McLean's Auto Salvage

Hello again my friends!  I am, as usual, a little late on this one, but I wanted to share some pictures from a recent photo adventure that I went on.  It was a couple weeks ago, but I'm only now getting around to posting these because, well, I'm very lazy.

Dad and I went out with Brian and his Band of Merry Photographers, many of whom were with us for the Burwash adventure that I posted about a couple months ago.  This particular trip was a little closer to home though.  We went out to McLean's Auto Salvage, near Rockwood (outside of Guelph.)  It's quite an interesting place; from what I can gather they've been operating as an auto salvage yard for decades, but they aren't doing a ton of business anymore.  It's a huge piece of land, and the old cars are scattered through various fields which are separated by small stands of trees.  The result is a forest of old, derelict vehicles, many of which predate me.  It's become a real attraction for local photographers like my friends and travelling companions who have a passion for the old and abandoned.  What's really fantastic about this place is that the owners are quite happy to let us wander around their property taking photos of the old treasures scattered throughout.  In searching for information of McLean's before we went out there I found several other site from groups who went out there to hone their craft.  What started as a couple guys running a salvage yard has turned into a photographer's playground, and through that the owners have become real patrons of the arts.  I wouldn't blame them for a moment if they wanted to start charging an entrance fee to reap a little profit from this growing attraction, but no suggestion of the sort was ever made.

I've collected some of my favourite shots from the day and I'll put them here for you all to enjoy.  As usual I've scaled these down to prevent taking all day uploading them, but if you'd like a full-sized image I'm always happy to provide those upon request.  Enjoy!

It's funny and/or ridiculous, but I think this is my favourite shot from the day... and the salvage is entirely in the out-of-focus background.

Okay, something rusty, that's more like it.

I love this old Ford.

This was a common site throughout the day.  Any car with its windows at least mostly intact seemed to act as a kind of greenhouse, and the plans were loving it.

As you can see it was a beautiful day.

Safety is serious business.

Another greenhouse car.  Some of these even had a bit of condensation on the windows.  It's pretty obvious that the plants in this car were in their element.

I liked the moss all over the seat.  Euphy has informed me that this is, in fact, "gross."  I stand corrected.

A symbol of a long-lost era.  Even more so now.

There were some newer vehicles on the property; testament to the fact that this is still a functioning salvage yard.  Dad dug around in a minivan and found an incredible series of old books.  We actually tracked down one of the owners and bought them from him.

I love the irony of this sticker.

Got a clue?

I'm pretty sure everyone who has ever visited here has taken a picture of this car.  The eagle-eyed among you will notice that there is a TREE growing clear through the roof.  The eventual fate of all things we build.  Nature prevails.

There was some pretty heavy equipment laying around the site.

So there you have it folks.  Hope you enjoyed my effort.  I certainly enjoyed getting those shots.  It was a great opportunity for me to practice my photography.  In fact, that was the first time I threw my camera in full Manual mode and just took the time to play with the settings and get things (occasionally) right.  All in all it was a great learning experience.

I've been playing around a lot with my new camera.  On Brian's suggestion I've even been taking it downtown to work with me and heading out to shoot on my lunch break.  I'll make a post in the near future with a collection of the photos I've manage to capture in my practice sessions.  Until then, be safe, be happy, and enjoy this lovely Canada Day!

Burwash

Hi Everybody!

Remember this place?  I know, nothing at all in 2013... not a spectacular display of the blogger's art I'm afraid.  I recently got back from a weekend photography trip and I thought that I'd resurrect this old blog as a way of sharing a few of my photos.  I've been in the (bad) habit of only occasionally throwing a few photos up on Facebook and calling it a day, but I know that not everyone books faces, so this is probably a better way to reach more of you.  Also I think if you post a photo on Facebook they own every creative thought you have from that point forward.  I really should read those user agreements...

Anyway!  Like I said, I just got back from a trip that focused entirely on photography.  Those of you who know my good buddy Richard will know that his dad is quite the photographer, and he regularly puts together photography expeditions.  Brian was kind enough to invite my dad and I out to their 2nd annual trip to Burwash, a now-extinct town outside of Sudbury.  It was home to Camp Bison, a minimum security prison that shut down in the 70s.  There's no trace of the town, but the shell of the old prison still remains and makes for a very interesting subject.

