Alberta Rockies- Monochrome

There are some spectacular drives in the world- probably too numerous to mention, and varied in their beauty and uniqueness.

I reckon I’ve had a chance to enjoy a few of them- but not nearly as many as I’d like. Among those that spring to mind immediately include the highway between Lausanne and Montreux, along the northern shore of Lac Leman with the Alps rising from the opposite shore (in fact, almost any road through the Swiss and French Alps would have to qualify, including the highway entering Chamonix from direction Annemasse, and the road that snakes into the Val d’Aosta from the Tunnel St. Bernard); PNG’s North Coast Road between Madang and the Ramu River after dawn, with the coastline gleaming in tropical sunlight; the desert track that winds through Niger’s rugged and barren Air Mountains; the road running into Yosemite Valley via Tioga Pass- a truly jaw-dropping scene as you finally round the bend and catch your first glimpses of Half Dome and El Capitan; the Nairobi-Naivasha road as it drops into the East African Rift Valley with sprawling, cloud-speckled views of Lake Naivasha, Longonot Volcano and the plains; and almost any road you care to mention in Ethiopia once you’ve cleared Addis Ababa.

Among my very favourite is the road running between Canmore, Alberta, and Golden, British Colombia. Taking in the length of Banff National Park, it is an unending array of glorious mountain peaks one after the other that tower into the sky in dizzying proximity. The first time I drove it end-to-end was an early March morning after a heavy snowfall, when the sky was almost indigo, utterly cloudless, and the peaks sagging under a fresh carpet of white. It was so crisp, so utterly beautiful that at points I had tears in my eyes just watching it slip by.

(A little aside for any skiers among you: Kicking Horse Resort, above Golden, would have to be the greatest on-station ski terrain I have ever come across. Make it your Mecca.)

I haven’t had much chance to spend time in the Rockies of late, but a brief detour from a business trip let me spend a couple of days with dear friends in Calgary who, knowing my love of all things vertical, took me for an afternoon drive out to Banff. We had a lovely time, and it did my soul good to be back among mountain peaks. I find myself inspired when I’m among them, more in touch with my spirit. Mountains are my church and my cathedral, a place where I feel closer to God and most inspired to worship.

The photographer in me was stoked as well. My last trip to the Rockies, my equipment had been a Canon Powershot G6. It was fun for some skiing snaps and a bit of backcountry footage, but having a serious camera with me this time made me hope for a repeat of the scenery I saw those years back on that brittle spring morning.

Alas, the weather was not on my side. I didn’t end up with that aching blue sky, nor the fierce light that makes the snowcaps shine. We had patchy cloud, a finger-numbing wind, and shifting light.

But I wasn’t disappointed. As a photographer- literally a ‘writer of light’- you adapt. Photography is about making the most of the conditions you have, and while I’m not adept enough to come out with anything truly great if the conditions aren’t precisely in my favour (heck- I’m not going to come out with anything truly great even then), one thing I feel I’ve been blessed with is the ability to see beauty in nature under most circumstances.

While patchy cloud doesn’t necessarily allow the most spectacular nature of the mountains to be showcased, it does lend a drama to the scene that a blue sky doesn’t. Not only that, but the shifting cloud means no two pictures are the same. I mean, a blue sky is a blue sky- a plain backdrop that looks more or less the same. The angle and colour of light and shadows might change with the time of day. But with blowing cloud, the mood shifts from one minute to the next. And while colours may not sing out in the most vibrant fashion, the sense of contrast, depth and darkness- white on black- make for some great black and white shots. You get to celebrate texture, detail and form in a way that hones the eye, and which can be lost by the distraction of colour.

I took a lot of these shots at the time with monochrome in mind. It was clear looking through the viewfinder that they were only going to be a step or two above dull in colour, but the potential to celebrate the contrast was evident even at the time. As a photographer, you compose the image you want in your mind even before you look through the viewfinder. You look for form, for light, for colour. It takes only a subtle shift to turn those colours into a greyscale palette as you look at them, and once you’ve done that, you can appreciate a view in a whole new way. And while the electronic conversion of the files from colour into black-and-white happened after I loaded them into my computer and post-processed them, the conceptual conversion happened before I pressed the shutter release.

