Me with my mother Evelyn on the Toronto Harbourfront in the year 2000.
A test of the panorama stitching addon in Luminar Neo. This photo editor has steadily improved over the last few years and now has become a very useful tool. My first attempt at gluing together the eight handheld telephoto frames that went into this image did not go very well but the Luminar addon managed the trick. I couldn’t resist fiddling with Neo’s other goodies and swapped out a dull blue sky for a more Mad Maxed look. I did leave the little road signs in the foreground brush intact. In my previous Uluru panorama (click here) I edited them out.
Me and Jacob at a Toronto in vitro clinic party in 1992. Jacob was an in vitro baby. His mother suffered years of infertility problems, including an ectopic pregnancy that resulted in one of her fallopian tubes being removed. She was overjoyed when the in vitro treatments worked, resulting in Jacob’s birth. Of course, many couples were in the same boat, so around a year after, many babies were born; people were invited back to the clinic to celebrate.
Öber’s cynicism extends to all domains.
Carl Sullivan, grinding away in the thin section lab in the basement of the University of Alberta geology building. What we do becomes entangled with the memories of others. I cannot think of Carl without thinking of thin sections. For Carl, grinding sections was a job: something to pay the bills and save up for his treasured trips to the coast. Carl is gone, but thin sections remain entangled with him, and when you read this when I am gone, the entanglement will live in you.
My grandmother Helen as I mostly remember her. Shot near her Livingston home in the summer of 1979. At this point in her life, Frank had died and she was still adjusting to living alone.
The trees on or near the boggy approach to Gros Morne’s cliffs were super gnarly.
New York from the Statue of Liberty Island.
The prize exhibit in the Seven Keys Lodge key collection is Hitler’s so-called house key. My bullshit detector went off when I saw this. How would you check? Even if this key opened the alleged door it’s supposed to it in no way implies Hitler ever used it. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there is a minor Hitler house key industry that produces fake keys to sell to WWII collectors and other credulous buffoons. Always assume it’s crap until there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The highlands at 3900 meters of Rocky Mountain National Park are surprisingly walkable.
Looking suspicious in the Seven Keys Lodge key room. Some of the keys, like Adolf Hitler’s Berchtesgaden key, set off my bullshit detector.
Mali lunching in Steamboat Springs.
Green goofs grinning.
One of Frank’s touring ruin shots. I have no idea where this is, but I am adding this slide to "Frank Shots" because it’s typical of my dad’s photos. He didn’t mind people in his pictures and made no effort to frame them out. This contrasts with my first slides. I worked hard to get the naked apes out; in retrospect, leaving them in results in more interesting pictures fifty years later.
Mali by the tethered balloon cage.
A bold squirrel Mali and I spotted while reading tree labels in the Kleiner Park arboretum. I’ve been to Kleiner many times, but I never noticed the tree labels. I don’t see a lot of things.
Facing reality.
The little black clamp in the lower left frame can attach cell phones to optical gadgets like telescopes, binoculars, and microscopes. These test images were shot with 10x50 binoculars through the glass of a window. The results are soft (as expected) but I’m sure if I used a tripod outdoors and fired off half a dozen shots I could get some decent images.
My mother and Mali just before boarding a Toronto Harbor tour boat. It was on this trip that Mali and my mother met.
Me on a porch in 1956. I was a favorite photographic model of my grandmother Hazel in my early cute days. Now cameras refuse to focus on my age-ravaged visage.
Belaboring the obvious.
On the top of a Rocky Mountain alpine plateau at over 3600 meters these capped rock pillars got my attention. The distinct rock layers are hard to ignore.
The Seven Keys Lodge has a well-known key collection. Some 25,000 keys are hanging in the bar. Some of the keys allegedly belonged to the famous and infamous. It’s a distinct gimmick.
Salt Lake from Salt Lake Park. Our little rocky mountain road trip hit a snag. While driving Highway W318 in northeastern Utah one of our front tires went flat. We were about 50 kilometers from Flaming Gorge and literally in the middle of nowhere. It was our first flat with “Chunky” (our car’s name) so I got out expecting to replace a tire only to discover that Chunky was not hauling a spare. Fortunately, a few people stopped, and we caught a pickup ride to Flaming Gorge Resort – our day's destination. We called roadside assistance and arranged a tow. When the tow truck arrived the following morning, we rode out to our car with the driver. We loaded Chunky on the tow truck’s bed and then drove to the nearest dealer in Draper. The dealer was busy and didn’t have the tires Chunky needed, so we had two unplanned days in Salt Lake City. We’ve been to Salt Lake many times and didn’t have anything on the agenda, so we drove out to the lake in a rental to check the water levels. They’re up! The moral of the story: don’t drive in the hinterland without a spare.
Me on my first trip to the Black Hills in the 1970s. I am best taken out of context.
