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…
York Minster exterior
York Minster nave, looking towards the transept.
The nave, clearly showing the aisles.
Looking at the crossing and transept. The choir and organ are in the background.
The altar.
A memorial to Christopher Cradock, possibly the unluckiest admiral in the Royal Navy in the First World War. He was given orders to pursue two German heavy cruisers- Scharnhorst and Gneisenau– to the South Atlantic in 1914 with two very old and hopelessly outclassed antique cruisers under his command. Facing an impossible situation, he did his duty and took on the German ships. As we are looking at a memorial, I think you’re smart enough to guess the outcome of the battle that followed off Coronel. Reading the account of what happened to his ship, himself and his crew is the stuff of nightmares. The Admiralty should never have sent him on such a mission. It was practically an act of murder.
Lord Rockingham, combining the best of Georgian and classical fashions…
Do I really need to describe this one?
A wonderful display of high relief sculpture for the high born in history…
St. John and St. Cecilia
The dog was this figures best and most loyal friend
Tin templates for stonework restoration, to be preserved for future use.
Over the years, I have taken many photographs of the world around me. 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. Click on these for enlargements.
Bowmanville harbour
Whitby harbour
Niagara Falls
My back yard
Local flowers
Along the lakefront trail in Whitby 1
Along the lakefront trail in Whitby 2
Along the lakefront trail in Whitby 3
Along the lakefront trail in Whitby 4
Along the lakefront trail in Whitby 5
Bowmanville beach at sunset in September
Ice storm 1
Ice storm 2
Ice storm 3
ice storm 5
Ice storm 4
Ice storm 6
ice storm 7
All images are copyrighted C.A. Seaman. Do not reproduce them without written permission from me.
Not all my research for MANNA involves books. Building models is a great way to create miniature representations of the equipment I will be featuring in the book. However, nothing seizes the imagination quite like seeing ‘the real thing’, whether it is a tank, a heavy gun, an airplane, or in this case, a working Schwimmwagen.
It looks like a bathtub on wheels. It even has a propeller on the back that can be lowered into the water so the driver may ‘drive’ across rivers and small lakes. It was built in Germany in the war as an amphibious vehicle, slightly smaller than the VW Beetle, with good handling qualities on land or in the water. According to at least one of my interviewees, a number of them saw service in the Netherlands during the occupation of 1940-1945. This would be hardly surprising considering the number of canals and natural bodies of water in the country.
These pictures were taken at the Ontario Regiment Museum Aquino a few years back. The owner of this working Type 166 had acquired the car from someone in Italy many years before and carefully restored it to its original configuration, complete with the propeller being an authentic wartime vintage artifact bearing the VW logo with the gear surrounding the company initials. (The gear disappeared with the de-Nazification of the company by the British after the war.)
Type 166 Schwimmwagen visiting the Ontario Regiment Museum Aquino located near the Oshawa Airport a few years back.
If the Second World War, its history, equipment, and legacy, interests you, please take time to visit the Ontario Regiment Museum in Oshawa, ON., Canada. There is an excellent book on the regiment’s history I strongly advise you read to put what you see there into context. FIDELIS ET PARATUS, by Sgt. Rod Henderson, is an excellent, authoritative and complete history of the regiment. Many volunteers make this excellent museum ‘go’, and the tank days, when all the armour comes out to play, are well worth attending.
There will be other posts related to this collection and the connections to MANNA coming up in the future. More likely they will be posted on the social media sites attached to this one.
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.
TOKYO
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.
Asakusa Kanon Temple 1
Asakusa Kanon Temple 2
Asakusa Kanon Temple 3
Asakusa Kanon Temple 4
Imperial palace public gardens
Temple shrines
Tokyo temple
Shinto shrine
Shinto shrine 2
Shinto shrine 3
Shinto shrine 4
Tokyo Bay
Studio Ghibli museum 1
Tokyo candy store
Asakusa market
Residental Tokyo
Imperial palace public gardens 2
Imperial palace public gardens 3
Imperial palace public gardens 4
Classic Tokyo intersection
Famous Tokyo theatre
Tokyo shrine
Highways made earthquake proof
Studio Ghibli museum 2
Museum of Modern Art Tokyo
Bridge across one of many rivers in Tokyo
Tokyo tree bundled up for the winter
Imperial palace public gardens 5
Tokyo shrine
Tokyo shrine
Tokyo shrine
Warrior memorial
View from the New Takanawa Prince Hotel
Gateway to Shinto shrine
Offerings of sake
Tokyo graffiti
Modern sculpture adorning roof of classic Japanese beer brewer’s headquarters.
Japanese home garden
ENGLAND
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.
Bath
Bath 2
Pump House, Bath
Beaulieu Abbey
London
York
CANADIAN SCENES
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ASSORTED OTHER IMAGES- ELEMENTAL LINES, SHAPES AND FORMS
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Newtonville
Uxbridge 1
Uxbridge 2
Uxbridge 3
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….
BLACK ANGEL OF PETERBOROUGH
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.
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COBOURG AND PORT HOPE
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.
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TYRONE MILL SERIES
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.
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PARKWOOD SERIES
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.
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OSHAWA UNION CEMETERY
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.
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GHOST ROAD SERIES
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.
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ASSORTED OTHER VIEWS
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.
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All images are copyrighted C.A. Seaman from the time shown on the identification and may not be reproduced without permission.
