June 2013 – Elysium Photo by Rob Shaer

June 27, 2013

Personal Work – North Shore Trail Portraits: Run Shanny Run!

I have a pretty clear memory of the morning I met trail runner Shannon Penway, it was as if her giant smile bounced up to me and said “Hi! I’m Shannon, did you get some good pictures?” Or so that’s how I remember meeting Shannon following the first 5 Peaks event of the year last May at Golden Ears Park, BC. Since then I’ve photographed Shannon a few times, at 5 Peaks Alice Lake in Squamish, BC, last weekend at the Scotiabank Vancouver Half Marathon, and a few weeks ago in the Lynn Headwaters region above North Vancouver. Shannon is relatively new to competitive trail running, but comes to it with the grace and athleticism of an experienced athlete. When Shannon runs, it is often with a grin stretched ear to ear and although I think that smile is a way to unsettle and intimidate her competition, Shannon says she smiles because running makes her happy. Since meeting her, Shannon has made the podium of a number of events and distances including placing 3rd in the National Mountain Running Championships recently held in Quebec where she ran despite a fall on a training run the day before.

Learning a lesson as a photographer is often humbling and can sometimes be quite expensive, especially humbling when things stop working the way they are supposed to while a subject waits patiently and with good humour for instructions to re run the same 15 meters of trail for 5th time. During our shoot my camera’s display took a nap, I don’t know how else to describe it. At one point I exclaimed, ‘I guess we’ll do this the old fashioned way’ and continued shooting without the digital play back and instant gratification (or horror) that comes from having instant access to review. What happens in situations like these? Well if you’re prepared, you pull your back up camera from your bag and keep shooting. If you are not, you turn the camera off and on for a bit, take out the batteries, groan under your breath and look to the tree tops for answers. After a few unsettling minutes everything was working as it should and we continued. In the end I think we got a few good pics and these are among my favourite.

You can read more about Shannon at her running blog Run Shanny Run, and if you’re a sponsor, you should reach out before someone else does first!

June 25, 2013

Flim – Photographer James Balog and Chasing Ice

I saw the trailer for Chasing Ice more than a year ago. I was immediately drawn in by how visually striking the imagery was and the innovative way in which cameras were tasked to document the remote places featured in this film. Chasing Ice documents photographer James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project which, with great objectivity, turns the lens on glacial recession across the far north.

This is a documentary that demonstrates my first covenant of photography; you have to be passionate not only for the medium of photography but also what you turn your lens to. James Balog describes photographing ice as an experience close to that of a portraitist like Irving Pen or Richard Avedon finding infinite differences in familiar subjects. Clearly Balog maintains a fierce passion for what he does and for what this project represents. After a career spent documenting the natural world, Balog sought out a way to document environmental change that had few visual references beyond the nightly news video loop of drought, fire and the growing phenomena of extreme weather. The Extreme Ice Survey Project created a visual metric for climate change that is indisputable.

Chasing Ice is really two stories, that of Balog and his team and that of the profound rate at which these glaciers are changing. My blog is about photography, and I try to keep it at that, but whatever your position on global warming, it is impossible to deny that change on a global scale is happening. Whether or not you believe that the endeavors of human kind are at fault for this change are immaterial to the fact that glaciers are receding at an unprecedented rate and all that water has to go somewhere.

I believe that documentaries are portraits, they are revealing, suggestive and sometimes inspiring. Chasing Ice is no less a portrait of Balog than it is a position on climate change. We are invited into Balog’s home, family and hospital room where he is prepped for one of a series of knee surgeries that the photographer hopes will see him through his project. For those of us with 9-5 jobs, it might be difficult to understand this kind of drive or resolve; it can appear selfish, obsessive, even insane to those of us who maintain very narrow zones of comfort. This is the nature of photography at it’s best, it takes us places that we might otherwise fear to go and it takes people like Balog and his team to take us there. Photographers take risks so that others don’t have to so we can all better understand the world we live in.

Chasing Ice is available on NetFlix and on iTunes, but if it comes to a theatre near you check it out on the big screen, it’s worth it.

