End Of An Era
Since 2009, one of the clients that I’ve probably done the most amount of work for has been the EKATI Diamond Mine, located about 300 kilometres north of Yellowknife, above the treeline in the dramatic Northwest Territories Barrenlands.
I’ve spent countless days up at this mine, and have been extremely proud of the photography that I have created highlighting many of their great workers over the years.
Well, all good things must eventually come to an end - especially as you evolve and grow - and due to my own personal time constraints and having less and less availability to offer, I decided this past month to finally end my contract after almost a decade run.
It’s been such a pleasure working with the people of EKATI, and I have to say I’ll miss my trips up there!
Misadventure: The Royals
Note: this originally appeared in Photo Life Magazine.
One of the most memorable assignments occurred in 2011 when I was asked to be the official photographer for His Royal Highness The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, and Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton’s three-day visit to northern Canada.
This was a pretty high-profile task, and one that I was excited to shoot. It’s not every day that you get to spend documenting two of the most famous people in the world.
I handle stress pretty well, and never really let the pressure of any assignment get to me, but this assignment started out with one of the most stressful moments in my entire career in photography.
The evening the Royal Couple was due to arrive, my first tasking in my role as official photographer was to take a formal portrait of William and Kate, along with a number of dignitaries. It would be done in a secure hotel meeting room, and would be their first order of business when they arrived from the airport: briefly meet all the dignitaries and then sit down, with me directing, while they all posed for a portrait.
I was given about 90 seconds for my image.
*********
Earlier that day, I had spent a couple hours setting up for this 90 seconds. I brought in all my equipment, including studio lights, light stands, modifiers, cameras, lenses. I carefully set everything up and then did what any photographer worth his salt would do: I tested.
I tested everything, multiple times. The angle of light. My camera settings. I even had 10 hotel workers take ten minutes out of their day to come and sit in the seats that would later be filled by the Royal Highnesses and the dignitaries.
Everything was perfect.
Fast forward to 20 minutes before they were due to arrive. Again, I tested everything. Again, everything perfect.
Then, I hear Prince William and Kate Middleton arrive. A cheer goes up down the hallway. I’ve been instructed to go down the hallway and take some frames of them greeting hotel guests as they arrive in the lobby. I scurry down the hall and catch my first glimpse of them. I fire off 40 or 50 frames and then return to the meeting room.
They arrive behind me in the room, and shake hands with the small crowd of dignitaries. I wait at the end of the line, where I’m to direct them to their assigned chairs, and then, gulp, tell them the process.
My voice cracks, but I get it out. I tell them all that I plan on taking about ten images, total. I want to keep it way less than 90 seconds. I figure I can have the photograph I need in less than 30.
I put my camera up to my eye, compose, and fire.
And fire. And fire.
By frame four I get the sick feeling that something’s wrong. I’m not seeing the tell-tale flash of light out of the corner of my eye.
My flash is not going off. My heart sinks.
The very last thing I want to be doing, now - now, of all times - is to troubleshoot. I have 90 seconds. This is one of the biggest moments of my career to date. And I feel absolutely sick to my stomach.
I keep it cool. Okay, just a hiccup. Shoot some more. My radio wireless triggers are bound to kick in. They’ll be okay. I press the trigger. No light. I press it again and again and again. No light. They’re not firing.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to take a look at the images and make sure I captured one with no one blinking.”
This is what I tell the group, who are waiting patiently. They have no clue anything is wrong. William and Kate turn to each other as I turn to my camera.
I hit the play button with dread. I know I’m doomed. My nausea is getting stronger.
I look at the last image I took. Black. With no light from the studio lights, the exposure is completely black.
I flip back to the image before. Black again.
Flip, black.
Flip, black.
Flip, black.
I’m dying.
I’m already making excuses in my brain. My brain has turned to mush.
Flip, black.
Flip, black.
Flip, light.
Wait, what?
I see an image appear on my screen. It’s the group. The group in front of me.
