“Great photos aren’t taken, they’re made”
I’ve seen the title of this post, a quote from Ansel Adams, come up a few times when reading about modern photography and it generally holds negative connotations as people assume it refers to excessive post processing and “photoshopping” to change the results in the image. This is not what Ansel was referring to. He was referring to the difference in the eye of someone who is, or hopes to be, a Photographer and an individual who is simply taking a snapshot. Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. - Matt Hardy For the most part, I’d safely define the vast majority of individuals who own cameras as amateur Photo Journalists, in that they wish to journal the events and moments they experience so they use a camera to effectively do this. A turning point happens when you stop trying to catalog events as they happen and wish to create an artistic representation of what you are seeing. When you start to become an Artistic Photographer. When you stop merely taking a photograph of a scene and start making the photograph before you close the shutter. Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like - David Alan Harvey For me this has been a gradual process. I largely started out wanting to journal my experiences as they happened. Comparing my folders of digital images now I’m not really taking more images today than I was a few years ago but what I’m photographing has changed immensely. Going back a few years I can see that I would take photos as I moved, usually at eye height and directly at what I was looking at. I’d usually take one photo per view and move on. Now, I’m taking a similar number of photos but the content has been vastly reduced. I’m taking many pictures of a single moment, from different angles and heights, with different apertures, ISO’s and shutter speeds. The gap in time between my photos is no longer documented as I’m not concerned with simply journaling my experience but rather creating my own personal artistic representation of the experience. The difference between “Taking” and “Making” a photo you’d print and hang on your wall is subtle but the results can vary immensely. Making a photo could be as simple as dropping to one knee and using a different aperture rather than taking the photo from a standing height and using the auto setting on the camera. I don’t imagine that I’m an amazing photographer myself, but I make photos that I personally...
Joffre, Matier and personal milestones
On Easter long weekend, a year ago in 2012, we wanted to do something that would test our ability but would also be enjoyable and mostly fun. A few ideas had been thrown around. The Garibaldi Neve traverse? The Spearhead traverse? All of which seemed like a lot of hard work. We decided to do something a little bit more laid back, have a campsite we wouldn’t have to move for 2 nights and bag some reasonably close mountains with only moderate amounts of elevation gain. We decided on doing Joffre Peak via the Aussie Couloir and Mount Matier via its northeast spur . Fast, light parties can easily bag both of these peaks as a day trip car-to-car, but we decided to spread it out over 3 days and 2 nights. We’d consider doing other mountains in the vicinity also depending on where we’d get to build our camp. Information we received on the way in would ultimately dictate our camps location, more on that later. We arrived at the Cerise Creek Trail Head after 11:30am on the Friday. It was going to be a relatively lazy day so we didn’t push to get there super early. As I swung my ~40lb pack onto my back and started out on the trail I thought how relaxing this weekend was going to be. The weather was awesome and the trail in was nice and broken so we could move at a brisk pace. As we hiked in I started to think back to around the same time of year in 2010 and how much things had changed. Two years ago almost exactly from that weekend I was packing the last of my items into my suitcase and getting ready to leave Ireland for good and move to Canada. I look back on that person and wonder who he was. He was over 70lbs heavier and his interests could be described with one word; sedentary. He’d never touched a glacier, words like couloir, bergschrund and randkluft were unknown to his vocabulary and he could barely climb a few flights of stairs without getting winded. A relaxing holiday was lying on a beach in Thailand, sipping Margaritas and munching on crocodile samosas. Anyway, I continued to think back for a while, and before I knew it we were outside Keiths Hut near Cerise Creek. I’d initially thought to just stop for a second outside it, drink some water, then continue on but I remembered that I was bringing my, then, new MSR Reactor Stove with me and I hadn’t even bothered to test it out yet to see if it was working. So...
Skins, Skis and Aching Knees
“I’m concentrating on Ice Climbing this Winter, not Skiing” I foolishly uttered those words to myself last Fall believing I would hold fast in my convictions. I truly believe that if you want to get good at something, not just passably capable, you need to pick one pursuit per season. I’ve consistently broken my own rule in this regard. I’m like that dog in the film “UP” that has all the intentions in the world of doing one thing only, until SQUIRREL! I see a SQUIRREL! Coming into Winter last year I wanted to work solely on my Ice Climbing. It was all going well for a while, we took a 5 day ice climbing course in Canmore, Alberta and we tried to go Ice Climbing near Lillooet, BC for a few weekends but the shiny new skis of my friends kept glinting in the corner of my eyes. You see, when I’d chosen to focus on Ice Climbing, my circle of friends had not received the memo. They’d all chosen to focus on learning to backcountry ski. I staved off looking at that Squirrel for a few trips, whilst I wallowed through the powder in my démodé snowshoes. But eventually I couldn’t take it any more. I caved. MEC, our outdoor gear mecca, was clearing out of all their Ski gear for their Spring stock and had slashed their prices. Myself and my other half went in and bought everything we needed; skis, skins, boots and bindings. We already had ski poles and avalanche gear but still, it was a big chunk of change to get going. After the dust settled and we had our newly acquired Alpine Touring Ski setup laid out in our spare bedroom cum walk-in-gear-closet we wondered “now what?” Our friends, who had been touring on their skis all winter, invited us on an overnight trip to attempt a couloir on the East face of Atwell Peak. We wouldn’t be skiing this gully, only skinning up to it and then boot packing our way up to the summit. Nevertheless, just getting to the campsite below the base of Atwell, ~32 kms return with ~2000m’s of elevation gain, would be a big undertaking, seeing as this would be our first time in the backcountry on touring skis. We were apprehensive but I knew that the first half of the route is a common trail for beginner backcountry skiers, leading to the Elfin Lakes Hut. If we felt like we were way out of our depth by the hut we could always temper our plans, stay at the Hut for the night and spend the next day practicing our backcountry...
