I have visited York and its famous Minster several times across three visits to the United Kingdom. The last visit in 2014 was the first time I had a digital camera with me.
Guess which visit these pictures came from…
Over the years, I have taken many photographs. This gallery contains a few of them from both the archives and more recent collections of mine. From spring hatch-lings and summer sunshine to the coldest depths of winter, beauty is only a shutter click away.
The following galleries are from the old website, featuring images that were taken during the 1990s and 2000s. As on the page of black and white images, a number are reproduced from old prints. I transitioned completely to digital with the purchase of an SLR camera sometime around 2005.
In March, 2004, I visited Japan for the first time, spending the week in Tokyo going on tours and doing a lot of walking around the place. Tokyo has to be one of the cleanest, and most workable big cities I’ve ever visited. With a population of 12.8 million, I was truly amazed by how easy it was to get around, and how polite people there were. They certainly show us how it’s done! Anyway, here are some of the 100 plus photos I took while there, visiting places like the Meiji Shrine, the Asakusa Kinnon Temple, Ginza, the Imperial Palace, and Tokyo Bay. Frankly, I’m not a fan of big cities, but Tokyo works so well I’d move there in a second. Don’t even get me started on the anime and manga… I have grouped the larger images within the galleries, so you may not have hyperlinks off all the thumbnails below. This way, all the various locations can be grouped together where necessary.
Click on each of the images in all the galleries to hopefully open and explore larger versions of them.
I have traveled to the British Isles more than any other place. What is shared here will be some of the photos from trips prior to the most recent visit of 2014, which will be in a separate posting later.
All images in this page are copyrighted C.A. Seaman and may not be reproduced without permission.
There was a time once when you needed to buy something called ‘film’ for your camera, which itself was something self-contained and not part of that mini-computer that tries to pass itself off as your phone.
Okay… enough sarcasm. The photographs displayed here are ones I took years ago with either a traditional SLR camera, developed using traditional means, or the earliest of digital cameras, using floppy disks or something like them for storage- as far as I can remember. I actually took a course in black and white photography at Durham College in 1998, using darkrooms and enlargers and other tools of the trade that at that time were just beginning to be replaced by digital media. I’m glad I had the experience of that. It taught me the plan the work ahead of time and respect the process of development, knowing each image cost paper, chemicals, time and money. Today, with UNDO functions, Photoshop and the like, students of photography have many safety nets to catch them if they mess up, unless they first forget to hit AUTO SAVE.
With cameras and social media now so prominent in society, I think it can be argued the world and the people within it have never been photographed as much as they are today. And as to the quality of the overwhelming majority of images out there? Well, let’s just say if people had to pay for each one, the internet wouldn’t be choking on the many narcissistic selfies that appear on social media platforms every second of the day. Privacy might not have to be so carefully protected against unwanted recording in someone’s random imagery.
Photography was once a novelty. It was an event when the camera was taken from its case. Now, it is almost a substitute for vision and memory as we know it. People don’t watch concerts. They film them. People barely savour the moment of meeting a celebrity. They reach for their phones to let the device record the memory of that moment for them instead. It goes on…
You didn’t click on this page to read rants, though, and I won’t take up any more time on this rant because I could really go on and on….
This cemetery just on the outskirts of Peterborough featured many interesting memorials, but I must admit I feel in love with this statue of an angel sitting atop the grave of a former Lieutenant-Governor’s son. It is at least life-size, and looked fantastic from any angle. I believe these may have been in colour originally and shot with an early digital camera.
These two old towns have some interesting cemeteries of their own, with a couple of pieces that stood out from the rest. In Cobourg, it was the strange structure that sat all tipsy on the side of a hill, overgrown with vines and looking something like a beached stone TITANIC. In Port Hope, it was another angel, and…CREEPY!…a grave marker with my family name on it and no dates… These pictures were taken at roughly the same time as the Peterborough set.
Tyrone Mill is located just north of where I live, and is still an operational saw mill and cider refinery. It has stood since the mid 1800s, and is a dream photo location site. Inside the mill, wood is stacked ready for cutting. Tools used when my great grandfather was alive line shelves around the shop. On the lower level, you can buy cider and donuts made on site. Outside the mill, you can walk around a lake, or along the river created from its runoff. Then there are all the other little touches, as seen in this gallery.
I hear it has changed a lot since these pictures were taken. In that case, the images here represent an historic record of days gone by. While uploading this set, I found the original colour digital files of these images. I’m happy to still have them, but they look much better in black and white.
The following are photos taken by me recently at Parkwood Estate in Oshawa, the former home of R.S. McLaughlin and his family. For those you who don’t know who he was, he helped create General Motors, and his philanthropic ways helped create many other venerable institutions in Oshawa and around Ontario. I took these pictures in colour, but converted them to black and white in order to catch more of the period in which this grand building and its grounds were created, between 1915-17.
I have lived in the Durham area for 14 years, and yet only just vistied this old and very interesting place of rest on the corner of Highway 2 and Thornton. Here are some of the images I captured there. I have played a little with the settings, to bring out the detail in the stone.
Ghost Road was the name of a band in Oshawa, playing a selection of original and cover tunes with a country rock theme. I was invited to become a photographer with the band in 1999, and then followed like a roadie on the trail with them as they played some of their gigs. I felt like an older version of the kid in ALMOST FAMOUS. (Somehow I missed Kate Hudson along the way…) This gallery contains images of the mysterious Ghost Road itself, just outside Port Perry in Ontario.
These are assorted other images from the archives. Some may be recognizable to you in terms of locations. Others may be more abstract in their composition and not meant to be part of anything representational or narrative in context.
All images are copyrighted C.A. Seaman from the time shown on the identification and may not be reproduced without permission.