After my Celtic Colours 2005 trip to Cape Breton, I was requested to share some of the photographs I took then and during my previous trips to the Island—my collection currently numbers in the many thousands. Since, at the time, I had no mechanism for posting them on-line with which I felt comfortable, Mike Little offered to host them on his Cape Breton Choices web site (click the “Photos” link underneath the banner at the top of that site’s home page). We agreed that I would supply a set of pictures on a more-or-less monthly basis presenting an aspect of Cape Breton’s scenery along with some descriptive commentary. The following table lists the essays in the order in which they have actually been published, which has turned out to be considerably less frequently than agreed.
| Essay | Essay Title | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Early Fall Colours in Cape Breton | 2005 November 3 | Archived |
| 2 | Cape Mabou Highlands | 2005 November 30 | Archived |
| 3 | West Mabou Beach Provincial Park | 2006 January 19 | Archived |
| 4 | The “Railway Trail” | 2006 February 28 | Archived |
| 5 | The Gulf Coast | 2006 April 11 | Archived |
| 6 | The Bras d’Or Lakes—Cape Breton’s Inland Sea | 2006 June 14 | Archived |
| 7 | The Southwest Mabou River | 2006 August 29 | Archived |
| 8 | Fall Colours—2006 Edition | 2006 November 5 | Archived |
| 9 | Cape St. Lawrence and Lowland Cove | 2006 December 31 | Archived |
| 10 | Chéticamp | 2007 February 13 | Archived |
| 11 | The Mabou River | 2007 May 13 | Archived |
| 12 | The Beautiful Isle | 2007 July 15 | Archived |
| 13 | Fall Colours—2007 Edition | 2007 October 28 | Archived |
| 14 | Chéticamp River | 2007 December 21 | Archived |
| 15 | Cape Smokey | 2008 January 29 | Archived |
| 16 | Cape Mabou | 2008 April 9 | Archived |
| 17 | East Coast–From Isle Madame to Fourchu | 2008 July 13 | Archived |
| 18 | East Coast–Gabarus and the Mira River Area | 2008 October 5 | Archived |
| 19 | Fall Colours—2008 Edition | 2008 November 11 | Archived |
| 20 | East Coast—Louisbourg Area and North | 2009 February 5 | Archived |
| 21 | Iconic Views | 2009 June 7 | Current |
The current essay is always posted on Mike’s web site, not here (though the link at the left does work—it takes you to Mike’s web site). The previous essays are archived here; they are the same as the versions that appeared originally on Mike’s site, except that I have made occasional minor revisions to the text to correct typos, infelicities of wording, and errors as well as to incorporate feedback I have received. Consequently, the pages in these essays lack the navigation bar at the left that one finds elsewhere on my site; essays before the 18th use HTML 4.01 Transitional (rather than XHTML 1.0 Strict) and do not use CSS.
Please direct any feedback on these essays to me using the link in the navigation bar.
I am more than willing to make the originals of these pictures (or others in my collection) available without charge to anyone who wishes to use them to promote Cape Breton or its culture. Contact me using the link in the navigation bar and I will try to work out some mutually acceptable method of delivering them to you. I am delighted to be able to give something back to the Island for all the incredible hospitality it has shown me over the years.
Please note that I’m not a professional photographer. I’m frankly amazed that the results have turned out as well as they have, given my inexperience and lack of knowledge of professional photography—it’s indeed a tribute to those who built the camera, a digital Olympus D-540 Zoom (pictures prior to 2004 December 12 were taken on film using an Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 80). In the spring of 2008, I acquired a Nikon D40 (digital SLR), which works much better at night than the Olympus but which I am sometimes unable to convince to do as good a job with scenery and landscape photos as the Olympus. In the fall of 2008, I used the Nikon exclusively for scenery photos to give it (and me!) a thorough test and you can see the result in the essays beginning with the 19th (though following essays use photos from both cameras—you can tell by the photo’s aspect ratio (length to width): the Olympus uses 4:3, while the Nikon uses 3:2). Earlier essays use photos taken only with the Olympus, although you will find photos of concerts and festivals in other sections of my web site now generally prefer the Nikon to the Olympus.
In order to not use up too much bandwidth (Mike is currently on dial-up and I was until late in 2007), each photo, which runs from 400KB to 1700KB, had to be reduced to something on the order of 50–200KB. This is done using JPEG compression, which preserves an amazing amount of detail considering the amount of data it removes. Thus, the versions on the web site are considerably smaller versions of the originals.
Click on one of the green links at the left in the middle portion of the navigation bar to access the corresponding essay.