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Being a photo of the sun approaching the horizon with no clouds to serve as a canvas for its setting rays. But there’s a little tree. I went out to take pictures of the sunset and it just doesn’t work right without clouds. Still, I got any number of ridiculously-dramatic shots of the ripe prairie grasses in sideways light. I’ll run one or......

Being a photograph of a Saskatchewan hayfield and a cloudy sky. This taken within a couple of minutes of that shot of the storm-beset barn. Damn, it was......

I’ve always had a weakness for cowboy fashion, and when we visit Saskatchewan, we always drop by the big Cowtown store in Regina to do our bit for the Prairie economy, not that it needs it what with grains and potash and petroleum all booming. The store is pretty big, but it’s the smallest of the buildings clustered around the Masterfeeds parking lot. Masterfeeds actually owns & operates Cowtown, and downstairs there’s more animal food than anything else, along with a weird assortment of exotic pets; you can pick up a tarantula or chameleon along with your horse chow. Upstairs though, it’s Western Wear. I like denim and checks and plaids and, and I’ve never understood why you’d want buttons on a shirt when you can have pearl- or black-fronted snaps. Jeans There’s a rule...

This week we visited a Saskatchewan farm where they have a few Highland cattle, which are just adorable. Here’s a group shot: They don’t seem to mind the Prairie winter, even when it gets down to -30ºC; look at that fur. They’re approachable and mild-mannered; seem to enjoy being scratched like a dog. Here are a mother-and-child. There will be three more calves in that particular pasture by April; should be great fun. This farm has a great big dog named Missy, not all that bright, who has a complicated relationship with the cattle. She chases the calf around and I’m almost sure it’s a game, because once or twice up and down the paddock and the calf breaks off and heads back to her mother. And later, at morning haytime, Missy got a little too close and one of them just...

We’re also visiting Lauren’s mom and her husband on their farm near Stockholm, Saskatchewan. People talk about doing “photo-walks” in glamorous urban locations; you’d have just as much fun touring around a nice piece of prairie. The essential things are the vegetation and the clouds,......

We’re visiting my Mother in Saskatchewan. Here are some of her flowers. This garden has appeared here before. You know, I’m really going to have to buckle down and learn about Color Spaces and so on; these pictures look immensely better in Lightroom than the browser.......

I mean birch trees not Adriatic dancers. Although some times they are nearly spotless and others more statuesque than sylph-like. Whatever; I love ’em. Back to the Net after 72 hours off; has it ever been busy out......

I’m on the prairies for the week; we do this every summer. I’d been looking forward to showing the kids to the grandmothers, enjoying the landscape, and getting some hours of uninterrupted work in away from the phones. What I wasn’t looking forward to was my MacBook acting sick, crashing three times this morning, rebooting when I close the lid. Sigh. And there’s email from people having trouble with both mod_atom and the Ape. Double......

What happened was, I was strolling in the pasture trying to get a camera angle on a hill across the road and I just about stepped on this cow that was sleeping in the long grass with her calf. We were both surprised. Boy, was she......

In mid-August Saskatchewan, the first crop of hay bales is out in the fields. These are no longer the traditional brick-shaped bales that a strong adult could flip with a pitchfork; they’re round, taller than most people, and you move them with a fork-lift attachment on the front of a tractor. It’s way more efficient and handling bales may look romantic, but I’ve done it and it sucks. Scattered across the fields, they have something of the look of the megalithic alignements in Brittany. Or individually against the sky like the big stones at Avebury. But get up close and they really don’t look like anything but what they are. Through the winter, the cattle make this into beefsteak....

A photograph of a boy flying a kite, in Saskatchewan This is in a little park, not much landscaped, right behind my Mom’s......

This trip is supposed to be for Spring Break, but in Saskatchewan, Spring hasn’t arrived yet. It’s been hitting -20°C at night, with the wind brisk; that’s a nasty combination. Well, you don’t come here for the weather, but the photo opps have been scarce too; the March light, until Friday, was alternately hazy and harsh. Herewith four pictures of snow. I forced myself to do some walks around the farm even with the alarming wind chill. At the top of one little hill, I felt duty-bound to photograph, if only to prove that the Prairies can be unbeautiful. But the flat white sky and flat white snow, even though it felt kind of dim, were so bright that I couldn’t see the LED on the pocket cam, so I just pointed it here and there and shot a few. This is PhotoShopped some, but...

Here are three shots of the oldest Swedish Lutheran church in Canada, which you’ll find down a side road off a side road that doesn’t go anywhere else. It hasn’t fallen entirely out of use, which is good, because it’s an attractive thing against the winter backdrop. The congregation was founded in 1889, this church built in 1921. I thought the stained glass looked promising from outside and was delighted to find the door open. My family, my Dad’s dad’s branch of it, was Norwegian Lutheran, and the church felt......

It’s Spring Break, so we’re in Saskatchewan with the kid visiting his grandmothers. I’ll be out at Lauren’s Mom’s farm for the next three days with lousy Internet access. This is partly by design; I am seriously behind on my Java One deliverables and a day or two hiding upstairs at the farm, away from the Net, while Lauren hangs with her mother and the kid with the animals, may help get me caught up. In the interim, here are three very Saskatchewan photos. Here’s what the weather’s like. Photo by Jean Bray. When you have that kind of climate, you care about flowers. The city has an excellent conservatory where I found this Amaryllis. When we arrived at the Regina airport, there was a Mountie in full regalia, and all sorts of regalia, letting everyone know that The...

Friday Slide Scan #24 is a shot that should have appeared in FSS #6: Cypress Hills; it caught my eye when I was going through the files and it is, if you like the Prairies, just too pretty to skip. As a bonus, there’s a Prairie story of jailbreak and highway terror. I suppose I should, as with that other picture, plug Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, a wonderful place. Now, here’s that story. Jailbreak One time I was driving somewhere around here, heading east from Calgary to Regina. It was the middle of some quiet weekday, hardly anyone on the road, nobody at all for lengthy stretches, then all of a sudden there was a police car behind me, lights flashing. I don’t know where the hell he’d been hiding, in that country you can see a gopher a...