Tuesday 4 September 2007
Tobermory
I’m lucky enough to work at a small company full of cool people. All friends, all the sort of people you can have a good conversation with about aesthetics or theatre or philosophy, and hang out comfortably with for a week. So this past week we all packed up and headed to a cottage near the tip of the Bruce Peninsula.
There was some shop talk, like how to get more “good” clients - the kind of organizations that are trying to make the world better - and plotting strategy for our video department. We did a bit of improv and other creative exercises, too, and there was a lot of good food, light reading, ping-pong and beach-going, as well as some hiking along the northernmost part of the Bruce Trail, which runs all the way down the Escarpment to Niagara Falls.
I did a lot of poking around in the woods and along the lake. Funny thing - while everyone else is admiring the grand, sweeping vistas, I’m usually crouched with a magnifier studying the tiniest things I can find. So I spent a lot of time this trip puttering around with our camera, exploring the possibilities of macro photography.
Of the places we visited, I think my favorite was along the rocky shore at the end of the road. The ancient, glacier-carved sedimentary rock is like a garden of miniatures - every few inches you’ll find a little crevasse or a tiny pothole that’s become home to an even tinier plant or two, comprising a startling variety of species. And of course, there were lichens and mosses and ferns, whose primitive forms hold a strange fascination for me.
In the evenings we watched Rome on DVD (ah, what a horrible, lecherous, bloodthirsty lot) and played with the camera some more. After a few light-painting experiments using exposures of several seconds, we hitched the camera to Sean’s laptop, using a piece of software called iStopMotion to create our own animations, in the style of Pika Pika.
Sean’s gone and created a Flickr set of our experiments, and uploaded a video (click the “Read more” link). A few of my photos are up on Flickr as well.
In all, a wonderful week.
Anyway, that got us excited all over again about the idea of building. Sean’s started talking about building a small set of offices that could serve as an “incubator” for green businesses. Sean suggested a music studio too. I’m picturing a network of people to hang out with, a room for coffee and hanging out, perhaps a little quiet space for people to do yoga or nap… I still have reservations about moving out of town, but all these ideas have me a bit more optimistic about the prospect.