The Garibaldi Times - Issue #1

Alan Forsythe is a newspaper publisher friend of mine in Squamish.  I worked with him on his first paper, the Sea to Sky News, which met a sad end at the hands of our corporate newspaper overlords.  A couple of days ago, he called me up and asked me to shoot pictures for his new Squamish paper, the Garibaldi Times, and if I could do it that Tuesday, as the first edition was coming out Thursday.

It was a pretty good first shift, as I was driving down the highway past the Chief climbing lookout, I saw a group of people looking up with worried expressions on their faces.  I pulled off the road, grabbed my cameras, and ran over, thinking that a climber was stranded on the cliff face.  I looked up and saw a tiny figure throw itself off the top of the mountain and realized it was a group of BASE jumper flying off the 1800' Squamish Chief.  That made for way more interesting cover than Alan's idea of a feature on the under funding of the boat canal dredging.  After that we were invited to a bonfire on the Squamish water front, where our friends wished us good luck on the paper, and welcomed us back to the newspaper world.  I think I'm going to enjoy this.

Tech Stuff:
Top
Camera:  Nikon D700
Lens:  Nikon 17-35mm AF-S f/2.8

Lower
Camera:  Nikon D2x
Lens:  Nikon 70-200mm AF-S  f/2.8

Meredeth and Jay's Wedding, Whistler Mountain

After a summer of beautiful weather, I finally had to shoot a wedding between heavy rain showers this past Saturday.  We arrived at Rebagliati Park in Whistler with a big thunder cloud brewing, and within five minutes, we had to run for cover.  It turned that was all the time we needed.

Tech Stuff:
Point the camera, push the button, couldn't be simpler.

Camera:  Nikon D700
Lens:  Nikon 28-70mm AF-S f/2.8

R-ONE Fourcross Bikes

This is a multimedia presentation I did a few years ago when I was the photographer for the late, and lamented, Sea to Sky News.  It was a dream gig for a photographer, since they pretty much let me do whatever I wanted, as long as there were enough pics to fill the paper.  One of the things I started to do was recording audio while on assignment in order to make multimedia slideshows.  Since the Sea to Sky folded, I've gotten out of the habit of doing multimedia, but I happened to come across some html code that lets me paste the shows onto my Blogger page, so I thought I'd give it a try.  This is more of a test, but I like the show, so I've dusted it off.  Now that I've got a medium to publish my shows, I'll start doing some new ones.

Stacy and Johnny Wheels are a couple of bike builders in Pemberton who started making four wheeled bikes for wheel chair bound riders.  They're pretty crazy machines, and the dudes who build and ride them are pretty nuts as well.

Pemberton Stock Car Races

All the motor heads in Pemberton got together and built themselves a combination Motorcross and Stock Car track. Tonight they were having an evening race, and some friends talked me into going.

It was a tricky thing to shoot, as the light was coming from a few rented light towers (the same thing you see road crews who work at night using), and they don't throw a lot of illumination. Only the corners were lit, and most of the light was on the corner where they head away from the spectators area. You can see in the lower photo that the crash barrier is just an old log laid at the edge of the track, which didn't instill a lot of confidence in the safety of making my way around to far side of the course. In the top photo, I waited for the cars to come into the little spot of light, which made for an interesting, while in the bottom image, I thought a back lit shot might look cool.

Tech Stuff:

I bought my D700 camera this summer hoping to try out it's famous low light capability, and ran straight into the hottest and brightest Summer in years. I finally had a situation where I could push the camera up to ISO 3200, which is the highest you can go without boosting the ISO (by comparison, my D2x doesn't even go to ISO 3200 in the boost mode).

Camera: Nikon D700

Lens: Nikon 70-200mm AF-S f/2.8

Fixerupper

I love shooting black and white landscape images, especially old derelict buildings. I'm always pulling off the road to grab a shot of some old ghost town. This is the boat house from the old Britannia Beach mine site that's halfway between Vancouver and Squamish, along the Sea to Sky Highway.

I started my newspaper career in the days of B&W film in darkrooms, making 8x10 prints in open chemical trays, which makes me a dinosaur among my peers. A big influence for me was Ansel Adams, who not only was an important artist, but also a brilliant photo technician who literally wrote the books (The Camera, The Negative, and The Print) that modern B&W printing is based on. I often think that if Adams was around today, he would be out of his darkroom and using multi Photoshop layers to do his work.

Tech Stuff:

I included the original, rather flat, colour image that came out of the camera as a good before and after view. I used several adjustment layers in Photoshop to apply varying levels of contrast to different parts of the shot.

Camera: Nikon D700

Lens: 70-200mm AF-s, f/2.8

Trite, but True

This is a shot I see a lot of, the couple driving off into the sunset in a convertible. The problem is, being in a resort, doing mostly destination weddings, most of my clients don't have cars as part of their wedding. Luckily for Paula and Adam, one of the guests had rented a convertible Mustang at the airport, which we appropriated for the photos.

To get the shot, I sat on the folded up canvas roof of the car. I had one toe hooked under the armrest of the right rear seat to keep from rolling off the back of the car. The fisheye is so wide that I was having a hard time keeping my body out of the picture. You can see my toe behind Paula's seat.

Tech Stuff:

I stopped the lens way down and used a really slow shutter speed to blur the scenery. I used a fisheye lens to accentuate the blurring of the scenery.

Camera: Nikon D2x

Lens: Nikon 10.5 mm DX, f/2.8

Bless this Mess

When I shoot the 'getting ready' part of the wedding day, I always call ahead to make sure it's okay to come to the room. The answer I almost always get is, "sure, but let me clean the place up before you get here". I tell them for this part of the day, the messier the better, as it makes for great photos.

Tech Stuff:

When a subject is heavily back lit, there's two ways to deal with it, balancing the exposure with flash, which tends to flatten out the image, or expose for the subject and hope for the best. The latter makes for interesting photos, but you never really know what you're going to get.

Camera: Nikon D700 (both)

Lens: 17-35 mm AF-S f/2,8 (top), 28-70 mm AF-S f/2.8 (bottom)