose their relevance, here’s some stuff from before…

Yeah. So, anyway. A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to take photos of our local fire brigades as they fought a large grass fire. The local broadsheet published at least one of them, but I’m pretty sure it was two.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and post more often… I have a blog buddy who has been posting a new photo every day for more than four years. I think, starting next week, I’m going to post three times a week.

My original intent was to not turn this into a regular blog, but it has become my regular blog because it’s easier to post a photo and 200-words than the 1,000-word essays I used to write on my Other Blogs.

Hopefully the Internet will survive this increase in posting activity.

Stuff I Found: I do not want to know what this is

It’s not the multiple beaks, or the dozens of eyes, or even the five or six arms reaching out, searching for a better grasp on the fence. It’s the nearly savage desperation it took to push its way through the fence. That’s the most messed up part.

…but the creepy part is, this thing looks like it could have actually been sentient at one point. And that is one ugly, pissed off little life form. Lucky for everyone involved it never developed the technology to cut medium-gauge wire.

Highway Safety Films presents: death in the VCI high school parking lot

I never had the opportunity to watch any of the “Death On The Highway” movies, produced by Ohio Highway Safety Films… I skipped that day in health class. The movies showed, in detail, what happened when people broke traffic laws and wrapped their car around another car, or a tree, or a bus load of nun-children or your mother and her nun-children.

The films are pretty gruesome. I do feel like I got caught up, however, when I watched “Faces Of Death” a few years later.

I don’t know if the school board allows either movie on its curriculum anymore, but they do allow reenactments.

The VKH Volunteer Fire Department, the Ontario Provincial Police, the RCMP, the Paramedics Service, and even Hillcrest Funeral Homes, all came out on Monday to give the students of Vankleek Hill Collegiate Institute an idea what the consequences are when you drink and drive.

…that’s a kid under the blanket. There’s a kid trapped in the backseat, meanwhile the driver is being read her rights by some cops stage right.

There were roughly 120 students watching the play unfold. I’d estimate six were taking it somewhat seriously.

You can find the entire Ohio Highway Safety Films catalogue on YouTube… same with the Faces Of Death series. As a parent, if you want your kid to “get the message”, I’d go with the Internet.

Square dancing with skirts flying

Square dancing still exists… who knew?

This weekend the “Vankleek Hill Square Dance Competition, Showcase & Dance” was held at the Vankleek Hill Community Centre. The organizer said this years attendance was their best ever, so maybe this is the start of one of those “sweeping the nation” moments.

I was just happy to have something to shoot. I missed the first four hours, mostly because I had no idea it was happening. But I arrived just in time to take shots of the ‘Lachute 4-H Senior Team’ and the ‘Vankleek Hill Square Dancers’ — snappier names, in my opinion, would help attendance.

This was the first time I’ve ever taken photos of people square dancing. The main problem is, these kids can freaking move. Everything is spinning here or spinning there, faster than a top. So, with the craptastic lighting they have in the Centre, there’s not much chance of getting anything without a flash.

Which is problem two… the kids are stomping on a plywood floor. When I use flash in a snow storm, or in the rain, the flash reflects off the snowflakes or raindrops. It makes things annoying.

With the kids stomping, the air was filled with dust. So some shots came out great, everything’s in focus, and perfect… except for the dozens or hundreds of reflecting dots.

This is the Vankleek Hill team, and the only way I managed to get this in focus was to shoot on the ‘multiple exposure’ setting and hope for the best.

Combined, I managed to get fifteen usable shots (decent enough to send to the local paper) out of 260 shots taken. Yikes.

…I had to crop the guy’s head off because of the intense glare coming off his head from the fluorescent lights.

Working on fields of fire

An edited version of this shot ended up on the front page of our local paper (along with this shot: link). The version I gave them was cropped to the guy in orange’s back… but the more I look at it, the more I like the full frame version.

The grass fire was in a village a few miles from Vankleek Hill, called L’Orignal — it’s French for ‘Moose’, and it sits beside the Ottawa River. We saw the smoke on the way home from Ottawa. If it had just been me, I’d probably still be out there shooting. But my girlfriend and our kids were in the car, and I have this weird thing where I’m always thinking I’m keeping people from something.

So I rushed a little bit, and only grabbed fifty-four shots, ten of which were blurred beyond use.

I took most of the shots while standing pretty close to the fire-line, but I was always behind the firefighters.

If this was still the 90′s I have no doubt I’d have gotten between the fire and the firefighters, but somewhere along the line I also picked up a voice that says “okay… this is far enough”, or maybe I’m just listening to it.

The temperature in the shade was close to 30C, I can’t imagine what it was like for these guys. The fire came within a few metres of two housing developments. It took the combined efforts of the Vankleek Hill, Hawkesbury and L’Orignal fire departments to get it under control.

I still have a few more from this set I plan on posting… so if you’ve got a fire, or firefighter, fetish, this is definitely your week. You’re welcome.

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*Fields Of Fire is an awesome song [link] by Big Country, off their 1983 release, The Crossing.

How to shoot a fire without getting charred

There was a fire in a large field of long grass, sharp brush and short trees in L’Orignal, a small community a few minutes north-west of Vankleek Hill. We saw the smoke as we were driving back from Ottawa and decided at the last minute to find out what was going on.

The thing about grass fires is they spread in every direction. In this case it was bordered on two sides by two subdivisions, the third was a main street and the fourth was a dirt road and railway line.

As far as I can tell, I was the only news photographer on the scene… there was a kid shooting with a cellphone who followed me for a while, but otherwise I was it.

The first rule of photography, always have your camera with you and easily available because you never know when you’re going to have to shoot something.

The first rule of news photography is, always look like you belong. And just keep shooting, even when they’re kicking you out, just keep shooting.

I managed to get through two different police lines just by walking past them. On the side closest to the railway, I ended up standing beside the pumper truck, only about sixty feet from the fire line.

Later on, at the main line, where the fire came within a few metres of a new subdivision, I ended up walking around with the firefighters as they recovered from spending so much time out in the field. Another thirty feet and I’d have been walking on charred ground.

That was when the fire chief told me to back up. So I did. But I grabbed this shot, and a few others, as I was backing away.

I’ve got a pile of shots — one of which will be in the local broadsheet this week, a bunch of others are being played on our community TV station — so I’ll probably be posting more of them this week.