I've just picked up a new camera, a Pentax K-5 II, and this trip was an amazing opportunity to start getting used to it.  I took quite a few shots, but I'll share a handful of my favourite ones with you here.  These are all shrunk down so that they don't take all night to upload, but I'm more than happy to provide full sized images if anyone happens to take a fancy to one.

The landscape is undeniably Northern Ontario.

Approach to the prison...

...which has seen better days.

The mattresses could use a bit of patching up.

Nothing even remotely creepy about this hallway.

Something to keep in mind if you're planning to visit this place - there are holes in the floor.  At this time of year everything in the (completely dark) basement was frozen over, though I'm not sure how deep these holes are, or how thick the ice is.  I almost went through one that was partially covered in plywood.

I didn't stop for a haircut.

As Richard so ably demonstrates, the floors of the lower levels were under varying amounts of water.  What you can't really tell is that there was a layer of ice under the water.  Our rubber boots kept us comfortable, but you always had to watch your step.

Some commie at the bar.

I liked the reflection I got with this shot.

I thought the moss reclaiming this table was cool.  Euphy informed me that I was wrong and that it is, in fact, gross.

We got a few breaks in the clouds, which was awesome.  Just the fact that we didn't get rained on was a fantastic stroke of luck for this time of year.

Not sure how many more winters this poor old building has left before the outer layer of bricks is completely stripped away.

I love the colour in this shot.

Richard, Dad, and I climbed up to a high point of land to get this great perspective of the prison.

Up on the second floor there was an old theater.  You can actually get up into what used to be the projection room and look down into this room.  There's still a bit of the old parquet flooring left.

Despite a 5km hike from a point that was already in the middle of nowhere the place was covered in graffiti.  Most of it poorly done.  I'm not sure what kind of person carries paint all that way just to spray a crude rendition of a penis onto a crumbling wall, but I have a number of disparaging opinions about their mental state.

I love the tenacity of these little trees.  Sadly, what we're likely looking at here is the death of this building.  I strongly suspect that these guys will eventually grow large enough to bring the roof down, and I don't image the rest of the building will last very long after that.

I appear to have forgotten about the building I was standing on.  That Northern landscape is too much to resist.  I very much want to return in the Fall to get the leaves when they're changing colour.

A couple of bricks appear to have fallen on this roof.  A testament to how well it was built.

It was pitch-black in the basement, but Richard held a flashlight for me so that I could attempt a few long-exposure shots.  I love this kind of thing.

So there you have it folks.  I hope you enjoyed my little show.  If anyone would like to see the whole collection I'd be happy to give a presentation.  I had a great time out there and would happily go up that way again.  I was fortunate enough to be travelling with a great group of guys who were more than willing to share their photos and their experience with me and it made for an amazing trip.  Also, my new camera rocks.

I won't pretend that I'm going to get back to the prolific writing that marked the peak of this blog's life, but I'll try to get a few more things up in the future.  Euphy has asked me to get some of our wedding photos up, so you can expect at least one more post in the near future.  For now, be well, and I hope to see you all again soon.

That's a Wrap

Hey there everyone!  Sorry about the brief post yesterday, but as I mentioned, I was feeling pretty under the weather.  A handful of over-the-counter medications and a good night's sleep later and I'm feeling much more like myself again.  We're at the airport now, chilling out in the Priority Pass Lounge, which feels very appropriate as this is the site of the very first photo I took on this vacation.  First though, I think I should recap yesterday to make up for my lack discussion on the subject last night.

We kicked things off early yesterday, not so much out of any precise schedule but more out of the knowledge that we were going to be cramming a lot of sightseeing into our last full day in China.  After breakfast we grabbed a ferry to Macao.  I showed you a photo earlier of the crossing at Gongbei Port, which is done on foot and is entirely land-based.  However, I was informed that the line-ups there are horrific, and that it's actually much quicker to head to the river and take a ferry across.  I can't speak to any line-ups at Gongbei, but there were very few people taking the ferry, and they run every half an hour, so it really was a very speedy process.