During the years my parents were separated, my father, Frank, bounced around the world. Sometime during his travels, he passed by the Giza pyramids in Egypt. One of his old Kodachrome slides shows the Sphinx and two of the great pyramids. It’s a much better shot than my distant image (click here) taken many years earlier. Dad always had an interest in ancient monuments. Most of it came from reading Herodotus in high school and college. I suspect he enjoyed studying history a lot more than engineering. My mother enjoyed telling me about him throwing his calculus text across the room in a fit of frustration during his first year at the School of Mines (now Montana Tech) in Butte.
Four wheeling into the game park.
People often hold onto funeral notices. This one is for my great-grandfather William Evert Baker. I never met William; he died before I was born. You’ll notice that someone, probably my grandmother Helen, has corrected the last name of William’s wife. It was Mary Maier. Mary is a ghost. I know she immigrated from Germany, and I’ve seen an old letter to my grandparents that identifies the town she came from, but I have never found a picture of Mary. I’ve located images of all my other great-grandparents but not Mary.
In the early 1970s, I spent two summers working in the oil fields around Slave Lake Alberta. Before leaving the town forever, I snapped this picture of the cemetery gate. For some reason, I have always liked this shot. There was something about it that kept catching my eye. The original color negative is a bland exposure with an above-average defect count. I’ve made several attempts at tuning this image, but nothing echoed my mood. Today, after reinstalling Luminar Neo (a recent update broke it) I tried again, mostly to test Luminar Neo, and produced this moody rendering.
The moon shot through my iPhone clamped to 10x50 binoculars. When using 3x iPhone magnification on binoculars you get about 30x magnification. The quality isn’t great, but I had fun spinning the color palette to generate this false-color image.
Mali applying makeup on our wedding day.
My good friend Carl Sullivan drinking tea with Mali in Georgia’s Calgary front yard in July of 2006. Carl died broke in early 2015 from pancreatic cancer. He spent his last days in a charity hospice in northern Calgary. I spoke with him a few weeks before his death. It took him some time to recognize my voice and remember who I was. It was a sad final phone call to a dear friend. I know why I didn’t post this image years ago. It’s a bland photo. I’m too far from the subjects and neither Carl nor Mali are well-posed, but from my current (2023) perspective, this is one of my favorite shots from that trip. You change your opinions about your photos. Technical excellence becomes almost moot with time.
The Soda Springs accidental geyser. The geyser is a drilling accident that got out of hand. Nowadays the geyser is controlled (hence the on-the-hour schedule) but the town decided they liked the colorful terraces and turned an accident into a nice town park.
I had never heard of Grand Lake Colorado until I drove into it. It’s on the western side of the Rocky Mountain National Park. It’s a delightful park town with, wait for it, a grand lake. Most towns adjacent to or in national parks are well known. Everyone knows Banff, Jackson, West Yellowstone, and so on but somehow Grand Lake flies under the tourist radar. In my correct opinion, it compares favorably to better-known park towns.
Enjoying the alpine view.
Last week we drove over to Colorado to visit Rocky Mountain National Park. It’s one of the few Western national parks I hadn't seen. As expected, it’s very scenic but busy. This is one of the parks that’s trying to control visitor traffic. During the summer, they use timed entry between 9 am and 2 pm. You must reserve a slot online if you want to enter the park. We didn’t have an entry time, but you can get in if you arrive early in the morning. Rocky Mountain has the highest overall elevation of any US park and the road through it is very much like the Beartooth Highway in Montana. Rocky Mountain is easily among the top five scenic drives in the US park system.
My maternal grandmother, Hazel's family, in the 1930s. You can find two of my great-grandparents (the old man and woman on the edges in the front row), my grandmother Hazel (seated in the front row beside the old man), and a slew of my grandaunts and great-uncles. Everyone has long since died, but here they are, gazing out at a century none of them expected to see. The original print is in excellent condition but is not dated. Hazel was born in 1914 and looks to be in her twenties here, so I'm guessing this was taken in the later 1930s.
Aileen and Steve opening Christmas presents in our MIS Iran bungalow in 1967.
Richard Moore is the kid mouthing a cigarette in a misguided attempt to look cool. If you set out to create an uncool individual somebody like Richard would emerge. Richard was a good friend in Beirut, and about a decade after this shot was taken, he committed suicide by firing a shotgun into his head. Two of my Beirut friends committed suicide.
When relatives die you often inherit odd documents. This is a 1933 layoff notice for my maternal grandfather Gert. He did not pass through the Great Depression unscathed. I wonder why this document survived: Gert held onto it, then his wife Hazel, then my mother, and now me. Gert was a proud worker who always excelled at what he was doing. It must have stung to be a victim of a bullshit euphemism like “account reduction.”
My father, Frank Burdick, beside a European tour bus in the summer of 1967. I vaguely remember him handing me his Signet 35mm rangefinder camera and asking me to take his picture. So, I probably snapped this shot in Spain or Greece, making it one of my earliest 35mm images. Dad was 34 in 1967. Though I saw him turn into an old hobbling man and was at his bedside when he died, this is how my memory sees him.
