Latest assingments

Well, in lieu of having a life just at the moment, I've been catching up on some of the places I wanted to visit and record for posterity. Thought I'd share some of the recent video for the amusement of anyone for whom that kindles a spark. :)

The first three here are of the old Bayview Avenue bridge near Bayview's one-time intersection with Lawrence Avenue down in the valley. I'm not sure when this bridge was built; probably at the end of the 19th century; but it was superseded by the adjacent and much more impressive current Bayview Avenue bridge just to the west, which was built in 1929 (and then twin-spanned in the early 60s). Presumably 1929 was the year this bridge went off the road grid... though every so often, restorative work to its successor breathes new life and purpose into this old bridge, and that's what's going on right now. So all the crap and weed growth and erosion ruts have been, at least for the moment, cleared away, and I wanted to get some shots of this bridge more like how it would have looked in its glory days a century ago... and here's the video.









Now, below is the old Major Mackenzie Drive bridge (technically the Humber Bridge Trail bridge now). I'm not sure just when they diverted Major Mack down the big sweep it now makes to the south, but aerial photos show this was still the route in the mid-50s, and probably was till the late 1960s. You'll see it's a dead end now once you cross the bridge, but the road used to creep up the hill, make a sharp turn, and come up at the top to recover its straight route. I tried hiking that yesterday and only made it to the sharp turn... after that, it's just too overgrown and eroded... just a V-shaped, fallen-tree-strewn remnant of whatever road it once was. But, the bridge is still there, still serves a home on the far side of the Humber, and the plans are to refurbish it soon.



Below is the Wiley bow arch bridge on Gorewood Drive, or what used to be Gorewood Drive. It's now closed to traffic but the bridge still serves as a pedestrian crossing of the Humber; this is now a conservation area. The bridge is, to my eye, in really good shape; only a few places are really in need of restoration efforts. Strange that this bridge has been out of service for decades, while the much more decayed old Major Mack bridge is still in use.




Finally, just for the hell of it, here's a timelapse video I made just before I moved a couple of years ago. I'm particularly fond of this because it's not just a video I sped up. It's actually several thousand photographs taken automatically by my Rebel XT every second or two. The blur effects are thanks to my using a neutral density filter to enable me to prolong the exposures to roughly half a second without blowing out the photos. So, you dump them all together in Premiere, add a little mood music, and voila... a high-speed trip through the northwest end of town. :)