Author: robshaer

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Link: Preview Gallery from the 2012 Scotiabank Vancouver Half-Marathon

Yesterday was an intense day. With a team of 7 photographers we shot the 2012 Scotiabank Vancouver Half-Marathon and between us we made close to 25,000 images which I will sort, process, and upload for the client this week. I have taken a comfortable seat in front of my computer and it looks like I will be here a while. I have posted a small preview gallery on SmugMug with images from myself and a few other photographers. It’s an unbelievably anxious feeling to be responsible for so many images, and with 6500 runners on Sunday it was bound to be a huge undertaking, but the more images I get to, the happier I am with the team that I pulled together for the event.

Have a look if you are interested!

2012 Scotiabank Vancouver Half-Marathon Preview Gallery

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Today’s Archive Image: 2011 Whister GranFondo

So much in the hopper right now ahead of this weekend’s 2012 Scotiabank Vancouver Half-Marathon and just a week out from this year’s BC Bike Race. I have been very excited to put together a team of photographers to shoot the ‘Scotia Half’ this year, regularly regarded as among the most scenic Half Marathons in Canada and I am looking forward to seeing a lot of great images from our team, perhaps as many as 18,000 images, which will see post production and upload next week. Wow, it will be interesting to see the final numbers. Get ready SumgMug!

As last summer was coming to an end I was asked to shoot the 2011 RBC Whistler GranFondo and this is one of the images shot that morning in September from the back of a motorcycle on the Upper Levels Highway above West Vancouver. My buddy Chris and I spent a huge day with the event shooting close to 4000 images between us in the period of about 16 hours. It was an intense day, but what can I say, I love shooting events, and I love shooting cycling. Sunday is going to be epic and I am looking forward to a team photo at the start line at UBC early Sunday morning.

The weekend is almost on us, events are everywhere, cycling, running, farmer’s markets, fairs and parades, these are the stock and trade of staff shooters covering weekend shifts across North America, these are where features are made, faces found and stories are witnessed. I hope you find something to shoot this weekend, your latest portfolio piece is out there.

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Personal Work – The Portrait Project: Hank the Barber

When I left the house early Friday morning to mark the route of a charity bike ride stretching from Crescent Beach in White Rock to Chiliwack, BC about 100km east of where it began I wasn’t thinking much about making photos. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve left the house with my camera with it never seeing the light of day, but I always remind myself that there is a lot to miss in this world and you never know what or who you are going to run into.

I can’t tell you much about the community of Yarrow expect that it sits in the shadow of the Cascade Mountain Range, has about two dozen businesses on the main street through town, offers a great sandwich at the Yarrow Deli and has been home to Hank and his barber shop since the 1940’s. Hank had a seat in the sun in front of his shop when we pulled into town and the sun seemed to light up his white, starched barber jacket. He was impossible to miss and after our lunch break at the town park, I wandered across the street to introduce myself and ask if I could make his portrait.

“I’m Hank the Barber, guess how long I’ve been here.”

We only had about five minutes with him, and I shot shot a few frames, but this was one of those times where I was grateful to have had my camera in my bag. I love this colour frame of Hank, but as much as it captures a certain light in his eyes, it is a reminder to me that some portraits are more than the face they capture. What’s making me crazy, days later, is how I overlooked including more of his shop in the frame given his shop is such a large component of who he is and his place in his community. Next time I will do better.

 

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Link: The Atlantic’s In Focus Gallery Historic Photos from NYC

I was working on a post earlier and will get back to it later I suppose, it features a few images I shot on the weekend of the 2012 Starbucks Run For Women at UBC last Saturday. As I was writing, and trying to collect my thoughts about what it means to see people complete their first 5 or 10 km race I found myself struggling to capture the emotion, satisfaction and exhaustion written across so many of the faces I saw that morning.

This is totally different! A link the the Atlantic’s In Focus Gallery, @In_Focus, came up in my twitter feed today with this remarkable gallery of images from the New York City Municipal Archive. Long before I considered a career in Photography, I studied history, receiving a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Victoria in 1999. I didn’t often get to sort through historical photos, but I relished any chance I got. I love seeing places I recognize in a fully different context, I love the differences and I love seeing what remains after the passage of time and human development.

What is most remarkable about this gallery are the images that also link to Google’s Street View to reveal their modern incarnations. If you love NYC, or old photos have a look and check out how these scenes appear today. I challenge you, however, when looking at these photos to consider them not as just images of our history but for the people captured in these frames, at the moment they were made, it is the apex of their modernity.

Have a look:

The Atlantic

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Today’s Archive Image: Danny Casper 2002

Every photographer or photojournalist has had assignments they seem to remember with perfect clarity whether it was last month, last year or a lifetime ago. I remember my time with Danny Casper with a clarity that is absent when I think of other assignments shot for the dozen or so different newspapers I have contributed to at one time or another. I remember the state of his poverty-worn home, a trailer as old as he, his story of what happened to him as a truck driver when he returned from his military tour in Vietnam. I remember his acute sensitivity to light as a result of the medication he was prescribed to treat cancer. I remember being in his trailer and having to dial up the ISO to 1600 on my Nikon D1H, a camera not known for it’s capacity in low light. I remember shooting this image of Danny in his doorway on my way out, camera still set at 1600 at f2.8. It was lucky I didn’t end up with something blown out and unusable. I look at this image, one that hangs on my wall ten years later, and I see the perfect portrait subject, unaware of the camera and totally unconscious of his appearance. This remains one of my favourite images from my summer in Spokane at the Spokesman-Review in 2002 and remains my favourite of the portraits I have shot. No mater how strong technically or creatively appealing any portrait since, Danny Casper is the bar by which I measure any portrait I make and at the worst of times Danny Casper is the mirror in which I see myself in 20 years wondering what has become of my life.