Helen, Josh, Ruth, Jacob, and Ian toasting Ruth’s Red Horse Lake cottage shortly after Christmas in 2009. Around this time, Ruth purchased a cottage property on which she later built a nice cottage. Much has changed since 2009. Helen endured several years during which she coped poorly with her bipolar disorder. Josh, Helen’s boyfriend at the time, is out of the picture. He was a computer consultant and eventually had to leave Kingston to make some money. Ruth, happily celebrating here, is now in a memory care ward in Kingston. She’s been diagnosed with dementia and is now dealing with cognitive impairments. Her memory care is being paid for by the proceeds from the sale of the very property everyone is celebrating in this picture. Jacob was struggling in his first year at Carleton in Ottawa and would later leave. Finally, Ian (the fellow giving me side-eye) died as a broke alcoholic in a Hong Kong hospital in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not from COVID but from years of self-abuse. As for myself. In a few months, I would be summarily fired from my bullshit job in Indiana and forced to move on to another, somewhat less bullshitty job, in Missouri. Life remains nasty brutish and short so suck it up princesses.
There’s something about watching movies in drive-ins that even the finest of IMAX cinemas cannot improve on. If the movie sucked, you could watch the stars. It’s a shame drive-ins are vanishing; I will miss them.
The eyes have it.
The most pleasant surprise of our Rocky Mountain Road trip was Fossil Butte National Monument in southern Wyoming. This monument is off the beaten path. The monument visitor center is excellent, especially if you are interested in 50-million-year-old freshwater fish fossils. The bottom image of this collage is the end of the visitor center patio timeline. The timeline runs for about 80 meters along two sides of the center. The count starts in the Precambrian, more than 500 million years ago, and runs to the present. As you can see, human history barely registers on this scale. Contrary to popular sky fairy manuals, the Earth did not form, and life did not evolve for the benefit of clueless naked apes.
The lobby in the Seven Keys Lodge had several interesting old newspapers and magazines. This is a page from a 1921 Estes Park newspaper. Note the fully notarized and public disclosure of the Estes Park Bank. When have you ever seen a fully notarized public asset and liability disclosure for any modern bank? The reason we have so little respect for modern institutions is simply because they have so little respect for us. Apparently, in the roaring 1920s, some banks felt compelled to level with the public. Contrast that with the "Wells FuckYous" of today.
Weather coming in from the east.
What’s the artist implying here? It cannot be that our phones are slowly bleeding the life out of us.
My father, Frank (the man with glasses), getting a congratulatory handshake from the winner of the MIS Iran Golf Club Tournament in 1968. I vaguely remember this event. Dad and this fellow posted the lowest scores in the tournament's opening rounds, and following golfing tradition, played another round to decide the winner. I recall watching them play down a barren MIS fairway from a hillside. The MIS golf club did not have grass, and the greens were a mixture of oil and sand. You don't need grass for golf. Dad lost, and I remember telling him, “Well, you came in second.” He just grinned.
My sister caught me walking near the famous “Rostam” relief cliff carving in Iran when we visited in 1966. Of course, the relief is not Rostam. Rostam is a character from Ferdowsi’s famous epic poem the Shahnameh.
Steve me and Dad at Baalbek Lebanon in 1967.
Bob Blaxley in the basement of the University of Alberta’s Geology building in 1972. This was smack dab in the middle of his “he who shall remain nameless” period. The “he who shall remain nameless” moniker was bestowed by our mutual friend Carl who worked across the hall in the same basement.
Frank standing in his Livingston yard in 1967. He is a year younger here than I am right now (2023). Frank lived for another ten years and died of lung cancer shortly after my first marriage. We share a penchant for half-assed lawn mowing. I can’t remember how many times I saw him roll over this little lawn with his push mower. Tall grass annoyed him. He cut until his failing health forced him to stop.
Political consulants lend a hand.
Some of my favorite panoramas have been built from images I snapped many years ago. This shot of New York derives from three scanned film color negatives I fired off on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty way back in January of 2005. I probably tried and failed to stitch the frames and then forgot about the scans until yesterday. Modern panorama software often succeeds on frames that could not be stitched decades ago. Yet another reason to save your duds. They may turn into treasures years from now.
Someone is indulging in clever deceptive advertising.
Rocky Mountain National Park highlands.
In Steamboat Springs we spent about an hour in Strawberry Park Hot Springs. We were underwhelmed. The hot springs are too large for their primary hot water source. The water pools are not replenished fast enough to avoid the build-up of algae. Lava and Thermopolis hot springs are much better if you’re looking to soak in hot water. Hot springs made sense before modern plumbing, now they’re just decadent. Strawberry is a good example. After five pm it becomes "clothing optional." Yee gads. Just what we need obese Karens and Chads frolicking in the nude.
Three hummingbirds squabbling over a feeder. They don’t share well.
The "Karen" pejorative has spread to road signs. I love how these things take hold. You know they’re hitting home when you read butthurt posts about how calling bitchy women (and now transwomen) "Karens" is "problematic." You know what’s really problematic, constant whining and bitching about tiresome trivialities.
