Federal Trident sailing through the ice in front of Quebec City 2026
Days with temperatures of -25 °C and below are becoming increasingly rare in Quebec City. With the wind chill factor, the temperature today feels like -36 °C. This is a golden opportunity to try to capture the sea smoke on the St. Lawrence River.
Photography technique
Sea mist between Île d’Orléans and Quebec City, winter 2026
Night photography in these weather conditions remains difficult. The low light requires a tripod, which itself vibrates in the gusty wind. This means increasing the ISO and decreasing the depth of field to achieve a faster shutter speed, which slightly reduces image quality. In addition, using a 300 mm telephoto lens increases the risk of blurry photos. Photography is all about compromise!
Canadian Coastguard icebreaker Des Groseillers at work near Quebec City winter 2026
Above is a photo of the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Des Groseillers at work. It is not surprising to see this type of vessel in the area, as the Seaway must remain ice-free in its centre to allow ships to navigate year-round. And this year, there is ice!
During summer 2025, several large aircraft scheduled to land at Montreal Airport had to divert to Quebec City Jean Lesage International Airport (CYQB). Numerous thunderstorms disrupted arrivals and departures at the main airports in the province of Quebec.
The extreme weather in the west gradually moved eastward. This delayed and even cancelled the departure of many planes in Quebec City.
When most of the storms finally passed over Quebec City airport in the evening, an Air Canada Boeing 777-300 ER took off from runway 24 to fly its passengers back to Montréal.
In the background, Air Transat aircraft can be observed. The Swiss Air logo can also be noticed on an Airbus A330-343. It had come from Zurich and was further diverted to Quebec City, along with an Air France Boeing 777-228 LR and a few others.
Below, we see the Boeing 777-300 ER refuelling at a time when extreme weather conditions have not yet reached the airport. Two Avjet tanker trucks are standing near the aircraft. The height of each truck is less than the internal diameter of the Boeing’s engines. For several years, this aircraft held the record for the largest engines on a civil aircraft. Now, the Boeing 777X has taken the crown.
Air Canada B777-300ER refueling at the Quebec Jean-Lesage international airport.
Photography Technique
Both photos required some compromises. Everything works if you accept being completely soaked and working with both feet in the water along a metal barrier with lightning flashing here and there. For some photos, the session lasted two hours.
I took the shots from a hole in the airport fence. My Canon EF 300 mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens was protected by a plastic bag tightly wrapped around the lens hood.
A frequency scanner provided data about air traffic. A controller informed an Air France pilot that such a situation of aircraft diversions during extreme weather had not been seen in several years.
I set my full-frame camera to produce only RAW images. Focusing was done in SERVO mode. I reduced the depth of field to optimize speed and limit the size of the photographic grain (ISO).
When selecting photos, I preferred the one showing the Boeing taking off, but where the Swiss airline’s logo is still visible. It was important to highlight the aircraft’s presence in Quebec City.
The novel “Un monde au-delà des hommes” by Catherine Hermary-Vieille.
The novel ” Un monde au-delà des hommes” will be of particular interest to readers whose knowledge of early Antarctic expeditions is limited. If you don’t know whether Norway’s Roald Amundsen or Britain’s Robert Scott reached the South Pole in Antarctica first, don’t do the research before opening this book. You’ll find it much more interesting.
In the days of the great conquests of the planet’s uncharted territories, explorers risked their lives for the glory of their country. Here, Norway and Great Britain race to reach the South Pole first.
This historical novel runs to just 134 pages, allowing the author to concentrate on the essentials. She has divided the book into two parts. The first focuses on Amundsen, the second on Scott. The two men used very different methods to achieve their ends. At the beginning of the book, she includes a map showing the routes chosen by each team and the stopovers they agreed on.
Author Catherine Hermary-Vieille discusses the preparation of the journey, the strategic choices made regarding objectives, the obstacles encountered along the way, not to mention the mental attitude adopted by each explorer and the members of the expedition.
Back cover of the novel “Un monde au-delà des hommes” by Catherine Hermary-Vieille.
On this trip, one of the two expedition leaders will use sledge dogs as their main means of transport, while the other will try to make progress with mules. One will have only one objective in mind, the other will have several goals to achieve. One will behave as a flexible leader, the other will be more intransigent. The choices and attitude of each explorer will have a direct impact on the success of the expedition.
