The best of 2009 part 3

The last of my dozen best, or just plain favourite, shots of the year.

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Sniff Sniff.


The nice K9 unit officer in this shot is inspecting, with some disgust, an empty beer can found in the back seat of a car he and his RCMP buddies stopped on a weekend police check on one of the two highways heading down to Moncton.

Yes. Police checks are sometimes news, especially when we get a couple funny shots out of 'em.

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Here's a digger taking apart a building on the old UPM mill site, which had just been bought by that Norwegian solar panel company previously mentioned.


Included mainly for its "end of an era" feel. It's not a spectacularly composed shot, but it's demolishing part of a mill on a site which has had a mill on it on and off for a century. On the Miramichi, that's a big deal.

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I've had this one on here before.

This is at a candlelight vigil for Hilary Bonnell, the girl from Burnt Church First Nation who vanished after a house party. She was later found dead in the woods, and her cousin was charged with first degree murder.

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This was a freak shot taken at Hilary's funeral.


The light just happened to hit Pamela, Hilary's mum, just right through the church windows, as well as the feather she had at the time. During the service, she would occasionally reach out and rest the feather against Hilary's casket. Behind her is Hilary's step-dad, Fred.

I'm told it's rare for NB First Nations to have funerals in a church, rather than at the deceased's house.

As sad as that was, I think everybody was at least relieved her body had been found. But it was a sad affair, although I was surprised at how accepting folks were of cameras in the church (at least for the newspaper folks. The CBC had, like, nine vehicles there).

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That's it for 2009. Rough year, but still a few good shots. Here's to 2010.

Best of 2009 part 2

Part two of my amateur best.

You know this guy.


He was in Miramichi for the World Acadian Congress, on the nearby Acadian Peninsula. In this shot, he's ringing a bell and waving a flag for the Tintamarre, where everyone present makes as much noise as they can, with a few screamed "vive 'Acadie!" thrown in for good measure.

Got to talk to him, too. He sounds remarkably like Mr. Spock in real life.

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This local veteran was having his experiences of WW2 recorded for the Memory Project, from the Historica-Dominion institute in Toronto.


Basically, the stories he and around 60 other Miramichi veterans will be posted up on the group's website, along with pictures of any memorabilia they brought with them. Apparently, our turnout was higher than in Moncton, the sort-of largest city and metro in the province.

We never used this staged shot, but I've always liked the look on his face, with the recording equipment in the foreground, so here it is.

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This is the president of one of the city's rotary clubs, which organize the pond-hockey tournament. We set this shot up because the big mystery was going to be who was going to drop it (ie: Stevo).


I just like the composition, so here it is.


Notably, you can see the cleared-off ice patches at French Fort Cove that were to be used as rinks. In the summer, all that melts, and what you have is a lagoon in the middle of the city, surrounded by trees and trails.

But I digress.

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This lad is Nick Hardy of the Chatham Ironmen, sliding into home to win the pennant for the 2009 NB Senior Baseball League regular season.


They would eventually lose in Game 7 of the finals to the Moncton Mets.

Mainly I like this shot because his helmet is basically in mid air. Nice effect, one of several to come out of the travesty that is my reluctant baseball coverage for the Miramichi Leader.

Best of 2009 part 1

Little late, but here's some of my best shots of 2009.

We'll start with the infamous 'where's the beef? Right there, Mr. Premier' shot.



This has been on the site before, but I've always loved it, and it was hit in the forums, back when we still had a website. To recap, the larger gentleman is a local MLA, John Foran, who'd invited me to tour a local slaughterhouse with the premier, Shawn Graham (left).

I don't think this marvelous, and hungry looking, shot was quite what the portly pol had in mind.

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I don't know any of these people and their deeds, but prolly some of you might.



Left to right are presumed NHL greats Terry O'Reilly, Don Marcotte and Brad Park, next to a set of signed pucks. They were each on corporate sponsorship teams during Miramichi's legendary pond-hockey tournament, but all were Boston Bruins alumni (so I was told). I included this one because I've always like the composition. For the most part, they were distant when I chatted with them for the paper, but very friendly with the local hockey talent. I suppose that's the way it should be.

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Then there's this guy.


He was in town to drop the puck for the pond hockey tournament, and stopped by the local hotel for some kind of function. I was there at the same time, with the NHLers and managed to beg my way close to him, escorted by a handler, to get a shot of him with the son of the city engineer, whose school project he'd just signed.

Whatever you think of the guy, I thought it was pretty neat to have a shot no other media had.

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This was taken in the cockpit of a cadet training glider.


I happened to see if flying around the airbase and once it landed, someone asked if I wanted a go. I was working that Saturday, and wasn't against actually having some fun on the job so, naturally, I said yes. Got some great aerial shots of the city, and I've always liked the composition of this one.

Boom?

I'm a civilized man. The product of thousands of years of refinement and cultural development, a lover of order and civilized peace.

I also like it when similarly civilized men take the time and effort to blow shit up.


Those storage tanks above used to be part of the UPM mill complex in Newcastle. The site's currently being re-developed by a Norwegian solar panel company for use as a polysilicon plant. That means there's a bunch of stuff on the site that they need to get rid of, hence the demolition.

Basically, the whole thing was a massive fiasco ... starting with the fact they were late.