The photos are nothing more or less than a record of one of my favourite drives, an afternoon spent with friends (even if those friends don’t appear in the image, they were at the heart of that afternoon), and my own take of what I was seeing. In that sense, they are neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’- they just are, and I think anybody who enjoys creating should try and see their work in that light. I’m no Ansell Adams. I flinch at every flaw and shortcoming in my own work, and want to go back to do better. I also want to go back and take more photos under different lighting conditions. Heck, I just want to go back and enjoy the mountains. There are few places that draw me more fiercely than the Alberta Rockies. Cham maybe. Nepal. The Southern Alps. At least on a par.

Regardless, these are a few of the gorgeous peaks, dressed in a particular fashion and captured, like models, in a particular moment of glory. And for me, just another opportunity to work with the light I’m given, and learn.

NB: A couple of these photos I’ve linked to the original large-size image so you can explore the detail- it’s well worth clicking through and taking a look, in my impartial opinion as the photographer… 🙂

Touching the Sky

One thing I love about the sky is that it’s constantly changing. We forget, I think, that the air is, from a mechanical standpoint, a fluid. Moisture, temperature and pressure interact to give us weather, and while to our busy, narrow perspective at ground level that change may seem a little slow or plodding, a simple time-lapse of the sky shows us cloud fronts breaking like waves on a shore, building up and breaking down like foam, or boiling away- as ethereal as steam from a kettle.

I don’t think I ever noticed the sky before I started photography. Not really noticed. Now, I love to stare at the clouds and study the layers, watch the way a low-angled sun strikes clouds differently at various altitudes, the range of textures of different cloudforms, or imagine what those clouds might look like from a plane window amongst them.

Even monochromatic skies have depth and interest. Using a polarizing filter teaches you about the different way that sunlight moves across a blue sky, and even with the naked eye you can see dark, rich spots and paler areas where the light seems to desaturate. Blue skies vary from place to place. My family have always enjoyed the very rich, pure blue that seems to accompany sunny days in Australia and New Zealand; growing up in Europe, somehow the sky there used to seem just a little washed out. In western Afghanistan, the winter sky was so clean, so void of moisture, that the edges of every building and every mountain spine stood out, close and sharp, a clarity I’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

Life- any life- can have its monotonous stretches. Daily routines, slogs and grinds, times when things seem slow or bogged down. That will change- it’s the nature of life to shift, particularly when people want it to. But even when it feels like more of the same-old same-old, don’t forget to look up. The sky’s always changing, and that makes every day it’s own. If we can learn to celebrate those little things, we can touch the sky every day.

Rooftops

I went for a walk on a snowy morning in Calgary. I loved the geometry of these rooftops set against the blank canvas of a snow-filled sky.

A Study in Light and Water

 

One of my favourite things about water is that it is constantly changing. As a photographer, a ‘writer of light’, few things react as utterly and dramatically to changes in light as water does. So, too, wind and other factors affect the character of water surfaces so that from season to season, day to day, even minute to minute, water can be smooth, patterned, violent or sedate.

I took this series of shots over a time-period of less than a week. All but two were taken during a half-hour visit to a beach at dusk about five minutes from where I live. Another was taken just up the coast a day or two later. The last (I’m sure you can guess which) was taken a couple of days later in the Canadian Rockies, a hemisphere and two seasons away.

I like this little ensemble because it reflects a host of different characters of water. The first is a contrasty and dappled texture reaching to the horizon. Others are silvery, smooth, rippled and sparkling. One shows a rock wrapped in seaweed amidst an oily smear of pastels that an impressionist might appreciate. In another, sunlight weaves like a tangle of threads through the transparence. Flushing through frozen banks, water photographed at high speed also freezes, catching in the sunlight, in bubbling forms like the ice-baubles growing on either side.

One of the joys of photography is that no two scenes are ever truly identical. Light changes. The sun’s angle shifts, clouds soften hues, shadows shrink and stretch. Nothing reflects this quite like water. While none of these scenes is something I would call truly spectacular or outstanding as a photographic subject, taking a moment to appreciate the interplay between light and water adds a layer of interest that, for me at least, makes the images worth capturing, and worth considering for a moment.

Locations: Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, and Bragg Creek, Alberta

 

Moments in Space and Time #3: Wapta Icefields

There is a silence that settles in the mountains like something tangible. It’s hard to really explain unless you’ve experienced it yourself. It’s the combination of the muffling effect that thousands of acres of snow has on sound propagation, the white background noise of steady mid-altitude winds rumbling past peaks, and the utter paucity of any human-made sounds such as highways, airplanes and air-conditioning units.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.