It’s worth noting that the two competitors don’t start their journey to Antarctica at the same time, so there’s an imbalance right from the start as to when they’ll arrive at the South Pole. But even so, once you know this, there’s still a frozen continent to cross, men to feed, crevasses to avoid and frostbite to treat. You also have to be able to come back alive.
A novel like this can be read in a day. We can forgive a few sketchy descriptions and even a small error like the one on page 19, where the name of the Inuit dog “Funcha” appears twice in the list. These distractions don’t detract from the intensity of the story. These are, after all, the stories of men who went to the very end of themselves for the glory of their country.
Today, we’re witnessing a similar race between countries to send humans to the planet Mars. Which country will get there first? And once it gets there, will it have the right to claim a planet for itself at the expense of Earth’s other humans?
Click on the link for more biography books on my blog.
Cover page of the manga “Les montagnes hallucinées”, by Gou Tanabe.
Gou Tanabe presents H.P. Lovecraft’s masterpiece “Les montagnes hallucinées” (the French version of “At the Mountains of Madness”) as a two-volume manga. Leafing through Lovecraft is in itself a journey into the strange, but to do so by starting at the end of a book and reading from right to left adds to the weirdness of the experience.
This transposition of Lovecraft into manga is a success. And the statistics prove it. The 382 reviews left on Amazon show clear customer satisfaction, with a total of 4.9/5 stars at the time of writing.
I normally prefer color comics and graphic novels, but the black-and-white interpretation of Lovecraft’s work is a perfect match for the fantasy world into which Tanabe plunges us.
A page from the manga “Les montagnes hallucinées” from Lovecraft, by Gou Tanabe.
Lovecraft makes a phantasmagorical work credible by integrating a well-balanced mix of real and fictional elements into the plot. Unless you’re an archaeologist and paleontologist yourself, it’s hard to tell which data really belong to science. This helps to frame the reader. You recognize moments of pure imagination, but you’re still hooked.
I put myself in the shoes of someone who lived in Lovecraft’s time, when Antarctica was still a mysterious continent, unexplored in its entirety. A story filled with elements of fiction would gain in credibility, while no one could really confirm or deny some of the author’s statements.
A page from the graphic novel “Les montagnes hallucinées”.
In “Les montagnes hallucinées”, we read about sailing, aviation, extreme weather and survival in icy, isolated spaces. Readers witness the problems experienced by the various crews exploring Antarctica. The scientists’ increasingly startling discoveries force them to make risky decisions that plunge them into an unknown world. In short, themes that still appeal to most people today.
The two volumes total around 650 pages, which can be flipped through with interest in a single day, since many plates include no text at all.
The graphic novel “Jours de sable” by Aimée de Jongh.
The graphic novel “Jours de sable” is a historical reminder of the famous Dust Bowl which struck the central United States between 1930 and 1940. These were ten years of misery that inspired John Steinbeck for his work “The Grapes of Wrath“.
Add to these factors linked to the economic crisis and multiple epidemics, and we can understand the mass exodus of American households. They left everything behind, including many family members who died of dust-related respiratory complications. Most headed for the West Coast, but this massive influx of people only served to increase the region’s already high unemployment.
A page from the graphic novel “Jours de sable”.
The strangest thing is that, decades later, the climate changes experienced today in these same states could help to repeat the phenomenon, without it necessarily covering such a long period.
Author Aimée de Jongh uses fictional characters, but the scenario respects the reality experienced by the population. In her story, a young photographer leaves New York in 1937 to report on the Dust Bowl. He has been briefed on the subjects to be covered, but soon realizes that he is dealing with a human tragedy of unsuspected proportions.
The main character in the graphic novel tries to do his job in the sandstorm.
Asking suffering people who have lost everything to pose for the New York media was not as simple as he had thought. The situation becomes even more complicated when he gets to know these people and experiences their difficulties first-hand.
In addition to the deftly drawn panels that delight the reader, there are plenty of period photos gleaned from various museums, as well as official historical content. I loved this award-winning book.
I appreciate Erik Orsenna for his erudition, his Cartesian thinking, his poetry and his ability to find the detail that will amuse the reader while informing him. In his book, the author tackles with equal comfort a wide variety of themes relating to history, religion, philosophy, the environment, climate change, renewable energy, pure science, politics and economics.