Chasing Ice

Check out the trailer here:

James Balog’s Ted Talk presentation:

June 21, 2013June 21, 2013

Today’s Archive Image – Steve Smith at Crankworx 2012

There are daily reminders that Crankworx is less than two months away. Crankworx turns Whistler into a gong show and it was the most fun I’ve had shooting almost anything in a long, long time. There are more than a few photographers in town over this ten day period and competition for access is intense. I hope to return in 2013, and have submitted an application, while in the mean time reaching out for any assignment that will get me on the mountain.

I am excited that this image in particular, of Canadian Steve Smith coming over Heckler’s Rock during his winning run at the Canadian Open Downhill, has had so much traction, but it has also been a bit of a lesson for me. When you are contributing to a pool of images it is difficult to track where your images end up and whether they have been used with appropriate attribution. These are things that you learn with either a vanity search or with Google’s reverse image search where you can upload an image and Google will locate any number of pages on which your image has appeared.

In the days that followed Smith’s winning run, this image appeared on Facebook, in print and on a dozen different web outlets, some are included below. The exciting thing for me is though my week in Whistler for Crankworx had been a total gamble I saw my photos sent out to the Mountain Bike community world wide, especially cool since is Mountain Biking is among my favourite things to shoot, but also something I consider to be a weak link in my portfolio of experience. Now, almost a year later, this image still has legs and has recently appeared a travel magazine, with permission and attribution, destined for thousands of hotel rooms in Whistler.

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

The Whistler Question:

MTB Review:

Pedal Magazine:

Sick Lines:

Where Whistler:

Ten Years of Crankworx

June 13, 2013June 14, 2013

Recent Work – 5 Peaks Alice Lake Provincial Park

I’d like to think that I am at the mid point between two event weekends, but I’m not. My head is spinning because it’s already Thursday and last weekend feels like it was a month ago, which is about how old my last post is. In my defense, May and June have been busy months and though I have had to withdraw myself from some events I was keen to participate in due to injury we now we are into the dark heart of summer event season. It’s on.

I’ve taken on a greater role with 5 Peaks Trail Series and I am super excited to see where it takes me and while I continue to shoot the 5 Peaks BC events I now get to help guide the look and feel of the photography from our other events across Canada. This really kicked off last weekend and while I was shooting the 5 Peaks BC event at Alice Lake Provincial Park in Squamish, BC other photographers were shooting in Alberta and Ontario.

It’s also been a busy period in the Photography community. Recently The Chicago Tribune let go of it’s whole photo staff electing to outfit reporters with iPhones and employing freelancers as necessary. I want to address this issue, but I am still processing what this means, and how I feel about it. This is an issue for another post, or a year’s worth of posts, but for now, I have to let it go. After ‘retiring’ myself from photography late in 2008, I have obviously come back to it but I have come back to an industry deep in transition and very much reflective of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail model. Social media has created a voracious market place for content and the event community is being forced to reevaluate how to use photography and how to pay for it. Photography is no longer a value add, it can no longer be simply a revenue stream, it has to be more. Event photography has to interesting, creative and engaging because, in the era of Social Media, every photo has become a tool of outreach and branding. At it’s best photography should be sharing an experience that others want want in on.

Saturday in Squamish was a little wetter and a little colder than I had anticipated or prepared for. I definitely failed my Boy Scout training as I left the house in Vancouver unprepared for the conditions in Squamish but somehow I managed through. I even left my shoes on the roof of the car, finding them still there at a stop en route. Squamish is an ideal venue for trail running and Squamish trails are heavily used but also built and maintained by their users. In humping my gear down part of the course known as Credit Line, I came across a trail builder working on a couple of ladders to clean up a section of climbing. I was just as surprised to find out he had no idea that there was an event that morning as he was to look up and see almost 400 runners descend on him and his section of trail repair. Squamish offers an awesome variety of technical trails for runners and mountain bikers, lots of ups and downs under 300 foot trees, this is West Coast trail running at it’s finest, all that’s missing is a salmon bbq and a keg of west coast pale ale!