Oh, The Night That Paddy Murphy Died

That title is taken from a Newfoundland folk and drinking song, one that's been quite popularized by the band Great Big Sea- you can see it at this video link. Incidentally, I'd love to hear that sung at a funeral. 

I heard the song twice on New Year's Eve, when I went down to Lansdowne Park and the Aberdeen Pavilion for Hogman-eh!, a Canadian take on the Scottish word Hogmanay, for the last day of the year. New Year's is big in Scotland, and the Scottish Society of Ottawa has been putting on a New Year's Eve event each year, free to the public, here at Lansdowne. Music included rock, folk, and the pipes and drums, and there was food and displays from various groups, with fireworks outside shortly after midnight came. There were a good many people in the building, mostly around the stage area at its heart.

The Ottawa Caledonian Pipes and Drums participated through the evening, marching out from a rest area over at the west end to do sets at the front of the stage each hour.

I got close up shots of two of the bands, the first more of a folk-Celtic feel with fiddles involved.

The second was more of a rock band feel to their music, albeit one with bagpipes.

Ottawa Viewpoints On A Cold Winter Day

I went out for a walk on Christmas Day. The walk did me some good, as I was in a fairly dark mood over the holidays. It was a bright, cold day, and I came up to Nepean Point, a high spot overlooking the Ottawa River. This view towards Parliament Hill shows the ice on the river at the entrance into the Rideau Canal.

A shift to the left looks towards Major's Hill Park, the Connaught Building, and the Chateau Laurier in the background, with the National Gallery over at the left. Nepean Point is based on the grounds of the National Gallery.

Looking back to the west gives us this view of the Ottawa River in the midst of freeze-up. There's more ice on the river now, though upstream the water will remain open all winter as a result of the influence of the Chaudiere Falls. If you look closely, you might make out a viewing platform below with people on it. That is near the beginning of the Alexandra Bridge.

This view looks north as the Alexandra crosses the river into Gatineau.

And this view looks east, taking in the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge.

The shadow above is the statue that stands up here. The French explorer Samuel de Champlain first came up the Ottawa River in 1613. A tribute to him has been here for decades.

I left the Point and came down around to the front of the National Gallery. One of the outdoor sculptures on the grounds is this bronze one. Maman is by Louise Bourgeois, who seems to have a thing for spiders on a big scale. This is one of seven versions of Maman, the others being in London, Bilbao, Tokyo, Qatar, South Korea, and Arkansas. In the first two shots, Notre Dame across the street provides a backdrop (with a woman in the first shot to show scale). In the last shot, the Gallery is the backdrop. I'll be taking you inside the Gallery in a few days, as last evening, a few hours before this post went live, I spent time inside taking in the art.

The Dawn Rises Upon The Brand New Year

As I ended last year with a sunset theme, it's been my tradition for my first new post of a year to have dawn shots. I start with this take from September. I was up early one Sunday, a couple of days after the tornado that had blown through the area. I went for a walk along Bank Street, going as far as the 417, the freeway that goes along an east-west corridor through Ottawa. Here I paused in a parking lot to photograph the sky as it started getting lighter in the east.

This October shot in the Centretown area featured fall colours illuminated by the first light of day.

This take was in the latter part of November. Here we have a view of Central Park in the Glebe neighbourhood. I've started photographing east and west views of this park for a winter to spring comparative post sometime in late April, as has been another tradition for me in this blog.

Early December brought this view as I passed by Dundonald Park in Centretown.

A few days later and a couple of blocks south, here was the dawn sky.

And a couple of days later the morning sky had this look. The building you see here faces Dundonald Park to the west, and is a former church that has been reshaped into lofts after the congregation moved to other quarters.

A couple of days later, this was the view over Dundonald Park.

Two days before Christmas Day, I crossed over the Mackenzie King Bridge. This was the view of Confederation Park looking towards City Hall.

On the bridge itself, I photographed the Ottawa Convention Centre, aka the Shaw Centre, and its distinctive glass wall, illuminated by the rising sun off to the southeast.

Here we have the dawn view looking over the Rideau Canal from the bridge. The rising sun is hidden here by the buildings at right.

But moving a few metres over and crossing the road gives this view of the landmarks to the north of the bridge- the National Arts Centre, Parliament Hill, the Chateau Laurier, and the government Conference Centre, bathed in the early morning sunlight.

City Daily Photo Theme Day: Best Of The Year

Continuing on with my favourite shots of 2018, today I'm concentrating on Gatineau and the larger area called the Outaouais- a French translation for the Ottawa River and this area along its shore in the province of Quebec. Winterlude has activities in Gatineau as well as in Ottawa in February, with Jacques Cartier Park on the shore of the Ottawa River being turned into a massive snowy playground. Snow sculptures are part of that.

In May, Tom and his wife came up to Ottawa to see the tulips, and I escorted them on tours of the area. That included an excursion into Gatineau Park, a large swath of nature beyond the city of Gatineau in the regional municipality of Les Collines-des-l'Outaouais. We stopped at this countryside church, St. Stephen's Catholic Church, in the village of Chelsea. The parish has roots that go back to 1840, with the current building dated to the 1880s.

Up in Gatineau Park itself, the Mackenzie King Estate is to be found. William Lyon Mackenzie King, one of our finest prime ministers, left this weekend retreat that had been his real home to the people of Canada in his will. This is a view of one of the houses, Moorside, taken in May.

