(Photo: Louise Abbott)

 The Rural Route Communications team has been on assignment again for the Cree Outfitting and Tourism Association (COTA). We travelled for two weeks in March by truck, snowshoe, and snowmobile in Eeyou Istchee, as the Cree call their territory in northern Quebec. It was unseasonably warm, and by the end of our trip, the snow had largely melted, and thin ice was putting an end to snowmobile travel on lakes and rivers. The photographs that we took will be used to top up the COTA photo bank.

 (Photo: Niels Jensen) 

Wakefield Community Centre (Photo: Niels Jensen)

On the weekend of January 21-22, 2012, the Rural Route Communications team took time off from research and photography in the Townships, and headed to Wakefield in western Quebec to shoot video footage and stills of a workshop at the local community centre. The workshop, sponsored by the Blue Metropolis Foundation in collaboration with the Quebec Writers' Federation, is part of an oral and written storytelling project called "Once Upon a Time." The workshop leader was Laura Teasdale, a playwright, actress, and director based in Knowlton.

The photo below shows Louise Abbott at work. She recently added this boompole with a pro-sound ambient dipstick to her kit so that she can bring a shotgun microphone much closer to the sound source without interfering with the framing of the picture.

Niels Jensen, meanwhile, has acquired a Sony A77, which enables him to create panoramas, like the one above, in the camera itself. This new compact model also has built-in GPS tagging, which will be particularly useful for the work that Rural Route Communications does in northern Canada.

(Photo: Niels Jensen)

Eustis Bridge, May 2011  (Photo: Niels Jensen)

With a longstanding interest in covered bridges, Louise Abbott was delighted when Hamlet Heavy Timberwork asked if she would document their restoration of the Eustis Bridge near North Hatley in the Eastern Townships.  Louise  has completed a fifteen-minute video about the restoration and hopes to produce a longer documentary on the history of covered bridges in Quebec. On October 7, 2011, the restored bridge was lifted from terra firma back onto its abutments over the river in Eustis. Louise's video,  A New Life for an Old Bridge,  is now on YouTube.  A French-subtitled version can also be seen: Une nouvelle vie pour un vieux pont. 

Eustis Bridge, October 2011 (Photo: Louise Abbott)

Louise  Abbott's latest book review appeared in  The (Montreal) Gazette on Saturday, March 24, 2012.

Robert Capa: The Paris Years, 1933-1954

Here's a sample:

One of the most memorable photographs of World War II portrays an American soldier in the surf during the Allied invasion of Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast in June of 1944. Five years ago, the soldier was finally identified—Private First Class Huston Riley. When asked about the picture, the elderly veteran replied that he still wondered what that "crazy photographer" was doing in that hellish place.

(Photo: Robert Capa)

That crazy photographer was Robert Capa, an intrepid 30-year-old who had earned a reputation as the greatest war photographer in the world for his photo reportage of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Capa and his remarkable career constitute the subject of a bountifully illustrated new book titled Robert Capa: The Paris Years, 1933-1954, a translation of Robert Capa: Traces d'une légende.

As the French co-authors—Bernard Lebrun and Michel Lefebvre—acknowledge, American scholar Richard Whelan published "a thorough, formidable biography [of Capa] ... that will be difficult for anyone to improve upon." Thus they have focussed on "the all but forgotten 'French Capa,' nearly edged out of the picture by his American career. From 1933 to 1954, Capa used Paris as a global platform for his photography. It was here that artistically he was born."