By the time the warning siren wound down, I was on the side of the road, giant telephoto lense in hand trained on the tanks. But when the siren ended, no boom!

So I wait about a minute, and it wasn't until I dropped my lense for just a second (that thing's heavy), that a burst of smoke shot out from the foot of the tanks, followed a second or so later by the ear splitting, heart ratting BOOM! that was the whole reason for standing out there in -10 winds.


I was pressing my autoshoot button down with such intensity it wasn't until five seconds passed when it dawned on me...that sucker was still up.

Not impressed. Nor was the guy from Public Safety who'd been posted near me to make sure everything's hunky dory.

So I waited. Again. For an hour in the freezing winds on the side of the road. Then again with the siren, again with the BOOM! and again with the ever-so-slightly too late camera to snap what we were counting on for our front page.

Nada. Sucker was still up there.

To amuse myself, I shot random pics of demo workers resetting the charges among the decimated foot of the structure.


See all the blown-out concrete and steel rods? Something was happening, all right, but nothing was falling down. Must have been really frustrating. Hell, if I had a ton of explosives and some Norwegian guy was paying me to blow shit up, I'd be a little pissed about this whole situation, too.

So finally, an hour and half after the first blast was supposed to happen, the lads got serious.

The post-siren boom, when it came, was massive.

In the days to come, people would ask me what that was that rattled their window panes. At the time, the shockwave ruffled my trousers like a light breeze and my heart felt like it had been flicked by a plate-mail digit. My ear drums were not happy, and for a second I felt the soul-crushing terror programed into my instincts threaten to emerge.

Nothing. The damned thing was still fucking there.

In the meantime, the wind was getting colder, and while I was taking my battery out to tuck into my jacket to keep the cold from sapping it, one of the trucks the demo folks were using to patrol the inside perimeter of the property stopped in sight of me, and a lad got out and trudged through the old snow to within shouting distance.

"No good," he yelled. "Try again next week."

I left. Never did find out when the next demo was and I seriously didn't care. With the winds getting colder, no boom was worth it.

Spitting image

It's a sodding Llama.

A Llama. You know where I found this thing? In a barn in Black River Bridge, a rural community down the road from the city not far from the south shore of the bay.

A Llama! And apparently, there's a whole farm of Alpacas not far from Saint John. The mind boggles.

The guy who owns said Llama runs a little farm in the area, and has a whole lot of weird animals:

On the right is a miniature Donkey. On the left, slightly smaller than a great dane, is a miniature horse. Lords alone know where he got those.

I was down there for a "live nativity," hence the animals in this shed, subbing in for a manger. The Virgin Mary and the baby saviour actually live in my building.

Marvellous animals, truly creatures of the lord, and it was good to see the youth give them the respect they deserve:


All for now.

Beaubears Island

Well, folks, this here's Beaubears Island:


Used to be a major shipbuilding centre, back in river's heyday. Now it's just a national park, covered in forest regrowth and served by a tour operator who insists on calling himself Captain Dan.

The morning I took this it was snowing in Nelson, the part of the city facing the Island, and the river hadn't quite frozen yet, so I stopped and snapped this. Always loved snowy days, and still haven't quite got used to seeing such a large body of water just freeze over like that.

Welcome to northern NB, VANOC.

And so did the Olympics come to the Miramichi: In a veritable shitstorm of chilly rain and blasted wind.

Reporters from the Leader and the Times and the Telegraph all braved the lousy weather to grab the pics of the runners and of the cauldron lighting ceremony at the high school in Chatham.

Not me, though. No. See the pic below?



I took it from the media van.

The nice, big, shielded, toasty media van. It was pretty much just me and some guy from the Globe and Mail, along with the VANOC folks with their cameras and suchlike. Only one from the paper to draw that metaphorical straw.

When we got through Newcastle, we rushed over to Chatham, where the ceremony itself was being held at one of the high schools. Outside, in the freezing bloody rain, although the stage area was dry enough.

When we stopped there, I got out of the marvellously dry media van, and headed to the field. The guys from the Leader, Times and Telegraph were absolutely soaked to the skin, and freezing as all bloody hell. When I turned up, a faint sprinkling of cold drizzle in my hair and on my jacket, I could see the hatred burning like a frozen furnace in their eyes. I laughed. Then I went back to the media van to warm up.

My memory card was filling faster than a PEI pogey line, but not to worry! With my spectacular super powers, I had looked into the future, and foresaw that would happen, so I got meself a

brand

spanking

new

4gig card. When I ran out of room, I kept shooting and, soon, my

brand

spanking

new

card was filling with pics of Olympic drenchedness. The whir of the shutter was my constant companion, until suddenly it was no more, because, you see, my

brand

spanking

new

4 gig card decided to crash on me.

Just crash. No reason. No jostling of the camera, no extreme temperatures, no water seeping in, just your regular, run-of-the-mill, totally fucking inexplicable memory card crash.

I was pissed. Luckily, a nearby freelancer lent me one of his spares, so I could keep shooting, right up until we got to the end of the bridge. Then they politely booted me out of the media van, along with the freelancer, so I trudged through the freezing drizzle to the nearby Tim's, waiting for pickup.

Ah. The magic of the Olympics.