Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - David Ellingsen will be giving the residents of Cortes Island two presentations of his latest fine art photography series this year. “I'm going to be speaking at the Cortes Island Museum and Archives AGM on the 27th. It's a fairly short talk, probably about 45 minutes, and then some time for Q and A. So it's not a huge amount of time. I'm going to be speaking a little bit about the ‘Falling Boundaries’ series. I also am planning on exhibiting this series, the actual prints, in the summer time,” he explained.The second exhibit will be at the Old Schoolhouse Gallery on the weekends of July 29 - 31 and August 5th-7th.“Falling Boundaries” is an emotional response to the decline of British Columbia’s first growth forests. Ellingsen’s original inspiration for the series came from the stumps near his childhood home at Reef Point Farm on Cortes Island. The Cortes Island Museum gave him access to its’ ‘Von Donop Shed,’ allowing Ellingsen to take the old logging tools into the forest to be photographed.The current project came into being after a biologist invited him to take ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of an old growth forest, north of Campbell River, that was about to be cut. “It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to say with these images and that's why I wanted to inject the historical, archival photos into these to speak to a span of time here. So then I worked with the Royal BC Museum here in Victoria, and almost all of the photographs are from Vancouver Island as well. I wanted to try and keep those close to the same area where I made my original photographs, and then installed those images into my original photographs. The result is as you see with the ‘Falling Boundaries’ series,” explained Ellingsen. “I think most of us feel an incredible sense of loss just over the last couple of years, with the realization that we are down to less than 3% of the big tree old growth, as they call it.”He described the recent logging protests at Fairy Creek as “an emotional response to the predicament that we find ourselves in.” “I was really interested in looking at this from the perspective of what has happened since the arrival of the colonists, the settlers. Which of course is exactly my family history, and so my story to tell because that's the history of my family. We've been working in the forest, basically, since we got here.”Ellingsen’s ancestors were among the first settlers to arrive on Cortes Island. The Mike Manson whose name persists in Mansons Landing was among them. Generations of the Ellingsen family were born on Cortes Island and remain there to this day. “I live in Victoria, but still consider Cortes my home base. I probably will my whole life just because of being born and raised down on Reef Point Farm on the south tip. It's such an incredible place to grow up as a child and as a youth with the forest,” he said.