Steve Brandon's blog

In November 2003, I bought a roll of Kodak black-and-white film on a whim, and took a few photos around downtown Montreal on a rainy evening, a few more in the eighth floor of Concordia University's Hall building, which was undergoing extensive construction at the time and resembled a scene from the first Silent Hill game, and a few from Dorval Airport.

You can see the complete roll of photos here.

Just testing out the new Google Maps satellite image feature.

The first image is of Pincourt, Quebec (near Montreal), where I lived for 24 of my 30 years, up to December. Unfortunately, they don't have the high resolution satellite imagery for the northern half of Pincourt, even though they have high res imagery of the southern half of Pincourt. I wonder why that is? There is that mysterious "water filtration plant", that has, for some reason, an anti-aircraft gun, but I always assumed that was just a World War II relic... or is it? (Insert X-Files-ish paranoid conspiracy theory music here.)

By the way, that Pincourt image, at least of the north half, is several years out of date. They just built a huge new high school, library, and arena near where I lived, and there's tonnes of residential construction too. I think it may be from a NASA satellite photo I got right off the NASA satellite site taken in April 2001.

My new house is somewhere in suburban Ottawa, and all of Ottawa seems to be in high res. For some reason, "they" highlighted the house two doors up... is there something special about that house that "they" don't want the neighbours to know... hmm?

Everything seems to correspond to what I know about the area, but I haven't been here that long, so I don't know what was built when and couldn't hazard a guess to when this image was snapped.

This photo I took of some track fire marshalls on the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal just after the end of the Canadian Grand Prix of Formula One race in June 2002 has always puzzled me.

At first glance, it looks like a normal photo, and, for overall composition, it's actually one of my favourite photos that I've ever taken. But, looking at it closely, I noticed something very odd in the window of the passenger side door (see inset). It looks kind of like an old man Muppet. You can see shadows that seem to represent deep-set eyes and prominent cheekbones and a patch of what looks like thinning grey hair over the ears. It also looks too short and too pale to be human.

I've shown it to people, and the best explanation I've heard is that it's a puppy, like a dalmatian because they're firemen. I'd say that's likely, but the head appears to be behind the guy's shoulders, and I'm not sure what it would be sitting on. And it could just be the angle, but I'd swear it looks more like it's something outside of the passenger door, not inside.

I'm not saying it's a ghost... if it was, it would be one that likes daylight and large crowds, just I would love to go back in time and look at the scene from a different angle as the mystery of exactly what it is still perplexes me.