On the first frame I took, the studio lights went off! My heart’s pounding. But that doesn’t really mean anything. It may have went off, but what are the chances that ten people will have given me perfect expressions, with no one blinking.
I zoom into the image, quickly and furiously scanning all the faces.
Prince William’s look is perfect. As is Kate’s. Of course theirs are. But what about the others? I look at each and every face, and perfect, all.
I nailed it.
“Thank you all for your time, I have what I needed.”
********
Over the next two days, it was all a fun breeze. Everything went perfect. Exhausting, thousands of frames, but all pretty much perfect; nothing in the next two days compared with that stress of that first 30 seconds, thankfully.
PS - I still don't know what happened with my lights that evening. As soon as they left the room, I tried firing them again. And of course, they fired perfectly.
The Insomniac's Sunrise
This is not your typical sunrise image but it’s one of the sunrise images I’m most proud of.
First light, Antarctica peninsula earlier this year - probably about four in the morning. Everyone still and sleeping.
I couldn’t sleep and went and sit on a rock on the edge of the water and just sat, alone. And listened to life. Ice cracking, penguins sleeping. Gentle whisper of the wind. The occasional pod of seals would swim by.
Eventually, light made her appearance and kissed me good morning. This is the sunrise that gave me all the feels.
Slices + Abstractions
There’s always work I do that doesn’t fit neatly into a box. It’s work that isn’t quite this…and isn’t quite that. But it’s work I love: scenes I see and moments that deserve my attention. So here’s a small post with some of those images. I’m going to call it Slices + Abstractions. Because that sounds properly pretentious….
The Power of Now
One of the things that I see most photographers of all levels struggling with has nothing to do with f-stops, mastering lighting, seeing, creating, competition, making a living, or any of the countless other “stress” factors that photographers seem to worry about. Rather, a trend that I notice time and time again—and I’ve admittedly fell victim to this trend myself frequently throughout my career—is the failure to simply recognize that things, in this moment—right now—are actually far better than you give the present moment credit for.
What do I mean by this? Let me give you an example.
Let’s take a fictional photographer—a fictional photographer that many of you may see bits and pieces of yourself in. I see parts of myself in this photographer as well. Let’s call this photographer Apollo.
Apollo wasn’t born a photographer. He was born a person who grew up with diverse interests and friends and a great deal of uncertainty about his place on this planet. At some point he discovered that he enjoyed photography and that made him happy. He liked the feeling of clicking the shutter and seeing his creations appear on the screen. They weren’t all winners—he had far more duds than masterpieces but he didn’t really care. He simply enjoyed the process of using this piece of technology to express a little sliver of his soul in a completed image. Those images brought out an artistic side in him that he never knew he had; he felt like they gave him some degree of purpose and the moments in which he was behind the camera and lens, creating, he felt more peaceful than most other times in his life.
But then something happened. He looked around and saw other photographers doing their own photography thing. These other photographers were creating their own images and sharing their own little slices of their souls. He saw that his images that he was creating didn’t really measure up to theirs: the other photographer’s images were clearly stronger. This made Apollo feel bad and his self-worth went down.
Not one to quit, he used this fact—that others were better than him—to push him to try to better himself. He said to himself “if I spend 20 hours a week on my photography instead of 10 hours a week” I’ll definitely get better and then I’ll be happy. So he did: he shifted around his life and found an extra ten hours a week and pretty quickly, he started seeing the fruits of his labour: his photography skills improved vastly and he got better and better.
A funny thing happened, however. Even as others were recognizing that Apollo’s photographs were getting stronger and stronger, Apollo still wasn’t happy. Sure his photographs were stronger, he thought, but when he looked around and saw that other photographers were getting in magazines and having exhibitions of their work and he wasn’t…well, that made him sad. “If only I could have my work published and have that big exhibition, then I will be happy!”, Apollo mused.
