Category: Short Subjects

Camrest Motel Camrose

Camrest Motel: In the Heart of Rose City

Welcome to the Camrest Motel, Camrose Alberta and please enjoy your stay. It’s a budget friendly kind of place, down by the tracks, in the old part of town and a little run down. You know, it’s the digs you might find us staying at when on the road and...

Mine Rails Reused

Makeshift-a-Palooza: Mine Rails Reused

When money’s tight necessity spawns creative solutions. No one was more dirt poor than the lowly coal miner of old and when something was needed, they upcycled, recycled or salvaged something and made due. Or you did without and those are the only options. Here’s a simple and straight to...

Historic Revelstoke Courthouse

Historic Revelstoke Courthouse (1913)

The impressive structure shown here is found in a pretty-as-a-postcard mountain community out in British Columbia. The place is Revelstoke, our subject dates back to 1913 and built in the the Neoclassical style popular of the era, around the world, but not something you’d expect to find out this way....

Mount Begbie Revelstoke

In the Shadow of Mount Begbie

It happened last summer and memories of this amazing adventure filled journey remain fresh. Imagine a week of epic fun, times a million, spent camping out and playing in the Shadow of Mount Begbie in Revelstoke British Columbia. We hiked, we explored, we searched out history, abandoned things too, we...

Calgary Christian Assembly

Two Buildings in Inglewood

Two Buildings in Inglewood: one photographed solely because of its a gaudy pink colour (doing Barbie proud) and the second recalled from childhood memories. These were captured while walking about one of Calgary’s older neighbourhoods and the former’s a church and the other a home, but in the past also...

Canal Flats BC Mill

Random Pick (x3): Magnesium Chloride

The random pick subject today is…Magnesium Chloride. What the? Where do we start? First, these photos were never really meant to be shared, but taken just for us, then by chance were picked for this silly series. We literally close our eyes, select an image (or three) from our collection...

Jellyfish of Comox Harbour

Jellyfish of Comox Harbour

Jellyfish of Comox Harbour: wasting away the day wandering the marina and in search of interesting things to photograph. There’s personal craft, fishing boats and these are the reason for our visit, but one can’t help be mesmerized by the large number of odd translucent creatures floating about. They’re a...

A Thing for Trains

Random Pick: A Thing for Trains (II)

Sometimes we’ll just watch trains and if any show up that’s great and if there’s none that’s fine too. We’ll pick a spot somewhere within sight of the tracks, camera in hand, drop a blanket, bring a book, and perhaps a little snack. Then we wait. Sometime the efforts are...

Tranquille BC Sanatorium

Random Post: Tranquille BC Sanatorium

Tranquille BC Sanatorium near Kamloops: opened in 1907 to treat tuberculosis, closed as a mental health facility about 75 years later, mostly empty ever since and said to be haunted. It’s on private land and in talking with an employee(?) of the agricultural firm working on the property, the entire...

Kaslo Hotel Kaslo BC

Kaslo Hotel Kaslo British Columbia

We’ve driven through beautiful Kaslo British Columbia countless times but any stops made in the community have always been brief in nature. It’s odd, because it has all the traits of a place we’d really like to get to know, yet here we are. There’s so much history and it’s...

End of Track

Random Pick: End of Track

Random Pick: It’s just as the title suggests and we simply close our eyes, select a previously unpublished photo and post it here. Be it good or bad, profound or embarrassing cringe. So far it’s been pretty decent stuff, but one day it’ll be awful and we just know it....

Take an Alberta Break Grain Hoppers

Take an Alberta Break Grain Cars

These Alberta Government grain cars have been roaming the rails for forty+ years and approaching retirement, but a select number have found a new home on the Battle River Railway. While looking worn out, and graffiti covered, they’re still serviceable and help alleviate car shortages on the line. That they’re...

Meadow Creek BC Billy Clark's Cabin

Meadow Creek BC Billy Clark’s Cabin

Meadow Creek BC: stopping in a small town museum while on a backroad adventure in the remote Lardeau region. It was early May and the place had yet to open for the season, but we could still wander the property to view outside exhibits. That’s a good start and we’re...

Small Town Mini-Storage

Small Town Mini-Storage (It’s Secure!)

This former mobile home (or maybe it’s a retired construction/oilfield bunkhouse) might not seem like the most secure building for such a purpose, yet it didn’t stop a certain entrepreneur in this prairie community. Presenting small town mini-storage, satisfying a need with an economical and gloriously makeshift solution. These “relocatable...

Main and Railway or 50th and 50th

Main and Railway or 50th and 50th?

Main and Railway or 50th and 50th? In most Alberta communities one or the other usually marked the most important intersection there in downtown. Or what was the most important – things change but names remain. In some communities it was one then the other (almost always the former to...