I took this photo on day 3 of a ski-touring trip with my dear friend Mackie, which you can read about in this string of posts here, here and here. We rose early on this morning, a crisp winter’s day in the Alberta Rockies. The sun was shining but periodically subdued by passing mountain cloud. We had put the worst of the ascent behind us climbing up onto the Wapta Icefields, and were now on the icecap itself, gliding along the smooth surface on our quest to find epic powder. While we were moving, the sounds we heard were of the snow-crystals whispering beneath our skins, the hissing of our ski-pants rubbing together as we trekked, and our own heavy breathing. And when we stopped, that beautiful silence.

On the icefields the isolation was magnificent. It was Mackie, me, and what felt like a million miles of nothing. No other humans. No other tracks. Just smooth snow as far as we could see, ringed by inviting mountain peaks that formed something of a bowl and only served to enhance that sense of being cut off from the rest of the world. The peace out there is intoxicating, simply exhilerating, and I can truthfully say that few moments on earth can compete with the pure joy of being up in the mountains, trapped by the glory of creation, simply surviving in that wild landscape.

A Nomad’s Footsteps (3 of 3)

More pictures from different axes of the globe we wander, a sampler of some of my recent travels…

Mauritania (2005)

Sunrise over the city of Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania.  Half as big again as the US state of Texas (slightly smaller than the Northern Territory, half as big again as the nation of the Ukraine, or roughly the same size as France and Spain combined, depending on the audience and frame of reference…), Mauritania has a population of just 3 million mostly-nomadic people.  In true Sahelian fashion, it straddles the line between civilizations, with a thin southern strip home to a significant population of African ethnic groups, including the Wolof, and the rest drawn from north African groups with roots in the fairer Moorish, Berber and Tuareg peoples.  Sadly, as with many similarly-divided nations, a sense of superiority aligned with the lightness of skin has developed, such that in Mauritania there are ‘white’ moors and ‘dark’ moors, the latter of whom tend to be subservient to and occupy economic positions below the former.  Mauritania has the dubious reputation of being one of the last bastions of societally-condoned slavery in the world.

Mauritania is a fascinating place.  Much of the population is truly nomadic, and while the African agriculturalist groups have settled close to the Senegalese border (about a third of the population), and another million have begrudgingly accepted a sedentary life in the country’s nondescript capital by the sea, this leaves the final million to be finely sprinkled throughout the rest of this vast Saharan nation, with the result that it is, predominately, devoid of anything.  Just vast empty expanses of desert.

We love it.

I took the above photo with my Canon Powershot G6, the little digital point-and-shoot that kept me company during my year in West Africa.  No polarizer, no special lenses, and no post-processing.  The image of the sky you see there is exactly as it came out of the camera, the colours as they appeared, as the sun came up from beyond the desert above the eastern end of the city.  A phenomenal view.  I will talk more about Mauritania some other time, as it’s a country that has captured my imagination and left me thirsty for more…

Nepal (2007)

Another trip I will doubtless spend more time talking about in more detail is my brief stay in Nepal, trekking to the Annapurna Sanctuary.  Three of the best-spent weeks of my life.  The scenery was spectacular, the culture fascinating, the weather perfect, and the company pretty stellar as well.  Many very, very fond memories.  Among which is not the fact that my camera died forty-five minutes after arriving at the crux of the trip.

Fortunately, on this morning my camera was working.  I snapped this of one corner of the enourmous Annapurna Massif, here capturing at least two seven-thousand-metre peaks just as the sun’s first rays lit their crowns.  Howling winds tear across the tops of the peaks, whipping snow and ice crystals into the air and leaving them hanging like a fine veil for the sun to get caught in.  I have always been a fan of the mountains, and Nepal remains one of my favourite destinations on the planet.  Stupefyingly beautiful.

