robshaer

April 17, 2013April 17, 2013

Personal Work – From the Portrait Project with Gary & Elaine

Lots going on over the last month; but work is like dinner, it’s better to be looking at it than for it. It has been an interesting several weeks of photography including a snowshoe race, shooting trail running, road running and some personal work, a Ms Teen pageant and on going work on a cookbook project for a local restaurant client. I’ve also had the chance to hear and hang out with Photographer Ian Ruhter who has been in Vancouver for a number of local speaking engagements and wet plate demos, if you aren’t familiar with Ian’s work, have a look at the first video he and his crew produced about a year ago: Silver & Light.

Two weeks ago I ventured into the trails above North Vancouver with Ultra Trail Runner Gary Robbins to work on some profile pictures which would serve double purpose for both my personal portrait work and Gary’s need for some new Profile content. Gary took us to a great little trail hub that provided an opportunity for a variety of looks and we finished with a couple of head shot style portraits fitting for a trail runner and event manager. In looking back at this work and the photos that will follow of both Gary and Elaine, I see characters in their environments. These are studies of people in the places they are most comfortable.

By now the room that surrounds Elaine at her Piano will be very different. I haven’t seen it yet, but I understand that the shelves are nearly clear of books, packed and bound for new shelves in a new space in a new home. With lees than a month on the clock before Elaine and her husband Ken move into their new home I felt it was important to make a photo of Elaine at her piano in the house she has lived in for close to 30 years. I believe the spaces we inhabit, whether we choose them or they are chosen for us, become a part of who we are. I can’t wait to see Elaine’s new space, but I am glad we were able to get one last look at the old one.

One more look:

My space is subject to a perpetual cycle of cluttering and uncluttering. It is never static and often feels like a bit of a disaster. My workspace is often surrounded by piles of paper, folders, files and business cards and equipment transiting from one bag to another between shoots and assignments. One day I will make a self portrait of this chaos when I am brave enough to share, honestly, the state of my desk.

March 7, 2013

Link: Steve McCurry & The Last Roll of Kodachrome Follow Up

A few weeks ago I posted a link and a video about famed photojournalist Steve McCurry and how he chose to shoot the last roll of Kodachrome to come out of Kodak. Today I want to share the gallery. For a lot of photographers, the content captured on this roll might represent months, years or even decades of work, but for McCurry, among the most experienced, seasoned and professionally accomplished in the industry he managed to to capture this collection on one roll. It is impressive regardless of how many test shots he made with his DSLR.

I would like to say that this is the standard for photojournalism, even creative content at large, but unfortunately I don’t believe it is anymore. While I believe that photography, enabled by an infinite number of new tools, has the capacity to be more creative than ever before, there is a lot of work seeing the light of day that leaves me wanting for something more, something better. Content has to be compelling on it’s own. Creative content is everywhere we look, but good content, great content is more rarefied, it is the product of skill and, in many cases, hard won experience. The standard for content should be set at this level, however unattainable, not by what is affordable, what is easy or what is accessible. McCurry’s work is the work of a professional, of a creative able to make a living and succeed because others recognized value in his content.

Please have a look at the complete gallery:

Steve McCurry: The Last Roll of Kodachrome

March 5, 2013

Last Weekend – The Yeti Snowshoe Series at Whistler Olympic Park

Yesterday morning I polished off the edit from Saturday’s Yeti Snowshoe Series event at Whistler Olympic Park. My clothes are still drying out. It was that wet, and although I will try almost anything, I am a rookie on snowshoes and found myself waist deep in wet snow with my lens bags quickly filling with the white stuff. It was so wet that I feared that I might have to hang dry my jpgs!

Saturday was really the beginning of my photography event season and this year looks very busy. Over the past 5 years I’ve made some truly great friendships in the event world so working waist deep in wet snow doesn’t feel so much like work as it could, and for this I am grateful. There were a lot of familiar faces at the start line on Saturday morning, and by the count of the happy faces that stuck around for prizing, few were held from having a good time by the rain.

February 13, 2013

Today’s Archive Images: Let’s Cooking, the FEEDBack Project

My friend Hana is now in possession of a few test prints of her cook book ‘Let’s Cooking’ featuring photos by me! I can’t wait to see my copy. In preparing for an upcoming project I have been looking through older food related work and pouring over my favourite cook books with a renewed attention to styling, lighting and content. Food & Drink are right up there with those things I consider to be the best things in life. Photographing food poses unique challenges and when done right it is an exercise of passion, of love and of respect. I believe that the preparation of food can be a great gift to a loved one, and failing ability to serve a favourite friend a plate of something made by hand, hopefully a photo, as carefully crafted as any plate of food, will suffice. Unless you’re really hungry then a photo is a poor substitute for your favourite bowl of noodles.

These are a couple of my favourite images from the ‘Let’s Cooking’ project, about which you can read more here:

letscooking.ca

January 24, 2013

Recent Work: UBC School of Midwifery

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.

January 21, 2013

Today’s Archive Image: BC Bike Race Powell River

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.

January 16, 2013January 16, 2013

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

January 15, 2013January 15, 2013

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.

January 11, 2013

Personal Travel – A Couple More from Cox Bay

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.

January 10, 2013January 10, 2013

Author: robshaer