Jack's Shoe Store

Closed: Jack’s Shoe Store

We’re looking at Jack’s Shoe Store, in business as long as anyone can remember but now just another shuttered store in another small prairie town. It’s a trend common out in rural parts and one by one they close and the local economic base shrinks yet again. Rinse and repeat....

Beachwood Estates High River AB

Beachwood Estates High River Postscript

In this piece we’re revisiting Beachwood Estates High River Alberta, a once thriving community built in a flood zone. A known flood zone – anyone find that funny? Then guess what, the river flooded – the watercourse does have High in its title after all. This happened in 2013, and...

Misty Mountains Kananaskis

Random Pick: The Misty Mountains

Here’s another photo from our archives picked completely at random and presented here in all its glory. We close our eyes, point and pray what ever is chosen is worth seeing. So far it’s worked. It has be previously unpublished, but otherwise all images, good, bad or even cringe-worthy, are...

Farm Gate of Bed Parts

Farm Gate

In this post we’re looking at a lowly farm gate. Have we hit bottom and run out of subjects to babble on about? Never! Anyway, there’s a million of them protecting home, field or pasture, they’re strictly utilitarian and because they blend into the background hardly ever get noticed. Unless...

Fabyan Bridge

Fabyan Bridge (Battle River Trestle)

Fabyan Bridge (for trains – aka Battle River Trestle) is a bit short of a kilometre long and on such a scale that it kind of defies description. It’s not the grandest of its kind, and that title belongs to the Lethbridge Viaduct in southern Alberta, which wins by a...

A Thing for Trains

Random Pick: A Thing for Trains

We have this thing for trains and photograph them every chance we get. Some might call it a silly obsession and looking inwards, even we think so at times. Truth be told most photos we capture on the subject are not interesting enough to post, but what ever reason they...

Argenta BC Post Office

Bustling Downtown Argenta British Columbia

Bustling Downtown Argenta British Columbia: well…maybe the word bustling…and downtown for that matter…don’t really apply here, but we’re definitely in Argenta BC, so the title’s at least partly right. Welcome to this little East Kootenay Community, quite remote and off the beaten path and we’re here just because. Look, it’s...

Home with a View

Prairie Home with a View

Here’s a home with a view or rather it was previously a home with a view and now just an empty shell. Everyone up and left, so it’s been abandoned for some time now, this once grand farm house on the very edge of a scenic coulee. That it’s devoid...

Forced Perspective: Calgary Tower

Forced Perspective The Calgary Tower

Forced perspective (noun): the use of any of various techniques (as in photography…) to create the optical illusion that objects or people are smaller, larger, closer, or farther away than they really are. Credit: Merriam-Webster Dictionary. It’s often done for humorous effect – maybe you’ve seen those pictures where some...

Mini Stonehenge

Mini-Stonehenge in Torrington Alberta

Dateline Torrington Alberta and it’s early in 2022. Someone, and we can’t shake the feeling that it’s a person with far too much time on their hands (wink, wink) has built a mini-Stonehenge out of random blocks of concrete. Why? Wait, the big question is why not? It’s one of...

Alley Rhubarb Calgary

Back Alley Rhubarb Calgary

As long time city residents, we’ve noticed there seems be a proliferation of back alley rhubarb growing in certain 1950s-1960s era neighbourhoods throughout the city. Our community fits that time frame, and yes, we need only go a block or two to find some. They usually appear deliberately and strategically...

Lorraine Railway Bridge

Lorraine Railway Bridge Remains

These concrete piers, seen off in the distance, are all that remains of the Canadian Pacific’s Lorraine railway bridge. The line it supported dates back to the mid-1910s, but didn’t last long and everything removed roughly four decades later. In the railway business that’s the blink of an eye and...

Elk River Inn Hosmer BC

It Continues: Elk River Inn Hosmer

It Continues: Elk River Inn Hosmer British Columbia. Here we’re paying a visit to a small town hotel for the Beer Parlour Project series with vintage film camera photographer Rob Pohl. Maybe you’ve seen him before on this website and while our techniques and equipment are worlds apart, we share...

The Bear Stare

Random Pick: The Bear Stare

The Bear Stare: here’s a random pick photo from the collection showing a brief but memorable face to face encounter that happened out near Trout Lake British Columbia. That place is simply crawling with those furry beasts and encounters quite common. There we were burning down some logging road, at...

Alberta Midland - CNoR Calgary

Alberta Midland – CNoR Calgary

Here’s the most northerly extant section of an unfinished railway line that was to run south from Calgary. Part of Canadian Northern Railway’s Alberta Midland,. it dates from the 1910s and a planned foray into southwestern Alberta. This was in competition with the dominate player in the region, Canadian Pacific...

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