Along the Coast

Continuing to browse through the May 2010 folder that yielded yesterday's post, I came across this one taken the same day. The photo is taken from Fort Rodd Hill (you can see the gun emplacement on the right of this photo) looking westwards and shows the proximity of Esquimalt Lagoon, created by that long spit of land that cuts across the water in this photo. Esquimalt Lagoon is a bird sanctuary and one can almost always depend on seeing a half dozen different species of duck, blackbirds, swans, geese, herons, shorebirds, seagulls and terns as well as the occasional otter. The lagoon is only a few minutes drive from Fort Rodd Hill. Much of the forest in the right center background belongs to Hatley Park, another splendid place to visit and see the wonderful gardens and Hatley Castle. Directly behind me as I took this photo was Fisgard Lighthouse. This catalog is just to indicate how rich and varied is this section of coastline that lies on edge of the Greater Victoria area.

Fisgard Lighthouse Reprise

I had occasion to be digging around in the archives yesterday and came across this shot of the Fisgard Lighthouse taken from Fort Rodd Hill last May. It was one of those days with glorious light and a few puffy white clouds and a landscape bursting with spring green. In this cold gray weather we've been having I'm happy to have this photo to remind me of spring.

Fort Rodd Hill II

The primary purpose of the military efforts at Fort Rodd Hill were defensive and during most of the life of the fort the main threat to the Esquimalt-Victoria area was by sea. The batteries pictured yesterday were sited and aimed to defend the approaches by water to this area. The above gun is pictured as placed in the Upper Battery in 1897. Large guns such as this were intended to fire on large ships. To the left are the guns of the Belmont Battery, designed to protect the fort from smaller boats that might slip under the big guns' field of fire. But what if it was night - how would the large guns be aimed? That innocent looking boathouse to the right is a fake. It houses an immense searchlight, one of many that could be rolled out and aimed over the water if needed.

Residents and visitors to Victoria alike will find this site well worth a visit. As noted in the National Historic Sites information brochure,

...Fort Rodd Hill represents all the defensive locations of the V-E (sic Victoria-Esquimalt) Fortress, and was only one of a system of forts and related works. Fort Rodd Hill is one of the world's best preserved - and most complete - examples of its kind, consisting entirely of original structures, with minimal restoration.

Fort Rodd Hill

Yesterday's photo of the Fisgard Lighthouse is the default photo for this area although there are actually two distinct National Historic Sites at Fort Rodd Hill. The photogenic Fisgard Lighthouse of course gets the most attention. For photographers, the other National Historic Site that you walk through on your way to the lighthouse, Fort Rodd Hill, is a greater challenge. It's not very dramatic or colorful and in place of the sentimental and inspiring connotations of a lighthouse on the rocks, the rather gloomy cement battlements hugging the ground give rise to inescapable associations with conflict and bloodshed, although Fort Rodd Hill was only intended for defense. Nevertheless, those holes in the walls were for riflemen to shoot through should the Fort ever have been attacked. The big guns pointed out over the water, guarding the entrance to Esquimalt Harbour, and we'll have a look at them tomorrow. The top photo is inside the Lower Battery. The photo to the right was taken inside the Upper Battery where a few wooden guns have been provided for visitors to aim through the embrasures. Below is a wider view of the Lower Battery. The small red-roofed building on the right of the battery was the canteen.

Time for a break....

I am fortunate to have friends living in another part of British Columbia who are kind enough to invite me to spend a week with them every year. In the past I have uploaded photos of Victoria in advance to cover the days of my absence from the city. However, this year I will take the liberty of posting as I travel so you can see some of the rest of the Province of British Columbia, of which Victoria is the capital. British Columbia is a very large area (about twice the size of France or four times the size of the UK, for instance) and has a number of distinct climatic zones although much of it is covered with mountains and forest.

Peek-a-boo

When I came across ghostly Indian Pipe featured a few days ago I was actually looking for deer because about 50% of the times I visit Fort Rodd Hill I see a deer (sometimes two) on the road. Usually my camera bag is safely locked up in the luggage carrier on the back of my scooter. This time I decided to stop before seeing a deer, get my camera out, set it up properly and put it around my neck so that when I spied a deer I would be ready. Here are the results of that planning. Though these deer are wild, they are quite tame and will tolerate you if you don't move around too much or approach too closely. Fort Rodd Hill has some quite large areas of forest and is adjacent to Esquimalt Lagoon and the Royal Roads University Campus, which also have large contiguous areas of forest so it is not surprising to see deer there. Similarly for a beautiful young buck I saw a few weeks ago in Mount Douglas Park, another fairly expansive area. The most surprising deer I've seen in the city though was one I saw along the railway tracks here in Victoria West, pictured here, and more recently one I saw in Highrock Park, which is a very small park in a densely populated residential area. Yet no matter where I see one of these graceful creatures it's always a treat. This is a young Blacktail Deer.

Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora)

The wonderfully strange and ghostly plant above is commonly called Indian Pipe, Ghost Plant or Corpse Plant (Monotropa uniflora) and it has long been number 1 on my list of wildflowers I want to see. So I am sharing this photo with you today with a definite sense of satisfaction since I first encountered these in a forest near Victoria yesterday. Despite their appearance they are NOT a kind of fungi or mushroom. They are a flowering plant that lives from decaying plant matter rather than through the use of chlorophyll and photosynthesis. When I wander around in the forest I am usually looking for something specific because that provides a focus. Yesterday I was hoping to encounter a deer because, though I have seen several this year, I have not yet photographed one. I was also glancing around on the lookout for local orchids and for Indian Pipe, without much hope of seeing the latter because the forest floor where I was walking was quite well lighted and I had always pictured this plant as growing in the dimness beneath a dense rain forest canopy. Suddenly I saw one poking up above the moss. Then I saw the rest and realized I was in the midst of a grove of them, dozens of them all around me.

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ps: I DID see a deer later - but that's tomorrow's photo.

Wall and Water Bottle

I've mentioned that my social experience with the City Daily Photoblog community has been very pleasant. Another valuable aspect of CDP blogging is that I've learned a lot about photography, in several different ways. Posting a photo every day means thinking about images every day; first photographing the images and then selecting and processing them. This kind of practice inevitably improves one's work. ("Work" is probably the wrong word here. "Play" is more appropriate in this case.) Equally important though is what I've learned from looking at other City Daily Photo bloggers' photos.

Today's post is the first in an occasional series of posts recognizing some of what I've learned from others in this CDP community, and is dedicated to USElaine of the Willits Daily Photo for what I've learned about walls and doors and windows. We're surrounded by walls most of the time and, if we don't stop and look, we tend to see them as obstructions. They get in the way of the "view." Looking at Elaine's walls taught me to see them as potentially interesting elements of composition. The photos above and below this text I took because they reminded me of her photos. Below are links to some of the walls of Willits, California as photographed by Elaine Hamby. But don't just browse her walls. There's lots of interesting descriptions and photographs of daily life in a small Northern California town. Enjoy:

• What Happened Here?
• Stained Wood Wall
• Book Juggler Back Door
and my favorite,
• August Theme Day: Metal