Fast forward a year. Apollo sent out countless portfolios to countless magazines and made meetings with various art venues. It took a lot of doing….a lot of frustration and cursing all the rejection notices that arrived monthly…but Apollo finally got his break. A magazine agreed to publish a small photo essay of his (and even gave him the cover!). The next month one of the most prestigious galleries in his city agreed to a weekend showing of his work: his first major exhibition!
At the exhibition, people sang his accolades. His work looked beautiful hung up and behind glass. At one point on opening night, someone approached him with the magazine that he was just in: they wanted him to sign the cover that he photographed.
Apollo signed the cover, but he was distracted. He was a little upset, truth be told, because he had just heard that his camera manufacturer choose a photographer he knew to be part of their sponsored team. He didn’t have a sponsor, and this made him sad.
A year later, after thousands and thousands more images that he crafted to perfection and through a lot of grim determination, Apollo got sponsored. He wasn’t enjoying creating these images as much any more because he wasn’t getting as many Facebook likes as he once did because social media algorithms kept changing, but he finally got a free lens in the mail, so that was something. His friends in the photography world were so proud of him but still Apollo wasn’t happy: he’d be happy, he thought, if he could just get onto National Geographic’s team. “They’re obviously flawed if they don’t choose me…look at the work I create!”.
********
The point of the above is pretty obvious. We, as humans, tend to live in states of being stuck in the past (“I could have been happy in life but I never had the money to go to photography school, so now I’ll suffer the rest of my life saying ‘what if’”), or looking ahead to the future as the elusive cure to being happy (“I’ll be satisfied when xyz happens”.).
Neither mindset—living buried in the past or placing happiness as a conditional future state objective—is a healthy way to live, generally, or to approach your photography.
Why? Because all you have is NOW.
What is now and why is important to recognize that you have it better than you think you do? Because you do. All we have is now: life is a series of moments that unfold one after another after another after another and if you constantly tell yourself that you’ll never be satisfied with the current moment unless something in the future happens? Well…you’ll never find happiness. You’ll never be satisfied. You’ll never find peace. You’ll never appreciate just how much you’ve accomplished and how talented you really are. How FORTUNATE you are (imagine how many people in the world would love to simply afford to own a camera, let only worry about whether you get 250 likes on an image on Facebook opposed to 10).
If you’re always looking to the “next big thing” as that magical place where happiness and contentment resides, you’ll never find happiness and contentment, because as soon as you hit that place—that goal—you won’t recognize the moment for what it is (beautiful) ad you’ll be looking for the next thing as the magical place where happiness and content resides. It’s “all retch and no vomit” as the great Alan Watts preached.
Truth be told, you’re doing pretty damn well. Right now. In this moment. You truly are. You’ve accomplished, I’m sure, a lot in this life already. No matter where you are on your photographic journey, you’ve made some pretty incredible gains. Maybe you finally understand the exposure triangle. Or maybe you’ve sold your first print. Or maybe you simply enjoy being outdoors and photographing images that make you happy. Lock onto and appreciate that—all of that—because that’s what it’s all about.
Appreciate the power of NOW. That’s not to say don’t have goals, of course. Goals are a great thing: they motivate us and keep us moving forward. But please don’t attach your happiness to a future state: happiness and contentment is here, right now, in this moment. You just have to recognize it.
People often ask me something to the effect of “what is your ultimate dream in photography….cover of National Geographic?”. My answer is pretty much always the same: “to be able to do ten years from now what I do now…and to just enjoy the ride”. And that’s the God-honest truth. I have goals, but I don’t feel a pressing need to do anything in particular with my photography other than enjoy it. To not only not hate it, but to always have the same satisfaction being behind the camera as I did when I first started out. I picked up the camera because I loved creating. I loved knowing that I had an artistic side and that this was my medium. I want to hold onto that feeling. Forever.
End note: for some great reading on this subject, I highly recommend Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”. I read this book about a decade ago and I can emphatically state this book has changed my life like no other book I’ve ever read.