Being first and foremost a man of the field, he quickly recognized the need to develop and maintain political contacts in many countries in order to facilitate his travels in areas often considered problematic. The reader benefits from this privileged access.
In “La Terre a soif”, he presents us with portraits of thirty-three rivers around the world. The list is not exhaustive, of course, because after years of travel and observation, he was pressed by the publisher to produce his book. I know that if it were up to him, he would still be on the road accumulating information, each more interesting than the other.
Here are some of the rivers discussed in this book: Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Loire, Nil, Congo, Ganges, Mekong, Colorado and even Panama’s two rivers. The smallest of the rivers mentions in the book flows in Brittany, France and is called Trieux, while the largest is the Amazon in Brazil.
With some of the more powerful countries like China, or Israel and a few others, negotiating for the equitable administration of a river is difficult. The dams built by a powerful country reduce the flow downstream and the smaller surrounding countries make do with what is left. Water harvesting also dries up land over long distances, affecting agricultural production.
Navigation on waterways must also adapt to the reduced flow. One example is the Panama Canal: [DeepL translation]: “ The lack of water is the great fear of Panama. We remember that the heart of the canal is the great Gatún Lake. If it were to dry up, the ships would run into rocks and sand: they would no longer be able to transport their cargo from one sea to the other. Trucks would have to take over”. (p.252)
In contrast, the author shows that there are ways to administrate a major river so that it benefits the riparian countries. He cites the management of the St. Lawrence River by the United States and Canada as an example.
Contrary to what one might think when it comes to the environment and water scarcity, not everything in this book is negative. On the contrary, Erik Orsenna has understood that the reader is tired of alarmist statements. The author has therefore designed a very well-balanced book where it is possible to make the reader’s thoughts evolve without the latter feeling the need to take an antidepressant at each chapter.
End of December 2022. It’s hot in Quebec City. The city was first swept by a storm that left hundreds of thousands of Quebecers without power, some for more than a week. A heat wave then swept through the province of Quebec for several days.
One positive aspect of this warm air is that it melted the thick layer of ice and snow that had accumulated on the roofs of homes during the December 23 storm, resetting the clock for the remaining portion of the winter to come.
But when it comes to winter sports, it’s a different story. One had to walk around town on the last day of 2022 to see the changes in just a few days.
Passing by the public skating rink maintained by the municipality on the Battlefields Park, I took this picture that sums up the situation: a warm rain falling on the snow and accelerating the melting to the point where a thick fog sets in, puddles of water several centimeters thick covering a layer of ice.
I use this water to add the reflections of the skaters in the photographic composition. Fortunately for them, the sportsmen benefit from a mechanically cooled ice rink to continue practicing their favorite activity.
While searching high and low in various bookstores in Quebec, I often make very interesting discoveries. I recently found a book by Robert Seethaler, originally published in German under the title of ,, Ein ganzes Leben ” and which in English is translated by “A whole life“.
It is a small book of only 145 pages, but the concise writing has the power to immediately propel the reader into the early 1900s, in the middle of the Austrian mountains. It was the period when the construction of the first cable cars began, a period that would change the whole dynamic of the society by gradually allowing more and more tourists to occupy a territory that was once sparsely inhabited.
The author tells the story of Andreas Egger, a simple and endearing man whose strength of character allows him to stand up to any ordeal. He is not distinguished by his intelligence, which is quite ordinary, but rather by his ability to survive and his desire to always move forward. He is a human being that we love and wish only good for.
Here is what the publisher said about Robert Seethaler: “A whole life, elected book of the year (2014) by bookstores across the Rhine, thus confirms the depth of his talent as a writer, capable of leading with great simplicity his reader as close as possible to his emotions”.
The book “J’étais le pilote de Hitler” tells a true story that was originally published in 1957. The 2020 French edition, presented and annotated by Claude Quétel, improves our understanding of Hans Baur, one of the founders of Lufthansa in 1926, Hitler‘s personal pilot, but also a high-ranking Nazi SS officer and a close friend of the Führer.
