My girlfriend and I made a couple of fun stops during this roll of film. the first was by a field of sunflowers. We, of course, took all our pictures from the roadside and never entered the field. Although the urge to explore between the beautiful stalks was there, we knew better than to go frolicking in a farmer’s field.
There was, however, on the opposite side of the road an old fondation to a house. I walked the short distance through a field of wild grasses and flowers to take a few pictures.
It was also a place where I took some bad photos as well. A friend asked why I share my bad photos. I told them that as an amateur photographer I always see the picture-perfect pictures on the web from both amateurs and professionals and it is hard to learn when you don’t see mistakes.
These are photos I don’t like. Someone else might like them, but by labelling them as not great photos I hope to build a small repertoire of things that didn’t work out so myself and others can learn from them. As a wise person once said, “we all learn from mistakes – a wise person learns from someone else’s.”
The second stop of this roll was Pile Henge, or the Concrete Graveyard. An abandoned testing site for concrete pillars, is a beautiful and modernly mythical place. This testing side allowed Manitoba to transition from boring holes to bedrock and then backfilling with cement to stabilise foundations, to using preformed, reinforced, concrete pillars that could be noisily hammered down to bedrock.
It may sound trivial but, because Manitoba is a silty, clay bassin from the ancient Lake Agassiz, the ground shifts and rolls under the pressure of large buildings through the extreme freeze and thaw cycle of our winters and summers.
I have never been able to confirm why the Winnipeg International Airport’s parkade seams to slope and roll like the gentle rolling hills of southwestern Manitoba, but I have a suspicion is that the pillars were never driven completely down to bedrock. Why do I think this? Well, I cannot conceive of a reason to intentionally build a wavey parkade instead of a flat one.
-KMSB