South Africa (2007)

One of the images I carry with me that reflects the grandeur of the African landscape is the awesome skyscape that accompanies it.  No memory of the open drylands of this continent is complete without taking in the drama of the clouds that hang above, lending a sense of scale to the scenery beneath.  I snapped these cumulus towers building in the early afternoon near Pretoria, when a hot and humid January day promised to turn into a thundery downpour, and which it subsequently did, with gusto.  In this image I love the deep blue gradient towards the top of the frame, and the tangible texture of the clouds themselves…

Haiti (2007)

I took this photograph in a small village that was being rebuilt by the NGO I work for after it had been destroyed by a cyclone.  We were on Haiti’s Ile de la Gonave, a small island a short distance off the coast of the nation’s capital Port-au-Prince.  While Port-au-Prince remains one of the world’s more unsavory destinations, replete with riots, kidnappings, political violence and general criminality- not to mention substantial poverty- Gonave couldn’t be more different.  A laid-back Afro-Carribean island with friendly people and gorgeous tropical scenery laid out on coral-white rock and ringed by azure seas, the only thing that reminded me I was actually working while I was here was the fact that we spent eight hours a day rattling around inside a regulation Toyota Land Cruiser, on what I maintain are the very worst roads I have been on.  Anywhere, anytime.  And I decry anybody to find me a worse set.

Great place though.

Canada (2006)

As we’ve already ascertained, I love mountains.  So I’ve actually been pretty restrained in this collection by not just launching a whole ream of mountain photos at you.  Though truth be told, as my photography skills (and equipment…) have improved, the amount of time I’ve had around mountains has sadly dwindled, an error which I plan to remedy as soon as I get the opportunity.

I took a few weeks out from my stint in Niger to join friends in Alberta for some quality mountain time.  This generally meant strapping on two pieces of carbon-fibre onto the undersides of my boots and hurtling down steep slopes.  I find it hard to conceive of a better way of engaging with God and creation.  I snapped this shot of a mountain whose name I’m unsure while we were driving out to Lake Louise (or was it the Bow Hut area…?  My memory fails me).  It’s not a technically remarkable shot.  But the sheer scale of rock, snow and ice is awe-inspiring, and that blue sky behind the white snow gets my heart beating for more.  I am desperate to get back to the Rockies with my new Canon EOS 5D…

Ecuador (2005)

One of the downsides to travelling to lots of exotic places in my job is being there, and having to spend most of the time working.  One of the upsides is those rare days off.  On this day, a colleague drove us up to the jumping-off point for the ascent of Cotopaxi, Ecuador’s second highest mountain, a stratovolcano of 5,897m in altitude, and one of the world’s most threatening volcanoes.  Part of my trip had to do with supporting a project which is working with communities to be ready for a possible eruption, and so I felt it was particularly justifiable that I spend some time on the volcano itself.  A real hardship, given my earlier observations about my love of mountains…

And hardship it was.  Quite aside from the powerful winds, the altitude was an absolute killer.  We foolishly drove up from 2,000m to 4,500m in the space of ninety minutes, ignoring all calls for acclimitization.  Then we hiked up past the hut at 4,800m, eventually tailing off around 5,200m just short of the start of the ice-cap.  By the top, I was taking five paces, then stopping for two minutes to catch my breath.  Then another five paces…  We ended up coming down of the mountain fairly shortly after that, when my colleague began to complain of difficulty breathing.

This woman was one of the villagers with whom the project was working, one of several who wanted to accompany us on our little excursion.  I caught her in this brief moment of reflection at the mountain hut at 4,800m, and her bright clothes against the grey stone just stood out.  I’m really fond of this photo.  It captures something of the mountain spirit of these gentle people.  She seemed right at home up there, on the edge of where people survive.

South Australia (2006)

The Flinders Ranges, in South Australia, capture for me the rugged beauty of the interior of this continent.  Barren, dry, wild and isolated, they grab my imagination and make me want to explore some more.  The five days that my brother and I spent driving around the southern part of the SA outback only whet my appetite.  Such a beautiful country, right on my doorstep, sometimes I wonder why I spend so much time jetting away from it.  But then I think there’s beauty wherever we end up in the world, we just need to learn how to see it.  Certainly for those of us who’ve ended up here in Australia, we have no excuse to complain.  It’s a pretty amazing country, really.

Am I allowed to say that as a wandering Kiwi…?

