ferry island faces

A few weeks ago when Ty, Mase and I ventured along the magnificent Skeena, we were on our way to Terrace for a little day trip.  A highlight of our little venture inland (besides the delish lunch we had at Don Diego's) was checking out Ferry Island.

I love how the aspens made a bit of a tunnel

On paper, Ferry Island doesn't sound too special - a park within town limits that hosts a municipal campground, picnic shelter, and playground.  But venture on to the trails and you'll find that Ferry Island holds a little bit of (not so) secret magic.

There are over 50 faces are carved into the cottonwoods of Ferry Island.  Created by local artist Rick Goyette, the faces take advantage of the cottonwood's craggy bark.  Each one is different and the experience of searching them out adds a certain amount of Easter Egg hunt excitement to an otherwise nice walk through the woods.  While the faces are almost a bit creepy when you inspect them in detail, nestled into the trees, the effect is more mystical than sinister.

It was quiet in the park the day we walked through.  I like to imagine that the faces come to life afterwards and gossip  about the people that pass them by.  I bet they snickered at our poor observation skills as well...we only found half of the supposed 50 that are there.  We'll have to go back to search them out.

culture jam

I wouldn't consider myself an artistic person.  Sure, I love the odd crafty DIY, but most often I am following steps or mimicking something I've seen or admired (damn you, Pinterest).  This weekend, however, I did a little digging for my inner artiste and spent the entire weekend participating in the 2014 Culture Jam.

This annual event in Prince Rupert is put on by the local Arts Council.  It brings in facilitators to lead groups through an intensive weekend workshop in various artistic disciplines.  'Mingles' throughout the weekend give the different groups a taste of what is happening in the other workshops.

This year there were three different disciplines represented: fabric arts, photography, and drawing (there was also supposed to be a song writing workshop, but unfortunately they did not have sufficient sign-up). The groups mostly work independently, but all groups are working off a common theme.  This year's theme was 'Tall Tales'.

At the urging of a new friend, I signed up for the photography workshop.  I was somewhat terrified going in.  Despite owning a DSLR for many years, I really know very little about the technical side of photography.  I was worried I would be in way over my head, but luckily our workshop was facilitated by an incredibly talented and encouraging photographer named Tara Nicholson. Check out her website and some of her work here: taranicholson.com.

Tara led us through a jam packed weekend (seriously, we were there for 5 hours on Friday night, all day Saturday and all day Sunday).  In the three days she taught us technical skills, got us to create mini-collections, showed us a huge variety of work from contemporary photographers, had us making cyanotypes, and even threw in a photo collage project.  It was pretty amazing.

As I said, the theme for this weekend was 'Tall Tales'.  We were asked to interpret this theme in any way we wanted and create 5-7 images depicting our interpretation.  To me, a tall tale is something fantastical, unreal.  Something like a fairy tale.  So I decided to photograph characters and elements of fairy tales, as you would find them in Prince Rupert.  I dubbed it "There are fairy tales among us" (Pretentious much? Yep).  Here are the images I used for my project:

Carriage

Goldilocks

Castle

Snow white

Witch

Wolf

They aren't perfect images. They tend to be over exposed and I definitely need a fixed lens, a tripod, and a whole lot more practice....but I am pretty proud of them. I challenged myself to shoot entirely in manual mode and to choose subjects that I normally wouldn't. In the end, the whole thing wasn't really about making a perfect picture. It was about using a part of my brain that I don't use nearly enough these days.

Thank you, Culture Jam.