When Ray’s wife gave me the news of his passing this morning, she said that what she was asking of his friends and family was to go out and do something creative in his memory today. So I did.
Ironically, today’s outing was absolutely typical of the type of outing that Ray and I would often have. The weather was inhospitable at approximately -20C, what I thought I was shooting was not what I ended up shooting, I tried an alternate location that may have had what I was looking for and it was also wrong, but I managed to get an image I liked there anyhow.
Mossleigh, Alberta, 2024-03-04
I was looking for some old buildings that I thought were in Mossleigh, Alberta, for some reason. They were not. I took consolation pictures of Mossleigh Service and my wife and I rolled on. I knew that I had found the buildings I was after in a small town on a trip back from High River, Alberta, and the town of Aldersyde sounded like a good bet.
Nope. That wasn’t it, either. Aldersyde turned out to be highly unphotogenic except for one very appealing and crumbly church that was surrounded by 4,137 no trespassing signs. When there are that many no trespassing signs it’s a sure bet that even sliding so much as a pinky toe on the verboten land will result in someone looking like Elmer Fudd racing out of the building screaming KILL THE WABBIT while shooting at you. No thanks. I got one image from the safety of the road.
On the way back I realized that the buildings I was after were in Blackie, Alberta. It’s kind of appropriate that on a photo shoot done in Ray’s memory, everything kind of got screwed up in the same way as it would have if we had shot together today. I’m okay with that.
The Mossleigh Service images were hurriedly snapped with my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra as there was an unfriendly face watching me from the window of the business. The old church was captured using my Canon EOS 10D with the Canon 17-40mm EF L USM f4 lens.
