Calabogie Afternoon by Chris Sorrenti

Calabogie Afternoon

Here are a few shots taken on a Sunday afternoon in June 2007. My girlfriend and I rented a Volkswagen Beetle (great highway car with a peppy 2.5 litre engine) and headed up to the Calabogie area northwest of Ottawa to look at some property she was interested in buying.

At one point along the way we stopped at a country store with a garden out in front. A great opportunity to use my Canon Rebel, coupled with a new Sigma zoom macro lens, similar to the one I had for my old Pentax K-1000; used to take the hummingbird and purple loosestrife series. Upon seeing me begin to photograph her garden, the owner of the store ran out almost hysterical with excitement that someone would want to photograph her garden, and then eagerly pointed out a little path that went between the flower beds so I could get in closer.

Click on the pictures below for a larger version.

The VW emblem of our rented Beetle, purposely captured slightly out of focus to soften the few scratches which I found too distracting in sharp focus.

As always I like to build up to the macro shots. Here's a medium close photo of one of the beds.

What's a garden without the ubiquitous bumblebee?

Although I'm no horticultural expert, I know beauty when I see it:

In my excitement to photograph the many insects visiting the flowers, that didn't stay put for very long,

I quickly forgot snapping this photo. My luck (?) never fails to amaze me.

I still can't figure out whether this is a large moth or a hummingbird.

One of the only visitors to stay relatively stationary was this yellow swallowtail.

As can be seen in the next few pictures, I managed capture it in a few different poses,

each making for a unique shot, factoring in the surrounding plant life.

On the way back we drove through Arnprior, a friendly little town where I lived as a boy for five years from 1966 to 1971.

Read my poem "Ottawa" in the collection "Venus, Mars and Everything In-between" for a better idea of what it was like to live there.

I of course gave my girlfriend the full tour, pointing out landmarks, streets...houses where I had lived.

At the end of one in particular, McGonagal Street, the Madawaska River flows by, traversed by the picturesque trestle below.

It's uncanny, because I took this exact same picture in black & white in the summer of 1968

with an old Brownie camera (my first camera) that my mother had given me knowing I had an interest in photography.

Included below is the 1968 photo for comparison.