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Link: Pedal Power & The Big Picture

It takes real effort at times to separate the truly interesting content on line from the truly benign. One of my favourite sites to visit is the Boston Globe’s Big Picture Gallery where I am often rewarded by truly great images collected from sources from all points of the earth. This gallery strikes a chord, it’s called Pedal Power and it is a collection of images of bikes and the people who ride them. Two of my favourite things together, cycling and great photography. Have a look. And have another look next week when a new gallery arrives. I am especially partial to #43, Go Ryder!!

Pedal Power Big Picture Gallery

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Whistler Jump Park

Turning the camera is good advice. Advice that was often heard in the halls and classrooms of the Photojournalism program I completed ten years ago. Wow, ten years. There has been a lot of mileage racked up in that time and a lot of turning of cameras. Perhaps there is no coincidence that within a year of graduating I was shooting 360 degree panoramic images for hospitality and tourism clients, and in traveling the globe for a lot of that work, the world continued to turn under me. Somehow I don’t think my instructors meant their advice so literally. It was also a huge turn from working at a newspaper and though I no longer do that kind of work there are days when I miss both experiences; telling stories and capturing moments to be shared on newsprint and looked at by perhaps hundreds of thousands of readers and producing images capturing elements of style, design and far off places of luxury.

If you’ve been looking at my photos, or have looked through a few of my galleries, you may have already guessed that I have a strong interest in cycling, it goes back to childhood. One of the lessons that wasn’t taught when I was at school was that it wasn’t enough to be interested in photography alone. Photographers need to be interested and curious about the world they live in whether surrounded by family, food, design, heartbreak or even cycling. Start by photographing what you love and what you are passionate about and let the rest unfold. If you don’t like what you see try changing your perspective, try turning your camera. I shot this image in Whistler, BC on a sunny Saturday in May, and to capture this frame I had to take that advice from so many years ago. I turned the camera. In this case I turned it straight up.

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Link: Lucie & Simon Silent World

Though Lucie & Simon hardly need me to share their work, in my quest to rediscover what inspires me about photography their short film ‘Silent World’ stirred my curiosity. Years ago I read Alan Weisman’s truly fantastic ‘The World Without Us’ and it left an indelible impression of the crumbling artifacts of human ingenuity and hubris once humans were removed from the equation. There is a similar spirit in ‘Silent World’. Without getting into the what, why and how of ‘Silent World’, what struck me was seeing streets, many I have walked myself, so familiar in appearance, but so totally different in experience.

What happens when you largely remove human beings from the human world, when you remove man from what is man made? Has the scale of our cities become inhuman and is it possible to illustrate that with a camera? What I find most remarkable about “Silent World’ is the disconnect between appearance and experience. Having walked through Paris and New York I recognize these streets, intersections, buildings and landmarks but my experience is remembered as being elbow to elbow wrapped in a cacophonous blanket of noise. Appearance or Experience; what makes a city what it is? This is New York but it is also clearly not the New York that any of us know, and this is the magic of photography.

Check out ‘Silent World’ on Vimeo Here:

Check out more of Lucie & Simon’s work here:

http://www.lucieandsimon.com/

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Personal Work – The Portrait Project: Christopher

So far this personal work, The Portrait Project, has already proved to be a learning experience. While I am still working on the parameters that will guide this work over the next few years, or it’s duration, I am trying new ways of presenting work both here and on my Facebook page. Years ago while I was an intern at a daily paper in Washington state, an item in the entertainment section popped out at me, it was a quote from actor Edward Norton in which he suggested that as a photographer I can do what I do in my room, but as an actor he required an audience. In no way am I comparing myself to Norton but in truth I haven’t thought as highly of him since. Photographers make images to be seen and shared and spoke about, debated and critiqued beyond measure and praised beyond reason. Photographers seek to share the world. We have forgotten that before the internet the way we imagined the world was informed by photographers and writers traveling and reporting back what they saw and experienced. What if Mark Twain had never left his room, or Steve McCurry had never left his? Could McCurry’s elegant Afghan Girl have been shot in a studio? Would the image and story be as iconic had it not been seen on the cover of National Geographic or through the thousands of times it’s been reprinted or the story retold since it was shot in 1984?

I am not McCurry, Norton or Twain, but these ideas inform my approach to sharing the work that I do. I have been giving some pretty serious thought to keeping everything but “snap shots” from Facebook but in the last few weeks, after posting images from shoots with subjects self conscious about their image, the feedback has been fantastic. As a portrait subject it feels great to hear from your friends and family how great you look, or how much you are missed. So this is the learning process and I will keep posting work to Facebook to share my experiences and I will work to find a template to continue posting here. Photography is meant to be seen and if you can bear with me, I will show you as much as I can. My shoot with Christopher started over coffee pretty early for a Sunday morning in Whistler in the shoulder season. It turns out, surprise or not, early mornings are something that photographers and event managers have in common. Do you like the way I have presented these three images? If so, let me know.