Last month, when DW saw the Where In Ottawa photo, she didn't recognize the location so she asked me where I had taken it. My response was simple:
"If you want to know, you have to play."
I wish I had used that answer, yesterday, when she asked me where I was going. I was heading out to take the photos that I will use for this month's photo challenge.
When I told her, she said, "Oh, no, you're not heading way over there. You'll be gone for hours."
From now on, I'll simply say, "If you want to know where I'm going, you'll have to play the game." Of course, in doing that, she'll only discover where I had been.
And, by the way, in telling you what she said to me, I'm not really giving you any undue clues. I wasn't gone for hours. All told, from the time I headed out of our Barrhaven neighbourhood, in the beautiful afternoon, until I had returned home, I had only been gone for less than two hours, but I had also driven around until I found my Photo of the Day.
But I digress.
If my monthy contest is new to you or if you've forgotten the rules, here they are:
Below, you will see a photo that I shot somewhere in the Ottawa area. Your job is to identify the location by leaving a guess in the Comments section of this blog post.
You must leave your guess only in this post to qualify. Because the comments are time-stamped, everyone who plays can see the date and time that an answer is submitted. If you try to guess by any other means, whether you're right or wrong, I won't respond to that guess and you can't win.
For every day that the challenge isn't solved, I'll leave a clue in the top-righ corner of my blog. Above my profile picture on the main page of my blog. (I know, I've changed the layout of my blog and the individual posts don't show my profile. Simply click The Brown Knowser title at the top of any post, and there you are.)
The first person to correctly identify the location wins the challenge. I will also give you an autographed copy of my novel, Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary.
You can guess as many times as you like.
Are you ready? Here's April's photo (to make it extra challenging, I rendered the photo in black and white):
Think you know Ottawa? Prove it!
It's one of Canada's oldest boating clubs.
The home of the Ottawa New Edinburgh Club has been around since 1914 and at this time of year, it's hard to believe it's still in operation. Peeling paint, rusty bridge, boarded up windows, all showing that the building is past its prime. But it's the character of the aged structure that drew me to it.
Typically, for Photo Friday, I focus on a single shot. But the mere size of this building warranted more.
Perhaps when the snow disappears and the sailboats return, this century-old boathouse comes back to life.
Happy Friday!
The motto of the Ottawa Police Service, according to their public Web site, is A Trusted Partner in Community Safety.
I don't believe a word of it.
Yesterday, CBC News reported that members of the OPS have started wearing wrist bands that bear the badge number of one of their fellow officers, along with the words, United We Stand, Divided We Fall. The officer that the band represents is Const. Daniel Montsion, who is currently on trial, charged with manslaughter, aggravated assault, and assault with a weapon in the death of Abdirahman Abdi.
Montsion is accused of striking Abdi multiple times while wearing assault gloves, which are manufactured with a strong carbon-fibre layer that is built into the knuckles. Striking an object with such gloves has been equated to hitting while wearing brass knuckles. They are deemed a weapon.
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| Image via YouTube |
A witness to the video of the confrontation between between Abdi and police officers on the scene said that after Abdi was apprehended, he was "lying on the ground, face down and still," and Montsion "punches him in the head very violently, twice, and we never see Abdi move again."
"When we were watching the video… and then those two punches, we
gasped, because it was so disproportionate to what was needed. Nothing
was needed at that point. He was on the ground, he was face down, he
wasn't moving. It didn't make any sense, the level of violence that
we saw," said Heather Badenoch.
The violence, indeed, seems excessive, especially when there were several officers on the scene for one man and—the most important point—a person from the Ottawa community is now dead.
We can only hope that all of the facts are brought to light during the trial and that a fair outcome is reached. I don't want to comment on the details of the trial. I don't want to speculate based on only the information I've received from the media.
I do feel, however, that I can fully share my views on the recent action of the OPS. On the very first day of the trial, where Montsion himself did not appear, his peers have already drawn a line and made a stand.
And they are not standing on the side of the community.
Any police officer that chooses to wear the offensive wrist band is turning on his or her community, is saying that they must protect and serve the constable, and that they are unwilling to hear the facts as they are presented over the course of the trial.
They do not stand for the victim, nor for his family.
They do not stand for you. They do not stand for me.
Divided, we fall.
Twelve-hundred of these wrist bands have been ordered, which means that the person who ordered these band thinks that 1,200 OPS members, perhaps more, stand on Montsion's side.
That's a lot of officers that do not stand on the side of the community.