Yoho Dreaming

I believe every skier has a dream. It hits you early in the morning. You get yourself out of the hut, while the sun is still just a pale glow behind a distant ridge of mountains, and the air is brittle, as if a loud noise will shatter it, sharp against the skin and in the lungs as you breathe it in, breathe it out again and watch your breath hang in the stillness. You look up to the glazed peaks around you as you unfurl your skins, crispy and crunchy where the night’s cold has frozen them in the shape you hung them, and you work quickly with ungloved fingers to stop your hands freezing, stretching them over the smooth bases of your skis and clipping them into place. Your heart beats a little faster as your skis drop to the snow with a soft whumph, the loud clack as your boots clip into the bindings, the rustle as you nestle your poles into your gloves and adjust your pack. You’re ready…

Click here to read more…

Gordon Gauntlet

There is something about being caught in a snowstorm that I love. I don’t think I’m unique in the outdoors community in this regard. It’s a beautiful sensation, an isolation from the rest of the world, where the white envelopes you, cold and heavy and tangible. Chunky flakes of snow drift past, occasionally picked up and whipped by a churning wind, biting into your face as you retreat deeper into your mountain clothing. Sound becomes muffled. Your world shrinks to a small sphere beyond which all is lost to the grey. Nature reaches out and wraps around you, and for a few minutes, you might very well be the last person alive on the planet.

Of course, on a ridgeline at ten thousand feet overlooking a glaciated valley, these rarified senses tend to be usurped by one specific, very pertinent question: How the heck do we get down from here?

Click here to read more…

Bow Hut or Bust

I always have mixed feelings leaving the parking-lot at the start to a backcountry trip. On the one hand, there is an element of excitement, of anticipation, and that sweet jangling of nerves that gets the heart beating just a bit faster in preparation for the exertion and excitement that’s on its way. On the other hand, there’s a touch of fear, because every trip has an element of the unknown. Unknown terrain, unknown conditions, and even on a trip that you’ve done forty times before, that unpredictability that is as inherent a part of mountains as the snow, ice and rock that makes up their physical form. And let’s face it, if it wasn’t for that, most of us would probably stay at home…

Click here to read more…

Looking Ahead

I realise that with my recent departure from Papua New Guinea I have been remiss in keeping my website updated. This is largely because, with my return to my Mac in Melbourne, I no longer have access to Lightroom or Photoshop, and therefore at the moment find it hard to access and edit my pictures. This will change very soon I assure you. I have no intention of letting this site become another piece of jettisoned flotsam in the murk of cyberspace.

With that in mind, a brief preview of three pieces I plan to post in the near future, written following a ski mountaineering trip a little while back:

Wapta Wanderings Part 1: Bow Hut or Bust

I always have mixed feelings leaving the parking-lot at the start to a backcountry trip. On the one hand, there is an element of excitement, of anticipation, and that sweet jangling of nerves that gets the heart beating just a bit faster in preparation for the exertion and excitement that’s on its way. On the other hand, there’s a touch of fear, because every trip has an element of the unknown. Unknown terrain, unknown conditions, and even on a trip that you’ve done forty times before, that unpredictability that is as inherent a part of mountains as the snow, ice and rock that makes up their physical form. And let’s face it, if it wasn’t for that, most of us would probably stay at home…

Wapta Wanderings Part II: Gordon Gauntlet

There is something about being caught in a snowstorm that I love. I don’t think I’m unique in the outdoors community in this regard. It’s a beautiful sensation, an isolation from the rest of the world, where the white envelopes you, cold and heavy and tangible. Chunky flakes of snow drift past, occasionally picked up and whipped by a churning wind, biting into your face as you retreat deeper into your mountain clothing. Sound becomes muffled. Your world shrinks to a small sphere beyond which all is lost to the grey. Nature reaches out and wraps around you, and for a few minutes, you might very well be the last person alive on the planet.

Of course, on a ridgeline at ten thousand feet overlooking a glaciated valley, these rarified senses tend to be usurped by one specific, very pertinent question: How the heck do we get down from here…?

Wapta Wanderings Part III: Yoho Dreaming

It’s an elusive dream. You’re floating, just beneath a cloudless sky. Beneath your skis is a crisp sheet of cold, light snow, flawless, split into two by your blades, barely a whisper as it churns out behind you, your wake. The air is so clear you feel you can reach out and touch the peaks in front of you. The wind bites into your cheeks, the legacy of speed. Your heart is hammering, your chest heaving. Beneath you stretches out a vast sloping field of untouched powder, just waiting for you, and it’s all yours, acres and acres and acres of it, gleaming so white in the sunlight that it hurts to look at…