City Daily Photo Theme Day: Rock 'N Roll

The first day of each month is a theme day for City Daily Photo, and this month, the theme happens to be Rock 'N Roll. Check out how other members are taking on this theme at this link.

These first shots all date to Good Friday this past April. I was in the Vanier area visiting two large cemeteries. In between them was Richelieu Park, formerly home to a priest's order, now a heavily wooded property belonging to the city and housing a local museum, community centre, and library branch. There were some large boulders and flat stones that stood out in in the spring woods.

This rock wall was a short distance away from the park. Above this spot is the driveway into Beechwood National Cemetery, which is a neighbour to Richelieu Park.

These I took in late April in the Glebe, where in Central Park, these small blue flowers were blossoming among the rocks on the slope.

This one was taken during the Tulip Festival in May, when I visited Rideau Hall. I took a shot of these tulips from one perspective, and chose another for this theme because of the nearby rock, which carries a plaque commemorating a former Governor General, Lord Monck.

For the other kind of rock, I have this view from the Glowfair event in June, where a stage had been set up on Bank Street for the annual street fair, with a DJ playing electronic house music for the crowd.

City Daily Photo Theme Day: Nature

The first day of each month is a theme day for members of City Daily Photo. This month, that theme is Nature. You can find out how other photographers are dealing with the theme here.

My selection for the day is from Richelieu Park in the Vanier Quarter, taken back in April on Good Friday, when I was in the area photographing a couple of cemeteries. This property was once home to a Catholic order, the Society of Missionaries of Africa, known informally as the White Fathers. It was sold to the city of Vanier (later amalgamated as part of Ottawa) in 1977. Today the grounds serve as park land, with a community center, a local history museum called the Vanier Museopark, and a branch of the Ottawa Public Library on its 17.5 acres of property. It borders the nearby Beechwood Cemetery, which I featured in a series of posts in May. A good portion of the park, around the high ground, remains what it was already in the days of the White Fathers- a maple sugar bush.

This building is now home to the Vanier branch of the Ottawa library. It dates to the 1950s, but feels older. It housed the Soeurs Antonines de Marie, a sister order of the White Fathers. The sugar bush is off to the left.

Maple syrup tapping still happens here in the bush each spring, centered around this sugar shack, and done in the traditional way. The building offers maple syrup meals such as pancakes during the season, and off season is used for things like youth day camps. A careful eye might pick out a bucket hanging on at least one of these trees for the tapping process. These woodlands are a haven to wildlife in the heart of the city, and the sharp shadows of the trees against the early spring forest floor caught my eye, and made me think this spot was ideal for this particular theme day. I'll be using some other shots I took here for another theme day later in the year- the boulders and rocks that can be seen in these shots were typical of the grounds. This was the first time I visited this place, and it turned out to be a delight. I'll have to come back some time when the museum is open.