Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I received my final set of slides back yesterday from Dwayne’s Photo which was the last place on earth still processing Kodachrome.  A part of me  feels a mournful nostalgia despite the fact that in actuality I had stopped using Kodachrome in any meaningful way years ago.   An incredible amount of history was recorded with this film and we can be grateful because it was the most stable early colour film and many 60 year old slides remain unchanged.

While photographs should be able to speak for themselves it doesn’t hurt to have an understanding of what the artist intended. Yes this is an image of a beaver lodge in an uncommon place, at the same time it is an image of the construction work going on on the other side of the river. All that shields the natural world here from subjugation is a thin band of water.  There is little point in re iterating how we are encroaching on the habitat of animals we are long past that in most cases but the question should be now what do we do.  Do we accept there disappearance from where we live or do we provide some territory for them so that we might retain a connection to them and the land, to our benefit as much as theirs.  This year near my home two areas of  wild grasses and flowers I photographed have been cleared for a new shopping mall and a townhouse development surely displacing whatever small mammals and birds lived there and the owls that preyed on them.

I snapped two photos of this street recently and decided to include all the people into one image after the fact.  It alters the sense of how we occupy the same spaces but at different times.  With a little forethought I would have taken even more images.  This technique could just as easily be used to remove people.  This is a crop from the center of the image but the overall resolution is relatively low anyway as the negatives are just 35mm captures with an Olympus XA.

This is a view of the tailings pond of the Highland Valley copper mine, euphemistically refered to as the valley impoundment.  As you may notice I’ve titled this as number one, I intend to paint others including hopefully this site in the future.

Detail from Highland Valley Copper Mine (I)

I wasn’t thinking at the time about highway 416 (Veterans Memorial Highway) but the colour does remind me of a poppy somewhat.

If density were a criteria for choosing a camera this one would be a winner.  Well it still is a winner but more so because it is a great camera.  OK I admit I say that about many of the cameras I shoot with, but that’s often why I choose them.  Some of the fun quirks of this camera are that you need to operate the film advance lever twice per exposure to cock the shutter and advance the film, the back comes right off to load the film and the shutter release is a lever beside the lens.  Did I mention it is very dense.  Everything is packed into a tiny solid package, I can walk around just holding the camera in the palm of my hand.  There is no light meter and I didn’t have one with me so all these images are “exposurtimations“.  Hey it’s my blog I can coin words if I want.