Learning Curve

Learning Curve, originally uploaded by Dar Moorhouse.

Digital photography is a wonderful combination of art and tech. I don't claim to be any good at photography and I certainly don't call myself a photographer but that isn't the point. The point is to simply have fun with it. I found a simple method in photoshop which lets me borrow the look of Dave Hill. The photo needs to already have some strong contrast so I setup quickly at home and got my son to pose for a few minutes and blasted him with light. I took him as he was; messy hair and all. I'm not so much pleased with the outcome of this first attempt as amazed that it turned out at all.

Back in the Forge

The Hammer [Blog], originally uploaded by Dar Moorhouse.

As the temperature dropped earlier this winter I found the cut off point for working in my forge to be about -15C. Anything below that is just too cold. Even with the heat blasting out of the hearth, hot enough to melt iron, I still can't stay warm. The cold becomes like a live thing, feeding on the warmth of anything it can find. The anvil acts as a 160lb black hole for cold. Below 15C it becomes a large block of frost which sucks out the heat from even red hot iron being hammered upon it. It's nice to be out in the forge again (while the warmer weather remains) hammering and shaping...

-44 Celcius

-44 Celcius, originally uploaded by Dar Moorhouse.

This photo goes along with the earlier post. Yup. It's pretty cold out. And to think, -44 is warmer than this morning...

Deep Freeze

When Whitehorse weather is posted as a low of -34C we usually see a bit colder at our place out near Lake Leberge. We seem to live in a small temperature sinkhole which can be wildly different from the temperatures around us. Like this morning when I woke up early the temperature was -47 and Whitehorse was supposed to be a balmy -34 or so. I wonder what it is about this spot that makes it so much colder at times? When it get colder than -45C experience tells me that metal starts to do strange things - like break. The car doesn't run so well (if at all) so today was a home day. Even our pets are all inside. If the temperature warmed up to -30 it would seem pretty warm now.

Urban Yukon and My 5000 Word Essay

Well, it's not really 5000 words but it is about Urban Yukon. Dave Rogers asked me for a few words about UY the other day so I wrote down a few things for him for an article. Thought I'd share it:

I'm very much a part-time blogger. Even though my main audience amounts to about one person I still find enjoyment in the process and for about five years I hosted my own server from my own house and blogged mainly for my own Mom. I found Urban Yukon quite by accident back when Geof Harries was running it and one day I noticed a traffic spike in my log files; my little wordpress blog was listed on some site called Urban Yukon! At the time I wasn't prepared to go public so I asked to have my name stricken from that honour roll, although I was intrigued by the thought of a community of Yukon blogs and kept it in the back of my mind. I found myself going back to UY to check up on some of the folks and got to know a few of the names. It struck me that despite the wide geographical dispersal, differences in work and lifestyle, we all have the Yukon in common. We all feel the cold, we all see the change in the seasons, and we all appreciate the vastness and openness of the Yukon landscape.

 Not long ago I down-sized my server farm at home (only three machines now) and took the opportunity to jump from a self-hosted wordpress blog running on an old pentium 450 over to Blogger. I then contacted Dave Rogers and he created me a wonderful work of art as a welcome and signed me on. Now I'm part of the Urban Yukon community as well and rather enjoy it. Many of us in the Yukon are from somewhere else yet most of us who migrate here end up being as Yukon as the folk born here. I've always felt a sense of belonging in the North since my arrival here and now I've found the same in the "blogosphere" through Urban Yukon.