Month: January 2013

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Recent Work: UBC School of Midwifery

UBC Medicine Mag

This comes straight from the ‘How It Was Used’ file. 2012 presented a number of new opportunities and experiences for me as a photographer, while none were a total departure from work I had done in the past, the clients were most certainly different including The Faculty of Medicine and the Department of Midwifery at the University of British Columbia. I was asked to produce some images, both for file, and for the above article that appeared in the Faculty’s publication this past December.

There is something voyeuristic about photography, we observe and in some cases do our best to avoid influencing what we are observing. It was fascinating to watch these women, students instructors and mothers-to-be, interact with each other, it was a window into a world that I would not otherwise get to see while doing my best to remain unseen. I was on site for about 90 minutes with an hour to move between the rooms in use for this class and it was an hour spent with an inside view at the practice of Midwifery. We shot in small rooms making the best use of the available window light and in the end it I was pretty happy with the outcome and the experience.

Above is the image as it appeared in the magazine and below is the larger view.

UBC Midwifery Assessment Lab -1

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Today’s Archive Image: BC Bike Race Powell River

2012 BCBR Personal-35

Winter is all around us in Vancouver these days. The past week has been foggy and cold and I am growing increasingly jealous of friends spending time in Hawaii, California, Key West and other places where you’re more likely to see an umbrella drink than an umbrella. Despite the weather I’ve started training for a busy summer of bike riding. and though I am still recovering from a car accident last fall, back and neck issues, I got out on the bike twice this past week and starting logging base mileage in preparation for feeling healthier and stronger in the weeks and months ahead.

January has been quiet and I’ve been spending a lot of time combing my Lightroom archive for forgotten gems, and images from travels long ago. Without having to reach too far back I’ve pulled this from last summer, from my week working with BC Bike Race, with whom I’ve enjoyed an event week operations role the past two years, and look forward to returning this July. BC Bike Race is a traveling circus of a bike event, with stage races in seven different BC communities over seven consecutive days involving nearly 700 people including riders, crew, volunteers and rider support. Base Camp is rarely quiet, even after dark with mechanics working around the clock prepping and repairing damaged bikes for the next day’s stage. It takes a pretty tight knit and committed group to make this happen from the management on down. This week has been a difficult one for the BC Bike Race family, we lost one of our medics this week when he was struck by a dump truck while in a crosswalk. Though I didn’t know Rollie all that well, he was a colleague and an integral part of the BC Bike Race Medical Team.

Riding between patches of fog and sunlight, yesterday, we enjoyed a social ride talking about last summer and the summer ahead. Back at the parking lot we shared a few thoughts about our colleague with the prevailing notion that we should never waste an opportunity to get to know someone. Rollie was a name, a face, a colleague to us, and so much more to the people who knew him best. I am sorry that I didn’t get to know you better.

The above is a image from a sunnier day last July at the start line of the Powell River stage of the 2012 BC Bike Race.

I’ve been looking for pictures of Rollie in my BCBR archives and was able to find only this, from Easter weekend in 2011, on the ferry home from a weekend retreat in Cumberland on Vancouver Island sharing a funny story with a couple BCBR friends. Rollie is on the right rocking the toque and sunglasses.

BCBR 2011 Cumberland Visit Rollie-1

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Video – Cities at Night courtesy of NASA

From NASA and the International Space Station comes a 10 minute video looking down on those of us more Earth-bound. One of photography’s super powers is the ability to alter our perspective by taking us places we wouldn’t be able to go on our own or sharing an otherwise seldom seen view. The more I see of the world the more humble it makes me. One of my favourite quotes comes from Astronaut Neil Armstrong speaking about what he saw from the moon; “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

There is certainly some interesting tech at work here specifically having to rig, from spare parts, a barn door tracker to compensate for the orbital rotation which had previously limited the quality of photographs requiring longer exposures. I talk a lot about the magic of photography, but really, there is something magical about shooting the lights of our cities from the darkness of space and being able to see in detail the shape of cities and the roads that lead outward into an earthly darkness. It strikes me that these lights on Earth appear almost like far off Galaxies deep in space. Yet they also appear familiar shaped by familiar geography, streets and highways. Looking down on London and Cairo remind me of walking along the banks of the Thames and Nile rivers, it reminds of looking up at a sky filled with light pollution obscuring the stars above and feeling like these cities were stretched infinitely outward from where I was standing. From the space station, however, these cities finite maybe even accessible. What a difference a change in perspective makes.

Update:

I was remiss in not posting the link to the original article:

Cities At Night

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Video – National Geographic, Steve McCurry and the Last Roll of Kodachrome

What a fantastic find this morning on Twitter; Photojournalist Steve McCurry shooting the last roll of Kodachrome featuring faces in New York, Istanbul and India. While I will let the video, and McCurry himself, tell the story of this project I will say this is a fitting send off to a film that set the standard for decades and decades. I am ashamed to say that I have never shot a roll of Kodachrome, and I never will. By the time I was getting into photography I was largely using whatever film I could afford. I do feel that I have missed out on something special and as McCurry describes having nearly one million Kodachrome slides in his archive and their durability I wonder about the legacy and staying power of our digital archives. Somehow jpg files on a hard drive or burned to a DVD lack a certain magic. Somewhere in one of my closest is a slide case with a few hundred Kodachrome slides shot by my father on a camera identical to the camera I learned to shoot on. At some point I will have to get organized to digitize these slides before I loose the option and loose that part of my childhood.

