A long-time friend stopped by my shop today and we talked about his plans for a December pre-Christmas trip. He and his wife will be visiting family in Ottawa and he said he hopes he will find the time to walk around that beautiful city to take a few photos.
I won’t be doing anything so exotic as that. I am planning my yearly pre-Christmas trip and will be making the two-hour drive to Kelowna in the first weeks of December to photograph the 120-foot Tree of Hope and the bright city lights along the Okanagan lakefront.
Yes, his plane flight across the country to the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Canada is a lot more exotic, but I get to spend two days doing nothing but photography and the brightly decorated lakefront city is always so much fun to photograph.
I like short excursions and I really enjoy having something special to photograph during the Christmas season.
Before moving here from Los Angeles in 1975 I would always go to the desert to spend Christmas. That holiday outing required a four-wheel drive vehicle, the willingness to cross a couple rivers and traverse some very steep hills to get to my favourite camping spot.
As we traveled I would continually stop my bright yellow 1963 International Scout and jump out to run around taking pictures while my friends would be forced to patiently wait and always grumbled that I made the trip slower.
When we reached our destination we would set up our camp and while everyone else sat eating around the fire I would go for a walk with my camera and return when I lost the light. (There were no cellphone cameras in those days – the only photo memories were in my camera)
Christmas Eve would be spent around the fire until about 8 p.m. Then we would all pile in my 4x4 (today I would say “SUV,” but in the 1970’s that wasn’t even a word) with our thermoses of hot chocolate to listen to a radio show called “The Firesign Theatre.” The Firesign Theater was a live radio program from Los Angeles and on Christmas Eve the reading for years was, “A Christmas Carol.”
The next morning I would be up with the sun while the others slept to walk around with my camera. Those were good times for this 26-year-old photographer.
Nowadays I am quite satisfied with the pre-Christmas trip to Kelowna. It is more comfortable than the desert was 50 years ago and I now I prefer to go to restaurants and stay in a hotel that include breakfast instead of sitting around open fires and sleeping on the hard ground in a pup tent.
I have invited my photo pal Jo to come with me. It’s good to have a friend that is as excited about wandering the cold, decorated streets at night and getting up before sunrise to make photographs of a big tree as I am.
Stay safe and be creative. These are my thoughts for this week. Contact me at www.enmanscamera.com or emcam@telus.net.
