Canadian Firefighters Memorial, April 20, 2014

With a warm sunny Easter Sunday conditions were very good for photographing the memorial. I took the opportunity to try out my longer lens. For some of the shots I had to go across the street and into the park.

Take note of the guy in red. In a few pictures down you'll see him disrespecting the memorial and teaching his three children to disrespect it, too.

Look over to the left an you'll see that guy in red has climbed up on and is sitting on the wildland firefighter feature of the memorial.

Now that he's down from the memorial he has put his children up on it so they can play. That's not exactly what we had in mind for the memorial's use when we were working to put this memorial in place.

Starting with this picture and on to the end I used my 75-300 mm lens. For the first few shots I got further back and used the lens at its full length. As I had hoped this put the background out of focus.

This demonstrates some learning I have to do with this lens. The automatic focus found the tree branches in the foreground making the firefighter out of focus. If I had gone to manual on this picture it would have a slightly different look to it.

The Canadian Firefighters Memorial From Above

The picture below is a screen capture from Google Earth of the Canadian Firefighters Memorial. Use these coordinates to find the site: 45º 25' 02.47" N 75º 42' 46.62" W

Canadian Firefighters Memorial, April 6, 2014

Much of the snow has finally gone, leaving the memorial more open and accessible. Much of the foliage on the site now stands free of the snow. As the season progresses I expect it won't take long for it to green up.

This is the first picture because that's where I parked and got out of my car.

As far as I can tell this is either an eastern white pine or a red pine. In either case it will grow to a height of about 40 meters from it's base. Right now it is about 3 meters tall. When it reaches maturity it will be in proportion to its base.

I think these three wrapped trees are limber pines. If that's the case they will reach 20 meters in height at maturity. They won't dominate the site but they will be extremely impressive.

This shows most of the memorial site. You can see the firefighter pointing at the names of the fallen on the wall that is a stylized map of Canada. Now that I see it I think it would work better without the snow and with a person or two in the picture to give it all an element of scale. I have a feeling when I get to take that picture the trees in the background will be completely green.

I look at this and I think that I really like the colours and the composition. Every once in a while I luck out.

I took this to get the fire hydrant. The hydrant is part of the city's infrastructure. It was in place long before the National Capital Commission assigned the site to the Canadian Firefighters Memorial but I think it is now an appropriate part of it. I mean I think its fitting that a memorial to firefighters has an operational fire hydrant.