Infra-ready to go...

So a few hours ago, I heard from LifePixel with some good news...

Your order is complete

Hi there. Your recent order on Infrared Conversions, IR Modifications & Photography Tutorials | Life Pixel IR has been completed. Your order details are shown below for your reference...

A second email informed me...

Life Pixel complimentary IR training session invitation

Now that your converted camera is on its way back to you it’s time to schedule your complimentary One on One 30 Minute Online Training Session – a $40 value!

Whether you are new or experienced with digital infrared photography, you will find the session quite useful in helping you get up to speed with your IR camera and help you learn required techniques for great results.

It's kind of them, but I don't imagine I'll take them up on it. I've been shooting digital infrared for about 15 years now, and I've been pretty happy with my results for a long time. Besides, most of what they're keen to impart is for the wide-spectrum filter (I opted for a hard cut B&W filter) and processing RAW images, which the W1 doesn't produce (it creates MPO files, which are nested JPG pairs).

And then one last, faintly intriguing missive... Kind of a courtesy call...

The conversion went smoothly but there is one small thing.  In 3D mode, it shoots a 2D and 3D picture at the same time and they are both good.  But, in 2D mode, there is a spot on one side of the image and we have no idea why.  Once you get it, please let me know what you think.

I emailed them back and told them I'd certainly have a look, but in all honesty, I'd never used the pure 2D feature of the camera in the 13 years I've owned it, and couldn't give a fig about it. It's not how I used it in the past, and not how I intend to use it moving forward. If they got the 3D functionality to work, that's really all I care about.

So, anyway, hopefully the old W1 will be in the mail soon, and maybe as soon as sometime next week I'll be able to start taking honest-to-goodness infrared 3D photographs.

Lost Homes on Sheppard Avenue

There's a short strip of single family homes on Sheppard Avenue that I've been vaguely aware of for decades now, since I moved to North York in 2000. They're on Sheppard Avenue, a little east of the two homes I've had since moving here. They always kind of caught my eye in passing because of the pretty stand of trees that front them.

A few years ago, they were bought out and boarded up in anticipation of a single long unit of stacked townhouses. That will move more families into the same space, but it really will not have the charm of the current homes. I also don't think the little grove of trees in front of them will survive.

Here's how the places looked when they were still homes, and how they look at the moment. (From Google Maps street view.)

The homes appear to have been built in 1957. As you can see, this part of Scarborough was the fringe between suburban and rural at the time, and Sheppard Avenue was still just a two-lane cross-county road. (These shots are from the Toronto City Archives collection of aerial photos.)

So I thought it would be a good idea to go out and get some shots of these places before they're finally gone. They have been boarded up for at least a few years now. Odds are, it won't be long.

I got P-Doug to man the second W3 (these shots are all natively 3D; I'm just putting up the left side images here) and we set off on Sunday morning a week ago. The first place we took some shots of was the little strip mall on the southwest corner of Pharmacy and Sheppard Avenues. This mall itself is due to disappear soon, but for the moment, is still in business.

On the southeast corner, across the street, is a new condo building with some commercial space downstairs that replaced a different strip mall that had been there since probably the 1960s.

The houses in question are now fronted by a long wooden barrier. What I found most interesting is there was no evidence of any driveways; just paths to the sidewalk. It occured to me that the driveways might be coming into their backyards from the street behind, and P-Doug made the same suggestion when I mentioned the lack of sidewalks. That turned out to be the right guess. Once Sheppard was four-laned, either in the 60s or the 70s, that was probably a godsend to the people who lived here.

In order to get any shots of the places, I had to stand on tiptoe with the camera poised over the top of the barrier, and essentially shoot blind.

We didn't get any shots of the backs of the houses with their driveways that Sunday, so I decided to go back this Sunday just past and do that. Thing is, there, there are other houses, and I was a bit concerned I'd look creepy doing it. But, you have to break some eggs to make an archive, so it's either do it or whine that I didn't once the houses are gone.

I decided to walk it rather than drive. I took one of the W3s and also the S80 I had converted to shooting infrared. It was a bright June morning; just the time for making the ordinary look ethereal.

Getting to the boarded up places involves crossing the 401 on Victoria Park Avenue. This stretch is also designated "The Highway of Heroes" as it's the part returning fallen service men and women take after landing at CFB Trenton and the Don Valley Parkway (oddly enough, about a kilometre behind me in these shots below) that takes them to downtown Toronto to the coroner for certification.

Going through the neighbourhood to the south of the houses, I took a number of IR shots. These are the ones I liked best. Oh, I can't wait to be able to do this in 3D... hopefully soon.

The street that the houses back onto, where their driveways were, is called Abbotsfield Gate Lane. It's actually two streets that meet as a cross and all share the same name. The eastward branch was the part in question, and it still has one house extant on it, right on the corner. Sure enough, the people who live there were right outside; a dad and his toddler son and a friend or other family member. While, strictly speaking, it's still a public street, it still felt a little like I was intruding, since there's no real reason to go down there. The road ends in a cul de sac and doesn't have a path leading out... so why are you there, kind of thing? Fortunately they utterly ignored me, didn't ask why I was there, keep the evil eye on me, anything like that. Nah, it's just some old weird guy taking over-the-fence shots of places about to be torn down; a nerd, a harmless crank. If that's what they thought, they totally called it. :)

This is what I saw. Or, more correctly, what my cameras saw for me. (Note: in the shot immediately below, the house just off to the left side there is the one that's still a home, and likely will continue to be.)