The Gatineau River flows along the east edges of Gatineau Park towards its terminus with the Ottawa River, and here at the village of Wakefield, we find the Wakefield Covered Bridge crossing it. This view from the north gives a good view of the bridge, which was rebuilt in the 1990s after the first bridge was destroyed by fire. Today it is a pedestrian and bikes only bridge, and it is a beauty, spanning a length of 87.8 metres.

The Canadian Museum of History stands along the shore of the Ottawa River in Gatineau, another of our national museums, and I've visited several times over the year. Each visit always includes a look at the monumental abstract mural Morning Star, by the First Nations artist Alex Janvier, high over the Grand Hall. This photo includes people in the upper level, reinforcing how big the mural is. If I had to pick a favourite work of art in the National Capital Region, this would be it.

On another visit, I took in one of the temporary exhibits. Medieval Europe is soon to finish up its time here, and examines life in Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. At the heart of the space are a series of screens that rotate between images of European architecture and period statues. This particular one, with visitors amid the architecture, stuck with me.

Jacques Cartier Park hosted the topiary event MosaiCanada for the second and final year, a fabulous collection of living, sculpted art. They included a mother and cub pair of foxes, much larger than life.

This one featured a shepherd, sheep dog, and sheep- the dog's expression was priceless.

One of the show stoppers was this massive tree containing a variety of birds.

And of course my favourite of all the topiaries, a First Nations inspired take on Mother Earth, surrounded by animals and looking quite peaceful.

An October visit back to the Gatineau Hills brought me back to the Mackenzie King Estate for the fall colours. King was something of an eccentric, taking bits and pieces of buildings that were demolished and incorporating them into his estate as follies. They included various pieces that make up what is today called the Abbey, which looks splendid among fall colours.

And I finish with this grand view. There are several lookout spots not far from the Estate. This one is the Champlain Lookout. Here the visitor can look out over the steep drop to the valley floor. The Ottawa River is there in the distance, winding its way upstream.

City Daily Photo Theme Day: Best Of The Year

Happy New Year! The first day of the year is a chance for members of City Daily Photo to look back at their favourite photos of the year. You can see how others have chosen their favourites at this link. I have decided to do this over two days, with both sides of the Ottawa River. Today it's the Ontario side, and tomorrow I'll be doing the Quebec side.

This was one of my first shots of 2018, taken on New Year's Day outside the National Gallery of Canada.

One day in mid-January I happened to go into the Ottawa Convention Centre, aka the Shaw Centre, to photograph the glass wall from inside. There was a wedding show going on inside; one of the vendors gave me a ticket, and I went in. It was an oddity- I'm single, not getting married, and I've never been to one of these. Which meant that unlike the impending brides, grooms, wedding party members, and those offering their business services inside, I wasn't under any pressures. Among the many photographs I took was a fashion show of models walking the runways in wedding attire. This was the first time I've done a proper runway shoot, and this shot taken after it was done, with the models chatting with audience members, particularly stood out to me.

Winterlude is a big festival held in February on both sides of the Ottawa River. Ice sculptures are found at more than one site, but especially in Confederation Park. They look vivid lit up at night.

On the Easter weekend, I paid a visit to the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, one of the national museums here in the national capital region. Based on the Experimental Farm, a government research farm southwest of the downtown core, it is a working farm where animals are housed in a series of barns the visitor goes in and out of (in warmer weather they spend at least part of their time outdoors). This is the Dairy Barn, the largest of the barns on the grounds. The Museum is an ideal way for city kids to learn where their food comes from.

Inside the Dairy Barn, the herd is housed over the winter. The rest of the year they're out in pastures, only coming in at milking time. I liked the expressions of these two cows.

The Canadian Tulip Festival is another big festival held here in May, dating back to the aftermath of World War Two. I get in a lot of photographs on both sides of the Ottawa River over the course of the event, and particularly go for a view of the tulips with the Peace Tower of Parliament Hill as a backdrop.

The tulip beds at Commissioners Park is the biggest site of the many tulips planted here.

During the summer, the Canadian War Museum housed a temporary exhibit on Armour. This happened to include a contemporary one- one of the Iron Man armours from the Marvel cinematic universe, all lit up. You can imagine this was a draw for photo ops like this one.

Buskerfest is held here each year at the beginning of August. This was one of my favourite acts of the event, a man and woman operating as two thirds of the acrobatic troupe Les Dudes. At this point in their routine, Senja had red-flagged Philippe, and he responded by taking a dive and faking an injury that professional soccer players would be proud of.

The National Gallery held a special exhibit over the summer called Impressionist Treasures: The Ordrupgaard Collection, consisting of French and Danish paintings. I paid a visit on the Labour Day weekend. The Ordrupgaard, a Copenhagen gallery, has been under renovations at present, and sent their collection off on tour. Part of it was here, including this 1865 Claude Monet work, The Chailly Road Through The Forest of Fontainbleu.

On the 21st of September, a set of tornadoes swept through the National Capital Region, causing damage on both sides of the river. For my own part, I didn't know it had been a tornado until the following day. All I knew was a particularly heavy rainfall happened that knocked out the power around dinner time (my home would not see power restored for just over twenty four hours). When the rain ended I went for a walk and crossed the Rideau Canal during the last light of day. This view looking south from the Laurier Avenue Bridge shows the retreating edge of part of the storm.

Late in November I took a tour of Centre Block on Parliament Hill, as the building is due to close up for several years for rehabilitation work. Among my many photographs that day is this one inside the Library of Parliament, which I consider the most beautiful room in the capital. A statue of Queen Victoria is at its heart. Tomorrow I show you my favourites from the Quebec side of the river.