Maple Lake Ontario

Maple Lake In Grey

Ξ January 31st, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Maple Lake Ontario, Photography |

Accidental, early morning wrong-setting-on-the-camera result.

Frank and Alice at Maple Lake, Autumn, 1961

Ξ January 31st, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Maple Lake Ontario, Photography, beach, family |

The two people who helped inspire this blog, my grandparents Frank and Alice.

Maple Lake ~ 1968

Ξ January 29th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Maple Lake Ontario, Photography, cottage country, family |

I love this photo. It’s me and my brother at Maple Lake, taken as almost always, by my mother M.V. McCrackan. (I did some cropping and tiny bit of cleaning up (still needs more).

I’m going through the tip of proverbial iceberg of photographs that I borrowed from my parents while visiting them at their home in Maryland for the first time in eight years. This is something that I sorely longed to do (I visit with them every summer at their cottage)–to find lifetime’s worth of photographs and label and organize them. This was a very time-crunched trip but I managed to get started at least.

I realized several things in the course of this trip–one was that my love of photography was influenced by my mother. I used to fidget impatiently while she fiddled around with various cheap cameras that didn’t quite work right (at least not on the first try) but I’m very glad now that she made the effort. I think if she’d had better equipment there’d have been some stellar photos. Actually there _are_ some stellar photos, IMO. As is, she had a great instincts–a feel for her subjects which I think this photo amply shows.

Great Grandfather and Baby Jim

Ξ January 29th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Maple Lake Ontario, Photography, family |

This photo is loaded with meaning for me. Firstly, the subjects are my grandfather (now 10 years deceased) and my first son, age 5 months. They are meeting for the first time. Then the setting. It’s a cottage that my grandfather built, one of three on Maple Lake in Ontario. He also made almost all the furniture in the house, including the table and chair in this pic. Finally, since I spent 2 months of every summer here for many years, I have clear memories of many people, events, and feelings.

My grandfather is about 91 years old in this pic, my son 5 months.
Frank (which he preferred to be called) lived to age 101.

Hello Again, Maple Lake Ontario!

Ξ January 26th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Maple Lake Ontario, Ontario, Photography, Sorry, my blog broke :(, technical |

This is not actually my first post but on my first try, Maple Lake Ontario I –with  the blogging system that I’d thought I’d rightly chosen, looking towards the future Maple Lake Ontario whilst appreciating the past and all that it still means. so I moved where I’d thought maybe it wouldn’t be too far, by migrating from WordPress.COM to Wordpress.ORG (this). I should be ecstatic that I got the Maple Lake Ontario blog back up and that Bluehost was super helpful and…good humoured. Fun times, folks. If you are not doing this you must start.

This “multi-provider” way of blogging is a new challenge for me and I’ve put in some heavy time. Maple Lake Ontario, won’t be so bad to get back though as it is a labour of love.

Right now my brain hurts–I am very tired (if anyone cares) ‘cos I got up too early to scrub floors (!) The weather here is rank and so was our entire entrance-way.

Anyway, I apologize for my blog-transferring ineptitude. I was testing to see how “intuitive” the blogging system interfaces–WordPressORG and WordPress.com, were. LOL. At least one of us didn’t really make it an easy process, then poof! The first version of this blog, at the tender age of 2 months was accidentally snuffed out like a candle.

Cheers!