Which makes the motto, A Trusted Partner in Community Safety, a false statement. I wouldn't trust any officer who believes he or she has to wear this wrist band. That police officer has lost all credibility with me.
The Ottawa community needs to speak out loud and clear that these wrist bands bring disgrace to anyone who would wear it. We need to let Chief Charles Bordeleau that these wrist bands are unacceptable and that he should order his officers to not wear them. Not just while on duty, as he's already stated, but also not in public. If a member of the public sees a person wearing the distasteful band, that person can automatically assume that the wearer of the band is a member of the OPS and supports Montsion.
Bordeleau must try to dissuade his officers to not purchase the bands at all and he must speak publicly that he doesn't approve of the bands because the bands do not support the community.
Bordeleau has a responsibility to the Ottawa community first; his officers, second. He needs to instruct his officers that their responsibility is to the community first; Montsion, second.
If the OPS wants to be a trusted partner and wants the Ottawa community to feel safe, they must show that they can be trusted.
Twelve-hundred wrist bands that support Montsion do not instill trust.
Sometimes, I have an idea of where I want to go and what I want to photograph for my Photo of the Day (POTD) project. And on those days, I simply go out there and capture that image.
On the first day of the project, I sought a school bus that I knew was sitting out in a field between Barrhaven and Richmond. I had seen it many times on bike rides, be it alone, with DW, or in a group with the Ottawa Bicycle Club. I don't know what that bus is doing in that field, other than dying a slow, rusty death.
I purposely set out to the abandoned house, near the Long Island Locks, to capture the gloomy old structure in a snow storm. I drove up to Wakefield, to capture the covered bridge over the Gatineau River. I've visited Hog's Back Falls during the spring runoff and pulled over along Colonel By Drive, not far from Ottawa University, to grab a collection of tower cranes over our growing city.
Some shots come just by chance. Like, when I stopped in front of our mailbox just as a flock of cedar waxwings alit on the tree across from me. Or when I passed a group of parked diggers as the sun set in Kanata. Or even when, on my way to work, I spied a sun dog on Prince of Wales Drive.
But it's when I have an idea for a shot, head out to take it, and find something else that completely sidetracks my plans.
Yesterday, as the fog started to creep over the Gatineau Hills and I was leaving the office for the day, I decided to take a little drive through those hills, in search of a vantage from which I could get both the fog and the bare trees on the hills.
I crossed the other side of Highway 5 and took the winding roads of Notch and Chemin de la Montagne, which hitches up where the rolling hills of the southern end of the Canadian Shield and the flat Ottawa Valley meet.
Not wanting to venture too far—I did enough of that on Saturday night—I decided to duck into a small community called Hollow Glen. I learned that the roads are very bad at this time of year: lots of pot holes and plenty of chunks of asphalt to kick up into the wheel wells. My suspension took a pounding as I tried to dodge as many deep recesses as possible.
In the centre of this residential neighbourhood lies a long, narrow lake, called Lac Mountains (I know, English and French together, but that's how it's labelled on Google Maps and I'm sure the English name of this community is no accident: there are lots of English street names around here).
As I crossed a small overpass on the east end of the lake, I saw a vantage that suited my idea for a shot, but I wanted to keep driving, to see what else lay ahead. I could always circle back, and as I approached the western end of Lac Mountains, that was my intent. I turned right, off Chemin Kelly, onto Chemin Hollow Glen, and approached another overpass, when I looked out onto the lake. What I saw changed my mind about heading to the first spot.
Out on the lake, heading toward me were four deer. I stopped the car, picked up my camera, and took a few quick shots. Instantly realizing I didn't have the best lens for shooting (but not harming) wildlife, I jumped back in the car and quickly switched to my 70–300mm lens.
Everything happened so quickly that I didn't have much time to think. If I had had more time, I would have increased the ISO level. I would have switched from aperture priority to shutter-speed priority. But the deer weren't going to wait for me.
With the telephoto zoom on, I hopped out and started shooting again. The deer had reached where the lake met the road and leaped over the guard rails. One at a time, they hopped onto the road, stopped to look at me, crossed, and then hopped over the rails on the other side of the road, where a ravine led them out of sight.
I knew the photos weren't the best, that I was shooting too slow to capture moving objects. I had initially set my camera to capture landscape, had intended on mounting it onto my tripod. But the deer were too close, were too good to pass up.
They aren't what I had intended to photograph. But once captured, I had no choice to make them my POTD.
And I can always return to shoot still life another time.