Macao is a former Portuguese colony that was returned to China in the 90s, and much like Hong Kong it's considered a Special Administrative Region that still maintains its own passport, customs, immigration, currency, etc.  There's still a fair bit of Portuguese on the signs, but Cantonese is the de facto language.  As we left the ferry terminal I snapped this shot:

At the time I was just grabbing a shot of huge volume of parked scooters along that wall, but I didn't realize how typical a shot that would turn out to be.  The buildings were very typical of that side of the river, and the cluster of scooters, I would soon find, was a small one.  I think there's a scooter for every man, woman and child in the city of Macao.  Wasn't long before I figured out why either.  Euphy called up a friend of her mom who maintains a residence in Macao, and she sent her driver over to pick us up.  Oh la la.  It's nice to have wealthy friends isn't it?  We headed out and I snapped a quick shot of the road:

I know that a picture taken from the back seat looking through the front windshield is hardly ideal, but you can see here the narrowness of the street we were on.  The car barely fit down there.  Also you can see that they drive on the left side of the road like a bunch of savages!

I was amazed at just how many roads there are just like the one shown above.  Two lanes are by far the rarity here, and as the driver deftly navigated the twisting alleyways with only a few inches to spare on either side of the vehicle I decided that a scooter would probably be a substantially more comfortable way to travel in Macao.  In our time there we rarely saw any roads that would allow travel in excess on 50 km/h, not because of the posted limit, but rather just narrowness of the roads, and the traffic.  Unless you had kids to shuttle around a large vehicle would be largely pointless.

Our first stop was St. Paul's Ruin, which is a really fascinating sight.  It's the front of a really old church.

Yup, I said "the front" on purpose, that's all that's left.  The plaque inside informed us that there was once a mighty cathedral here, but after it burned down for the third time they just didn't bother putting it back up, and left the façade, which was the only thing still standing.  I guess God really loved that church.  The image of this church has become something of a symbol of Macao; I'm not really sure I'd want something my vengeful deity had thrice smote being symbolic of where I live, but I guess that's why I'm not from Macao.

We stopped outside the ruins for a brief snack of egg tarts.  I've had egg tarts dozens of times back in Toronto as they're available at virtually every Chinese restaurant or food stalls in the Pacific Mall.  I've never been that thrilled with them honestly, although I attribute that partially to the fact that the bright yellow filling always makes me think that I'm about to have a lemon tart, and all food is a bit disappointing to me when compared to a lemon tart.  I mention all of this because after visiting China I will, without question, never be able to enjoy one of those little egg tarts in Toronto again; they're SO MUCH BETTER here!  The best by far, was the one we had outside St. Paul's Ruins.  The primary difference between the Chinese versions and the ones I always get in Toronto is that here they either bake them for longer, or actively torch the tops, because they're heavily caramelized on top, and that makes them taste fantastic.  The Macao versions (where, interestingly, they refer to them as Portuguese Egg Tarts) rose above the rest based on the fantastic quality of the pastry that contained it.  No stodgy frozen tart crusts here, just light, crispy pastry cradling caramelized egg filling.  Damn, now I want an egg tart.

Okay, moving on before I get hungry.

Our next stop was Macao Tower.

As I'm sure you can tell from the photo, it's a tall sightseeing tower.  Virtually a necessity in any large city.  We went up and took in the views, which really were spectacular.

I don't know if it was the day, the time of day, or some other factor that I'm not considering, but it was empty up there.  No line for the elevator.  Hardly any humans scurrying around the observation deck.  It was awesome!

What makes Macao Tower particularly interesting is that they've got a bungee jumping platform on the top which is the tallest commercial bungee in the world.  Pretty exciting stuff, and it looked like they were running a pretty solid operation there, so it would have been an interesting opportunity for me to finally try a bungee jump, but I opted out.  Bungee jumping, as interesting as it would be, always ends up seeming like poor value for money when I actually stop and consider it.  Well over one hundred dollars to throw myself off a building.  Nah.  Also, my stomach was bothering me, which is probably less than ideal for that kind of activity.

We headed from there across one of the many huge bridges that connects the sections of Macao and into the casino district.   Macao is (quite rightly) called the Asian Las Vegas, and just like their American namesake they've got a cluster of some casinos that are towering monuments to wealthy excess.

Our first stop was the Galaxy, and then we checked out, interestingly, The Venetian.  Sound familiar to Las Vegas fans?  It should, because it's modelled after the Sin City edition in exquisite detail.

The photo above should be shockingly familiar to anyone who has ever visited the Las Vegas edition of this hotel.

