10 months ago the ski community kicked of the pre-winter excitement with word we were heading into a La Nina winter. Warmer ocean surface temperatures thousands of kilometers away promising of absurd quantities of white heaven falling from the sky. Now, 10 months later, the actual amount snow fall exceded even what our wildest hopes were last fall. Reeking havoc on the orderly tradition of seasons in the mountains.
As far as last week was concerned seasons are irrelevant, who needs to bike in sunshine and ski in winter, when you can bike while its snowing and ski when its +20 C?
Shooting bikes in Whistler has an interesting twist right now, normally the elements a mtb photographer in whistler gets to work with include: dry or tacky dirt, warm weather, and dialed trails. La Nina’s effect was so severe on the Coast of BC the Whistler trail crew has been digging snow rather than building an maintaining trails. In places you’re riding between banks of snow, in others you’re traversing mud pits axel deep, reminiscent of the West Coast Trail.
But its more than funky riding conditions, it is a key element of the definition of biking. Exploration, uncertainty, adaptability and a flowing evolution of the landscape we travel through. A deep snow pack in one year isn’t an oddity, it would be much more absurd to see identical conditions from week to week, year to year.
Tomorrow: Skiing on Dirt
Tell me exactly how it feels to turn the page of an issue of National Geographic. Now what about the dry leaves of a your city newspaper which make sounds reminiscent of fingers on a chalk board. Maybe kids a couple decades from now may talk about the texture of the surface of their first ipad or tablet, but for kids like me who grew up -at the end- of the analog era many different publications hold specific memories of texture, smell (old book store anyone) and character. Maybe we’re in a relatively sterile era of digital media which neglect some of the senses, but for now I am nostalgic about the little pleasures of the analog world.
This roundabout introduction brings me to one thing. Glossy colour pages, those big vibrant pearly white pages from where colour leaps off the page. Neglecting the geeky side of my brain which drifts to technical aspects of colour gamut and dynamic range, I can’t help but love to see images on a big, glossy, page of luminous beauty.
And, well, just this month I got to see two of my shots in Decline Magazine’s big, fat, glossy, sexy, colour-that-punches-you-in-the-face pages. Goodness, I love it.
The shot above is a self portrait from a great evening riding Sideshow Bob in Calgary. A sickeningly fun trail which dips bobs and curves around the chalky ridges of the river valley. Below is an image of Daniel Norton on Bear Cub in Whistler which is also July’s free wallpaper.
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Every year at the Deep Summer Photo Challenge 5 photographers are invited to the competition, and one wildcard photographer joins the 5 invited shooters. I and 4 other photographers have been selected for the wildcard position, but only 1 photographer win the wildcard spot, based on a vote by the users of www.PinkBike.com
What is the Deep Summer Photo Challenge? Its similar to the Banff Photographer Shootout which I won earlier this year. The basic idea is you and a group of riders have 3 days to shoot a bunch of pictures. 1 editing day. At the end each of the 6 photographers present a ~5 minute slideshow infront of a huge crowd during crankworx in Whistler BC.
I invite you to head over to the voting page and select the person who you think can challenge the photographers in the competition. Of course I’d like to think you’ll select me to go head to head with Barham, Zimmerman, Riga, Olsen and O’Neill, but thats really up to you. The voting is based on 3 submission images, which you can see below, but I also invite you to look over my wider (updated) portfolios
Click Here to Vote
Here are the three images from my submission. With links to download for -and only for- your computer background. (Be nice and don’t abuse the availability of the shots for your background. Santa is watching)
Carter, Whistler BC
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Andrew Pike, Millenium Calgary
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Self Portrait, Calgary
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Click Here to Vote for the photographer you like the most. I’ve got some really great ideas I want to flesh out in a slideshow, and don’t want to wait another to create it.
Reuben’s Architecture and Interior Design work has moved. It is now found at: www.LumicPhoto.com and Lumic Blog
Over the past year I’ve been shooting a lot with Alison Law from Studio A Interiors , photographing her interior design portfolio for her website. This specific project was a special treat as Alberta Home Magazine picked up the story of the interior renovation, and ran a feature article in their April issue.
On the photographer’s side of things there was some special challenges, namely including people in some of the imagery. Alison and I agreed it would be a great image to have an image of the home owner’s children in one of the shots. Photographing children and interior design are two incredibly polar opposite types of photography, and capturing both in one image at once proved to be an interesting challenge. When photographing interior design you have quite a bit of flexibility concerning when you take the shot, things don’t move very fast. Children however, have split second unpredictable photogenic moments, and a very short amount of time they’ll be happy working ‘on set’. After a fair bit of coordination with all the adults we had on hand, we managed to get the first image of the little master baker in his element. At the end of the shoot we even had the opportunity to sample some of his creations.
If you’re in Alberta in April, you can find Alberta Home on the magazine rack, the article ‘Forever Home’ is on page 41