The information offered by Hans Baur is of great interest. Early in Hans Baur’s career, the pilots doing what he did were called aviation pioneers. At the time, planes contained virtually no air navigation instruments that could assist a pilot flying in difficult weather conditions. The Alps are tricky to fly through in good weather, so it gets a lot more challenging in bad weather and in a poorly equipped plane. If we add the freezing conditions, engine failures, cabins that are not heated and that are not equipped with devices providing supplemental oxygen to pilots, then there are flightsthat would be considered something like an “exploit”. This aspect of the book is therefore very interesting.
I also liked all of Hans Baur’s anecdotes about Hitler’s demands on him. Being a pilot for the Führer was no small task. Hitler had very high expectations regarding the performance and the punctuality of his personal pilot, and the latter certainly demonstrated extraordinary abilities to satisfy his superior.
Where we have to be wary is that we are still dealing with an SS pilot, who was a member of the Nazi organization before Hitler took power. We have to question his personal values and what he voluntarily neglected in his book. The regular massacres carried out during Barbarossa Operation in Russia, or the elimination of six million Jews, are not discussed, as the SS pilot maintains he was never involved in politics. He carried passengers without asking questions, but he had chosen Nazism as a political movement. When you are invited to Hitler’s table on a daily basis and are therefore part of his inner circle, it is clear that the Nazi represented by Hans Baur is speaking about more than piloting.
The experience in Russian prisons is described as inhuman by Hans Baur, who has been there ten years. He talks about the transport of German prisoners in cattle cars, very bad food, etc. But I couldn’t help but wonder what planet he lived on to denounce his condition as a prisoner while ignoring the treatment the Germans imposed on the Russians and all the people who were deported and massacred. The Einsatzgruppen were not altar boys. Moreover, Claude Quétel also questioned this remark from Hans Baur, adding that “although very harsh, the living and working conditions in the Soviet camps have nothing to do – as we sometimes read – with those of the German concentration camps.”(p.381).
There are also some inaccuracies and sometimes falsehoods that Claude Quétel does not hesitate to point out. Sometimes these are trivial errors resulting from poor memory. However, other important facts are downright inaccurate. As in this passage where Baur says that Hitler decided to attack Russia four weeks before the start of the war, which is not true. The conquest of the East and of more living space is specifically enunciated in Mein Kampfand is spoken of in a book written while Hitler was in prison in 1923 following a failed coup.
Conclusion
The book « J’étais le pilote de Hitler » is a very interesting book, one more about Nazi Germany. The history of Germany is fascinating and complex, from the time of the Holy Roman Empire to the present day. But it seems that it will always be the twelve years of the Nazi period that will achieve more success in bookstores.
Have a good read!
Click on the link for other books on war in my blog.
February 7th 2020 snowstorm at Place d’Youville in Quebe City.
The photo above shows Place d’Youville, in Quebec City, during the February 7, 2020 snowstorm.
The original color photo practically showed only a general white veil. The processing in black and white photo helps to accentuate the effects of blowing snow in this winter scene. Transformation into black and white is a very useful photography technique when it comes to highlighting elements that are difficult to detect.
The subsequent enhancement using an image processing software also helped to highlight otherwise secondary elements.
Between the snow bank in the foreground and the buildings on the right, the cars are moving slowly along what is still visible of this entrance to Old Quebec.
The St. Louis street and the La Bûche restaurant in Old Quebec.
The scene
above shows St-Louis street partially obstructed by snow. On this Friday
evening, the Quebec carnival has just started. However, not everyone is
celebrating. The driver of the snow blower in the background is immobilized.
The trucks in which he would normally blow snow have been delayed.
In the foreground, the restaurant La Bûche. I’ve been there a few times since it opened. Always the same excellent recipes, impeccable service and an extra kilo after the meal. A very good restaurant in Quebec, near the Chateau Frontenac. And for those interested, what is happening in the kitchen is visible to some of the customers. (No I am not paid for this advertisement!)
A cyclist in a snowstorm in Old Quebec on February 7th 2020.
For the bravest, winter cycling is an alternative way to travel in extreme weather. The reduced visibility forces the cyclist above to use the sidewalk for his own protection. However, beware of walking down sidewalks at the corner of streets where ice sometimes accumulates. Having often been in Old Quebec to do night and day photography, I witnessed spectacular pirouettes that would make the elastic acrobats of Cirque du Soleil jealous.
The photos were taken with a Canon 5DSr full-frame camera.
