On November 7th, 2012, 3BAM provided support for the Canada Company event held a the Cote-des-Neiges Armoury. The event was a fundraiser for Operation Husky 2013, a commemoration of the liberation of Sicily, in which our regiment partook. Many member of the business community were present and the guest of honour, was Canada's minister of national defense, the Hon. Mr. Peter MacKay. A number of the civilian guests, including Mr. MacKay were invited to fire the 25-pdr gun outside the armoury. All seemed to take great pleasure in doing so. All in all, 12 blank shots were fired. The event gave me the opportunity to shoot some spectacular night photos of the gun in action. Also, I had the pleasure of running into a number of people I hadn't seen in years, starting with Colonel de Kovachich who as a captain, was my course commander on my gunner's course when I joined the regiment in 1982. I also had the opportunity to chat a bit with my former CO, LCol Michel Pronkin, as well as another former CO of the regiment, LCol Michel Bourque. who was a captain the last time I saw him. Another face I hadn't seen in many years, was CWO Normand Roberge, another RSM of the unit, and former BSM to me. Another old regimental hand I had not seen in many years was Sgt (ret) Laurent Langlais.
A couple of the folks to shoot the gun that night were ladies. They seemed to really enjoy the experience. Lets be honest: it's not something the average civilian gets to do...at least not unless you have a friend who owns a howitzer or two.It was a big event, with a lot of brass, the minister, and about 200 guests. There was support from the DND and as usual they sent a photographer, as did the newspapers but as always, 3BAM never got a single photo out what any of them shot, which is why I get called out to cover these things for 3BAM.
Frankly, aside from being assured of getting the photos, it was a pretty good idea that was called out to do this. For one thing, I knew from CWO Aubé what the program would be and about the night firing. For another, I came up in the artillery and knew instinctively what I'd have to do and what equipment I'd need to properly photograph the gun firing at night. The other photographers present were all blissfully unaware of what I knew and unprepared to do the job the way I did it. To be true...I did botch a couple where I didn't realize that the brim of my trademark fedora hat was interfering with the pop-up flash on my Nikon D800 as triggering the main flash, which was off-camera. So yep! I learned something too that night. For the record however, if you want to do this correctly, you need a tripod, shutter release and also to set your shutter speed at about 1/15th of second to properly capture the muzzle flash from the gun. My aperture was f.8. at 1250 ISO with a Nikon SB700 Speedlight set on a stand off-camera to camera right. The lens was my workhorse 24-70 f.2.8, worth every penny I paid for it.
3BAM had its own display, including vehicles, the unit's other 25-pdr, equipment and a table with a lot of photos, most of which, I was pleasantly surprised to had been shot by me in September. There was a lot of booze being served, and better still, free booze, but as always when I'm on the job, paid or not, I don't drink any alcohol until the job is done. That would probably have been around 2300 or so, when I was finally able to down a couple of glasses of good Italian vino. Somewhere in between not drinking, and freezing my caboose off outdoors on that cold November evening, I managed to get a few photos of the Mk1 gun we used to shoot that night, and the unit's two gun tractors. I will post more photos of the equipment in a subsequent post dealing strictly with the equipment of the unit.Ubique!
Gary Menten
Photographer
