The Cemetery.

I have an hour available before the ferry will arrive in Fulford Harbour bringing my wife Heather home from a day looking after a grandchild across the water. From the stone church, at the head of the bay, I can watch for the ferry and spend some time taking photographs.

The gravestones are my objective today. This is an old church, by BC standards, and the graveyard gives a snapshot of the people of the south-end who built it. Fascinating stuff for me and my camera. While the tide is far out in the bay below and the sun flashes out between grey clouds providing lots of other subject matter, which I will get to later, right now I will simply try to do justice to these gravestones and their history of Saltspring Island.

This does not call on any great technical knowledge or special lens but it does require that I look carefully and with respect. This is a form of anthropology, of documentation, but also a way to improve my own mental attitude. Good photographs come from careful observation and good observation is more than simply technical. It requires a form of empathy as I take these photographs that will permit me today to feel kinship with these folk long beneath the sod.