I took a few shots on my way back, during which I decided to go past my place to the grocery store to pick up some stuff to make soup. The entire walk was 6.4 km, or just about 4 miles. That surprised me; I would have guessed about half that. Anyway, I saw a number of interesting things on the way back, a couple of which I'll share here in passing.

This house is also on Sheppard. For the moment, it's still a home, but I have to wonder how long it will be here. Single family homes are rapidly disappearing from up and down Sheppard Avenue East.

Whatever business this used to be, it's in the process of becoming something else.

I suppose The Toronto Sun thinks this is clever. And if you're a) over 50 and b) read at a grade three level, then yeah, I suppose it's a real laff-riot.

It's also been my observation that Scarborough, the eastern quarter of Toronto and, for about 200 years, a separate municipality, has been the poor stepchild since it was incorporated into Metro from 1953 to 1998 (after which it became part of the City of Toronto proper along with the rest of Metro). It looks like the people of Scarborough have started to speak up about that, too. This photo was taken on Victoria Park Avenue, which is the border between Scarborough and North York, the part of Toronto where I live.

Rose McGee's Journey

I'm not sure how I got all this stuff, but it sure tells an interesting story about one woman's course through life. In this case, my mother's mother's mother, Rose McGee.

The one thing I do know where I got it from is this blue communication from the UK's Ministry of Defence. My grandmother sent it to me from Montreal in the early 80s. She'd written away to Britain for information about her father, William Ilett, who died in the Battle of the Somme, and she thought I, as his only great-grandson, would be interested in having it. I remember I had it on the cork bulletin board in my room for several years.

Edit: I found this mention of him on a Wordpress site. Apparently he was 30 when he died.

Rose McGee, by then Rose Ilett, had three daughters by William. My grandmother, Eileen, was the eldest. My Auntie Vi, who was born in England, was the youngest. Between them was a little girl named Gertrude, I think, who died when she was four. Back in those days, women were very much dependent on men for support and getting through life, and so a couple of years after she was widowed, she married another British soldier, a Scotsman named George Hill. He was the man I knew as my great-grandfather in Montreal when I was a child when we would go back to visit my mother's hometown.

They were married in Colchester in 1918 in the Catholic St. James Church, which still stands today. You can see it on Google Maps's street view. Isn't all the information here, from a century ago, kind of fascinating? All these people, with their particular lives, brought together by this event commemorated by this old piece of paper I still have.

Once Poppy Hill was out of the service, they apparently moved back to his hometown of Glasgow, where my great-grandmother received the following note.

At some point, Poppy and Nana Hill got on the boat and emigrated to Canada, where one or the other or both of them (not too clear on the point) already had family. They settled in Montreal. My grandmother had already been sent over into the care of an aunt over here some years before and had very few memories of life in the British Isles (despite being born over there, she had no accent to my ears). She told my mother that she had long been haunted by the notion that her mother hadn't wanted her and had sent her away. Later on she came to realize that this was simply the way of things back then. Resources were scarce for British families, and you did what you could, including depending on better-heeled relatives abroad.

I also have my great-grandparents' passports from the early 1940s. They're fascinating all on their own.

For one thing, they're massive compared to the modern passports you see. They're half again as big as the Canadian and Irish passports I have today. They're also sturdy hardcovers. You could practically pound in a nail with these things.

Inside, they're even more interesting. The nigh-illegible fancy script addresses the reader in the name of the Earl of Athlone, a British nobleman who was the Governor-General of Canada at the time. Governor-General around the Empire were typically British nobles back then. Canada didn't appoint a Canadian-born Governor-General until sometime in the late 1950s. Imperial ties were still pretty strong back in the days these documents were issued.

For instance... It's interesting, and a little strange, to see "British subject" listed as the nationality status on the interior page here. Canadian citizenship, as distinct from the all-inclusive status of British subject, didn't come into existence until January 1, 1947, so this was the effectively the legal status of everyone in Canada until then, regardless of whether they were born in Canada, Britain, or elsewhere in the Empire... or beyond, if they nationalized.

Nana Hill's birthplace is given as Enniskillen, Ireland, which was true at the time. Enniskillen is part of what's now Northern Ireland and is still part of the United Kingdom, but when she was born, all of Ireland was still part of the UK. She must have been still been living there when she met my great-grandfather, William Ilett, because their first daughter, my grandmother, was also born there, which is the reason I was able to register as an Irish citizen. William was already in the army at that time, and must have been stationed in Ulster for some reason. My grandmother was born in June of 1909, so Nana Hill would have been not quite 17 when she gave birth. They sure did marry young in those days.

Isn't it interesting that the passport appears to be valid only for one country? In this case, the United States. Poppy Hill worked for one of the Canadian railways back then, and they had then, and still have now, extensive property down in the US. He was stationed for a time across the border over in Maine. My mother remembers visiting her grandparents there when she was very young. Eventually they moved back to Montreal.

Nana Hill's passport includes this interesting resident alien card from the US Dept. of Justice.

Poppy Hill's passport is worth a look as well.

And coming back to that question I asked in my previous post... Here's the photo of the man from the locket side-by-side with the photo of the man I knew as Poppy Hill. Do these look like the same man to you? I don't think they are. Poppy's eyes are very intense, and he's wearing glasses. The man in the locket has a softer looking aspect and he's not wearing glasses. I have a feeling, on balance, that the man in the locket is in fact William Ilett, my biological great-grandather; the man who died in the Somme.

Nevertheless, George Hill was the man I knew as my great-grandather, my mother knew as her grandfather, and was essentially the only father my grandmother ever knew, since she was barely five when her biological father left for France, never to return. I'm proud of both of these men.