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In: Between Darkness & Light
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Among explorers, there is always a favourite type of location to explore, photograph, and visit. Some love abandoned houses, others prefer industrial buildings, and then there is the institutional. Here in Ontario, we don’t have too many surviving institutions from the 19th and 20th Centuries; there are some, but most were all torn down or replaced with modern hospitals. So a chance to check out the Muskoka Regional Centre was one I was not going to miss when I met up with strangers from the Internet to drive nearly two hours north to Gravenhurst for a rather epic exploring adventure and eat at a questionableRead More →

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I know that place, I muttered to myself while watching season 2 of Star Trek Discovery. The tell-tale support pillars were instantly familiar to me, as I had seen them many times before; there was no doubt that those were the generator supports from the massive Richard L. Hearn Thermal Generating Station in Toronto’s Portlands. I knew that Discovery filmed in Ontario and the GTHA (Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area), having seen the white church from Balls Falls and the Niagara Escarpment near Milton, all featured in both Season 1 and 2 of the then-latest Star Trek series. Hearn was my first extensive exploration and one thatRead More →

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In the world of speciality lenses, there is nothing more specialized than perspective-control or tilt-shift lenses. The idea was to give 35mm photographers some movement control that large and medium format photographers used to adjust perspective. While the level of control could never be as discrete as with a large format camera, a perspective-control or PC lens provided some form of tilt and shift to grant a photographer a way to recompose an image without moving the camera body itself. Nikon’s original release in 1962 as part of the Nikon F system presented the world with the PC-Nikkor 35mm f/3.5, a relatively simple lens withRead More →

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Honestly, you can thank Facebook for reminding me of this amazing trip that I took nearly eight years ago when I am first starting to see posts reminding me that this started to occur. It was 2012, several months after my first major Urban Exploration Meetup, since a rather off-putting event in Buffalo, New York. MAMU or the Mid-Atlantic Meetup had been resurrected by DJCraig, who I had met in December 2011 outside an abandoned hotel north of Dayton, Ohio, at a separate UE event VCXPEX. Early in April, I found myself on a twelve-hour drive south, the first time I had ever done suchRead More →

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It was May 2009; I was on a road trip with three friends to explore the wealth of abandoned buildings up in Northern Ontario. Our previous night’s plans of camping out at a mine further north skunked by cold weather and the inability to hide our car safely. But that didn’t matter; we found a small motel on Highway 11 north of our next location, the town of Cobalt. Despite the name, the city once thrived with silver mines and started the northern Ontario silver rush that eventually butted into the gold rush further north. Silver from Ontario caused riots in New York City inRead More →

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The year is 2009; it honestly feels like forever ago now. So why am I writing about 2009 now? In 2009, I had a chance to attend for a second time the Canada Youth event at Brock University. Canada Youth was the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s response to the Youth Triennium Event hosted by the Presbyterian Church’s various branches in the USA, primarily Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA). I did get to one Triennium event, but by the time the next event came along, PCUSA had curtailed the number of spots available for Canadians. The PCC had already started their own event Canada Youth back inRead More →

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One of the first History courses I took in High School was Canada in the 20th Century. Most Canadian history texts that are used in schools start at this point. And there’s no surprise. As a nation, Canada came into its own in the 20th Century. Many point the crucible of World War One as the focal point. Others state the post World War Two era leading up to the 100th Anniversary of Confederation. But everything that happened in the 20th Century built on what happened before and the sins of the past were going to come back to haunt. As Canada emerged from theRead More →

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Across the British Commonwealth and in Canada specifically, no other British monarch is as widely celebrated at Queen Victoria. Secondly only to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II for the length of her reign. The two queens share a lot in common beyond familial relations. Both never expected to take the throne, born Alexandria Victoria on the 24th of May 1819, daughter of Prince Edward Augustus and grand-daughter to King George III. At birth, Victoria sat fifth in the line of succession to the British throne. At only a year old, both her father and grandfather passed, leaving Victoria in the care of her over-protective mother.Read More →

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In a strangely ironic twist, the final of the significant three colonial railways to be completed would be the sole survivor of them all into the 20th century. And while Great Western and Northern Railway of Canada all survived past Confederation in 1867. It would be the Grand Trunk railroad that would absorb both of these before the turn of the century and then lose it all a couple of decades into the new century. Unlike Grand Trunk’s peers, the new railroad had not tried to build a line before the 1850s, chartered on the 10th of November 1852. British investors wholly-owned grand Trunk andRead More →

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PYPS, Presbyterian Young People’s Society, Pick Your Potential Spouse. However you want to call it, yesterday I learned of some news that I never expected to receive. And while I have, like many before me, aged out and ultimately drifted away from the organization a friend whom I met through PYPS posted the following on Facebook. THE FUTURE OF PYPS Hello PYPS family, Recently the Synod of Central Northeastern Ontario and Bermuda had their annual meeting and decided to pull funding from our ministry. We felt that, in the face of declining attendance, the money that has been allotted to PYPS in the past couldRead More →