Kodachrome isn’t just an element of our popular culture, but it was a mechanism used to record what would become our history, and indeed it did. Author Neil Sheenan suggests that “Photographs are the images of history rescued from the oblivion of mortality” and I agree. I believe that our understanding of the last one hundred years will be shaped by largely what we see in photographs the way the previous one hundred years is largely understood by what was read and perhaps the next one hundred years will in turn be understood through what we watch. Perhaps this National Geographic video is a perfect segue between these mediums.

Have a watch.

Another link I feel is worth a mention came to me from the American Photo Magazine Tumblr Blog featuring their picks for the best photo books of 2012


American Photo has also included a list of E Books with Getty Image’s Year In Focus at the top of the list. This is Getty’s 2012 showcase of highlights in photojournalism, from the Arab Spring to royal weddings and sports events and is available FREE! at iTunes. Definitely worth a look.

 

 

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Personal Travel – A Couple More from Cox Bay

442 Search and Rescue Squadron Carty Cox Bay Christmas 2012 W-5

Long Beach and the West Coast of Vancouver Island offer an ever changing set of conditions, from dark to light, from light surf to storm surge with any given hour of the day possibly different than the hour that came before it. I shot a lot of frames in five days at Cox Bay and the Long Beach Lodge, but these two are among my favourites. This the the 442 Search and Rescue Squadron out of Comox, BC and one afternoon I looked up to see their parachutes overhead.

For these men, this was a drill but for the people on the beach, it felt like something out of a movie to see the Buffalo Aircraft circling the bay and the Sea King Helicopter landing on the beach; one of our party described what she saw as “Very James Bond”. Making pictures of people at work is one of my favourite things to shoot, especially when it involves winter surf, four guys with parachutes and millions of dollars of aircraft. This is the kind of thing that feature photographers live for, and one that I could have very easily have missed had I decided instead to have a nap rather than heading back to the beach. It reminds me of the Boy Scout Motto, Be Prepared. I was lucky that my gear was close at hand, these images just wouldn’t be the same shot from my Blackberry! This is also a great argument to keep a small camera with you, as you never know what might drop from the sky.

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Event Season Sneaks Up on You

2012 MYM 50 Shaer-26

2012 MYM 50 Shaer-58

Winter is here. While the snow is blowing and falling in delicious inches in Whistler, Vancouver is wrapped in a shroud of grey. It’s wet, cold and unappealing to be outside, which is difficult for a city like Vancouver which relishes the outside spaces that surround it. It’s the second week of January and I am already thinking and planning for the spring/summer and fall event seasons. I photograph events, although if you pin me down I will tell you that I don’t really see myself as an event photographer, rather a sports photographer who happens to shoot events and I am lucky to have a few clients who invite me to shoot their events the way I see them.

While summer hung around the south coast long into October, it’s cold comfort now. Every few weeks I sneak away into the archive to look at photos from last summer, to imagine the summer sun and being outside in shorts and tshirts. I started September in Whistler with the inaugural Meet Your Maker 50, a 50 Mile Trail Ultra & Relay. I’m looking forward to being back in Whistler soon which may involve snowshoeing and getting out into the cold, but in the back of my head I will be thinking about summer, just as in summer there is always a part of me that waits anxiously for the first snow in the mountains. Here are a few pictures from Labour Day weekend on Blackcomb Mountain and the Meet Your Maker 50.

2012 MYM 50 Shaer-60

2012 MYM 50 Shaer-63

2012 MYM 50 Shaer-97

2012 MYM 50 Shaer-98

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Link: The NY Times – Snow Fall

From the parking lot of Stevens Pass on the night before the avalanche at Tunnel Creek. Several of those with plans to ski Tunnel Creek the next day huddled around a fire in front of Tim Wangen’s trailer. Among the assembled were Jim Jack, in red pants, and Tiffany Abraham, in red jacket. Keith Carlsen

On Christmas day there were presents in the living room of the rented cottage on Cox Bay, BC wrapped in well read pages of the New York Times. They were pages from this story, a story I had heard about, but had not yet been able to bring myself to read beyond a brief scan of the on line multimedia piece. Every so often I post a link to a gallery or a short video because I want to share something I’ve found which interests or inspires me creatively as a photographer. This morning I knew that I had to return to something that I have been putting off for weeks, the New York Times’ Snow Fall – The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.

I’ve spent much of this morning with this piece, with the galleries and the interviews, reviewing the graphics and, at times, clearing the tears from under my glasses. This is a story about tragedy and heartbreak the details of which I will leave for you to discover. When I was young, I spent every moment I could on Whistler or Blackcomb Mountains. If I wasn’t skiing I was thinking about skiing and conspiring with a few close friends of our next weekend on the hill. By the time I left for University I had been trained as an instructor and had volunteered with the Ski Patrol. The only future self I imagined was much closer to the men and women featured in this story than who I have eventually become.

I can’t imagine there are many multimedia pieces as well crafted as this, and this is the real reason for this post. It isn’t about specific images, videos, interviews or subjects, it is about how these elements have been brought together by reporters, editors, producers and photographers. Snow Fall is an unbelievably good piece of reporting and story telling that will affect you even if you’ve never spent a day in the mountains or have taken a single turn on skis. Be prepared, however, this is not a quick read, take your time and follow every link and finish by watching the 10 minute documentary at the end.

Snow Fall – The Avalanche At Tunnel Creek