FTLComm - Nipawin - September 15, 1999

For years I can recall wanting to capture the images I would see at night but with the doubtful nature of success I was less then eager to spend the money on film and developing. However, with the advent of digital electronic photography there is no film or developing costs and experimentation with night images is worth the time. Nipawin on Tuesday night around 11:00 was very quiet and is just as beautiful a community in the dark as it is during the day light hours. What other community has a night time Christmas parade every year with electrically lit floats and vehicles it seems only fitting to photograph some of the things in this town on a dark and starry night. This first picture is of the recently renovated and remodeled St. Eugene Roman Catholic Church. The building has been give a gray and white outside and then decorated with trees and shrubs to highlight the beauty of the building. As you can see the main features are set off at night with lights to focus on the various elements on the building. Only a block away is the funeral home seen below and it also is dressed up for a night appearance.

Lee's restaurant is designed to look good at night from all directions. The view of it below is from the West.

The Fast Gas outlet below is actually what made me decide to take these pictures of Nipawin at night. Clearly SaskPower must love a business like this one. I settled for this angle on it but it might have looked better from a little more distant shot. However, once I took this picture I had to go back and get the images above so that you are seeing the town sequentially as you would pass through it from the North East to the South.

This picture below shows Main street looking South from in front of the Coop right at 11:00 Tuesday night.

This is a jewelry store along main street and is fairly typical of many of the stores along the thoroughfare. I thought this one would have to stand in as a representative of Nipawin commerce in this photo essay. Nipawin has one of the widest main streets in Saskatchewan, so much so that it has angle parking once the norm everywhere it is now the only one in this size of town that I know of. However, in the central business district Nipawin also has some one way side streets which can come as a surprise to a visitor. As you leave the central business area of the town the centre lane in the street disappears into a boulevard and this is how it looks.

The Salvation Army has this fine looking chapel on Main Street and like so many other buildings it is lit up at night. The convenience store and Husky service station also became an A&W last year and is a thriving business on the South side of the town. But just across the street there is now a new Subway which was just built this summer so that Tisdale, Melfort and Nipawin all have Subway restaurants and Melfort and Nipawin each have an A&W.

This picture does not do justice to the Kingfisher Inn which is by the way, the restaurant of choice for an early breakfast. This place starts serving breakfast at 0600.

On the very South side of Nipawin is the only Canola crushing plant around and as you can see it runs twenty-four hours a day turning Canola into vegetable oil. It is not uncommon to see "B" train trucks lined up from the high way to the unloading dock.

Below is a grain handling facility that I believe is owned by Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. The image is completely untouched and appears below just as the digital Epson PhotoPC 500 recorded it.