Ice Climbing, Canmore
Swing like you screw, kick like you poo. “I don’t screw like that” a girl replied cheekily from the back row of our Ice Climbing group. Our instructor, Carl, paused a moment, cracked a wry smile in response and moved on: “When you swing your Ice Tools get your hips in against the ice, legs extended and shoulders out, like you screw. When you want to kick, hang off your highest tool and get your butt out, like you’re going to poo and look at where you want your feet to go” We were on our second day of Ice Climbing instruction with Yamnuska Mountain Adventures near Canmore, Alberta. The previous day they’d given us an intro to Ice Climbing at the climbs Irish Mist and The Water Hole, today we were at Kings Creek to hone our technique further on some single pitch Ice. The snow gods had finally answered the pleas from Skiers all over the Rockies and on this day it was dumping snow after a rather long drought in these parts. Anything we put down on the ground for a few moments was soon buried under fluffy white powder. I imagined it might make for a rather miserable day of climbing Ice but it turned out to be one of the best. Kings Creek lies at the bottom of a gorge with steep rock walls on either side. As snow built up above eventually it would fall off branches, boulders and slopes when they could no longer hold the weight of it. It would cascade down, get funneled into gullies, gain speed, bring other loose snow with it and eventually reach the bottom where we were climbing. This made for an almost ethereal experience while climbing ice, which isn’t exactly the most normal activity to begin with. Snow cover Belaying in Kings Creek Kings Creek Climb As we climbed, periodically, these sluffs of snow would hit us in waves. It was like being suddenly shaken up inside a snow globe. You could only brace against the ice and hope your belayer hadn’t been buried below. As I finished climbing another line and shouted “Take!” to my belayer, I clipped my ice tools into my harness and lowered my hands to my sides. My hands started to ache, ache badly (In ice climbing this is affectionately known as the Hot Aches or the Screaming Barfies). I braced against the pain and resolved to stop over gripping my Ice Tools next time. I looked down and shouted “Lower” to my belayer. At that moment I could see a snow sluff from my vantage point picking up mass and momentum above and barrelling down....
I a go to Great Bear: The French Connection
On Family day weekend, 2013, myself and a surly bunch of fellow backcountry recreationists spent a cold, somewhat windy night atop a mountain we had no intentions to be anywhere near. This somewhat serendipitous weekend occurred thanks in large part to my French friend, Mr. Adrien T. (drumroll please) What follows will be less an account of the events from that weekend and more the experiences I had and have gladly had in Adrien’s company. Mountains have the capacity to make people a little crazy in my opinion. If you’ve got even a slightly obsessive or addictive personality then you are going to find a way to feed it in the Mountains. You have the peakbaggers who just have to “collect ‘em all”, the adrenaline junkies, the First Ascentists, those who count every foot of elevation they’ve ever climbed, those who constantly need to push their physical and mental limits (I’d count myself among these) and then you have your Completists, to name a few. I’d define Adrien as a bit of a Completist. He sees beauty in order, organization and structure. How this translates to the Mountains is lists. Lists of peaks, lakes, trails, routes. There is a cornucopia of guidebooks out there on most subjects mountain related. Some use them as a reference, while others see them as a challenge. The challenge to visit all of the respective locales in these books and tick them all off. He’s certainly not alone. I’ve met many people who do this. When I have informed fellow hikers on the trails that I am using a certain book as a reference I’ve been oft posed the question: “how many have you done?”. I have no clue, but I do see the appeal of keeping track, if only to see how I have personally been progressing in my ability and experience. Adrien is working on a few lists at the moment and most trips that he plans tend to be chosen in such a way as to tick off at least one of the places they reference. Which is why it came as some surprise last weekend when he made us aware of a trip he wanted to do that wasn’t in any guidebook that I know of. He wanted to visit a peak accessed from the Coquihalla Hwy named Mount Henning. Adrien organizes like a mutha hubba, I mean he usually has it dialed in up to 11 when it comes to working out distances, weather, gear lists… etc. So when he said he wanted to do a few mellow peaks to do some testing of his new AT Ski setup I agreed. Saturday morning arrived, and in my typically Irish fashion, I was running...