After a bit of gawking at the ludicrously large hotel/casino combos we grabbed lunch at Portuguese restaurant, which was an exciting change of pace.  After lunch we made our way over to the ferry terminal and booked passage to Hong Kong.

My first impression of Hong Kong was a grim one.  For the sake of common decency I won't go into details but suffice it to say that the facilities in Hong Kong's ferry terminal could use some attention... and this is coming from someone who just spent three weeks in mainland China.  Somebody invite the British back, this place still has some hospitality lessons to learn.

Practicality dictated that our first stop in Hong Kong should be our hotel, so we grabbed a cab and headed there.  After the stunning room in Zhuhai it was a bit of a shock to check in to our Hong Kong broom closet.

Yup, that's the whole thing right there.

It was a bummer because we were originally slated to stay with a friend of Euphy's Dad in what would have been an incredibly interesting accommodation since the friend in question is a two-star General (equivalent to Canadian rank, I'm told) in the Chinese army stationed in Hong Kong.  He'd invited us to stay at his house on the base, which would have been incredibly cool.  Unfortunately we had to grab a hotel at the last minute when there was some resistance to him bringing a white guy into a Chinese military base.  Understandable, certainly, but a bummer all the same.

After we dropped off our bags we headed to Hong Kong's Times Square.  There were some tall buildings, tv screens, and about eleventy billion people.  That's what I remember anyway.

We went into the main shopping centre that supports the square, and wandered around for a bit.  It's a giant bastion of American consumerism, a tower monument to designer brands.  We weren't in there long before I had a rather comical conversation with Euphy where I reminded her that not only am I not really into expensive boutique shopping, but also she's REALLY not into expensive boutique shopping.  It was sort of a silly place for either of us to be, so beat a hasty retreat to the subway and headed to some place with more our style of shopping.

The huge throngs of people in a typical Chinese street market always make me uneasy, but I'm usually able to get over it and lose myself amongst the vibrant lighting, a stalls selling odd, quirky goods that are far more interesting to me than any designer sunglasses.  We went wild for quite awhile in there until the oppressive humidity started to wear me down.  We stopped for dinner, but it was a downhill slide for me at that point, and I ended up feeling pretty poor for the rest of the evening.

We made a brief stop along the shore of Kowloon, looking back at the island so I could get some pictures, and then headed back to the hotel.

The General who we were going to stay with stopped by for a visit, but I wasn't able to chat with him much since everything had to be translated through Euphy, which is a laborious process, and I was beginning to feel genuinely awful at that point, so putting on a smile and engaging in some chit chat was becoming difficult. It was a real shame too because he seemed like a really interesting guy.  Something tells me that you don't get to be a General in the Chinese army without accumulating a couple stories.  I'm holding out hope that someday I will get another opportunity to sit down and have a talk with him... maybe I can even learn a bit of Mandarin before then.

Well, as I said before, I was able to get myself a good night's sleep and I'm feeling on the mend now.  Good thing too since I'm less than two hours now from getting on a plane.  We had breakfast this morning with Euphy's Dad and then said our goodbyes.  We had to check out of the hotel at 11:30, and our flight's at 5:05, which means being at the airport around 2:00.  With that little time, and needing to leave a fair amount of time just to get to the airport (or anywhere in this city if it involves even a short cab ride) we decided that there was no point in seeking out adventure.  We grabbed a cab and headed for the airport express train station.

The airport train in Hong Kong is a fantastic service.  They've got a train that runs from the island out to the airport, but they've put check-in counters for the major airlines in the station.  It was lovely being able to check our baggage and get our boarding passes before we even got on the train to go to the airport, really made that journey a lot more convenient.  We arrived at the airport much earlier than necessary, but it wasn't so bad given that we'd already checked our bags and knew that we had a ludicrous amount of time to get through security.  So we wandered around, had a drink, shopped for a little bit, and then casually meandered over to the security check.  The lines were short and it didn't take long before we were in the gate area.  We stopped in at the Priority Pass Lounge and got some food, and now we're just relaxing here and enjoying their WiFi.

So I guess that's it.  After so long on the road it's going to be incredibly difficult going back to a normal work week, but I'll be happy to see everyone back home.  It's been an amazing journey, and one that I'll remember for a lifetime.  It's hard to forget anything that you've taken over 2000 pictures of...