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Last Weekend – The Yeti Snowshoe Series at Whistler Olympic Park

2013 Yeti Snowshoe Series Whistler

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.

2013 Yeti Snowshoe Series Whistler

2013 Yeti Snowshoe Series Whistler

2013 Yeti Snowshoe Series Whistler

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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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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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Personal Travel: Cox Bay, BC at Dawn

Dawn Patrol at Cox Bay

Something which feels rare, for this time of year, is happening in my apartment this morning; the sun is casting shadows on interior walls. It’s also quiet this morning which also feels rare when you live above a commercial space. Together the quiet and the sunlight have conspired to create a little serenity for me, all that’s missing is a cup of coffee and that’s an easy fix. Fixed; coffee now in hand. Yesterday I photographed a small, intimate wedding, and the day prior I returned from a five day Christmas vacation on Cox Bay, perched between Tofino a few minutes to the north and Long Beach a few minutes south on the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Dawn and early morning has always seemed to me a perfect metaphor for the new year, and with 2013 less than 48 hours out, and what may be my last post of 2012, Dawn seems like a good way to close the year. Dawn is filled with optimism, hope and fresh light. More and more I am becoming a morning person and there are a lot of early mornings when you work in events, in news or as a photographer working in either. I remember reading, years ago, that great photographers are not born, they just get out of bed earlier in the morning. This idea has largely informed my life in photography, perhaps not literally, although certainly true on occasion, because for me it’s been about working harder. I have to work harder; although I was naturally drawn to photography, photography did not naturally come to me.

I believe that photography can be fine art, but I do not identify as an artist. I want to make good looking images, but more importantly I want to tell a story, articulate a client’s vision or capture a moment of energy or exchange, and these images don’t often find homes in frames or on walls. I don’t often look to make photographs as a purely aesthetic exercise, but every now and then, however, I reach out to make a photograph for myself. Last week, on Cox Bay, I found myself in pre-dawn light, using a tripod and dragging the shutter to create something without meaning or governed by pragmatism, but simply reflective of a set of conditions on a remote beach shaped by winter waves.

Happy New Year,
Rob

Check out Photographer Derek Shapton’s piece on Art vs. Craft at Peta Pixel

Art vs. Craft: The Nature of Professional Assignment Photography

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The Best of the Season to You and Yours

VanDusen Xmas 2011-5

My Christmas Card to you. Thank you for visiting over the last several months while I explore my relationship with photography and my profession and share these explorations with you. I wish you the very best of the season regardless of how you celebrate. I will be celebrating with family on the far West Coast of Canada with good company, good wine, good cheers and hopefully a good winter storm.

This is an image from last year, shot at VanDusen Gardens during their annual Christmas light show. I hope you are, as I am, in good company, good health and good cheer. Will look forward to catching up with you in 2013!

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Today’s Archive Image – 2011 Stanley Park Triathlon

2011 YVR Tri Beach fb

Just a quick pic from a very early morning in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Triathlon competitors getting acclimatized to the water and clearing out their swim goggles in an early morning silhouette from September of 2011. This was shot from the hip on my back up camera that has become somewhat unreliable with it’s advanced shutter actuations (130K+) so I felt a little lucky when I discovered this on my cf card. Have a good weekend.