After Great Canadian heli and a couple days of New Years spent in Revelstoke, Daryl and I met brother Dave and carried our interior road trip on to Monashee Powder Snowcats in the Monashee range. For the three of us it was our third time there shooting. Monashee Powder’s tenure is a fantastic playground for skiing and a pleasure to photograph. They also have an extensive burn that I really enjoy moving through, and photographing. We spent some time hauling ladders around and climbing trees to highlight the beauty of moving through the burn on skis – experimenting with some different angles and concepts for magazines next year. Thanks to our guide Mark and the rest of the staff at Monashee who put up with my high maintenance persistence on taking a long time and requiring things like 28ft ladders to be hauled around.

photo, Dave Treadway

For the second year in a row (just before New Years) I’ve had the opportunity to join Great Canadian Heliskiing for some skiing and photography. Jamie Bond from doglotion.com was there to capture video, and Leah Evans and Daryl Treadway were skiing for ze camera. Great Canadian has some very long runs and playful, aesthetic terrain to offer. It was quite cold but GCHS gave us the opportunity to experiment and we accomplished a few experimental shots which I’m excited about.

Here we have Jamie Bond and myself freezing and hanging out of the side of the heli while Daryl and Leah await their turn to ski below for an image (photo, Daryl Treadway).

For a ski photographer there is likely no bigger editorial issue of the year than the Powder Photo Annual. Here are some tear sheets from this year’s issue (click to enlarge), shot in two of my favourite places: La Grave and Whistler.

Here is a recent cover from the UK. Chad Sayers, Whistler Mountain (there is a little bit of info about the photo here).

In June I did a week long shoot for Santa Cruz Bicycles in Whistler during their launch of their flagship Carbon V10 bike. Their website features some of the images that I gathered with Seb Kemp and Craig Wilson – check some more out here.

Here is a feature from the UK magazine MBUK, from a shoot/ride from this past summer.

I’ve just finished reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography. I don’t normally make blog posts like this…but with respect to photography, I can’t help but wonder what conversations between her and her partner Annie Leibovitz must have been like. Sontag’s On Photography is very critical of photography’s role in American culture, especially it’s popular and commercial role, while Leibovitz seems to epitomize American popular/commercial photography. A strange but equally fascinating dichotomy. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, you’ll have to read the book.

Left: Sontag’s well known On Photography, Right: One of Leibovitz’s Vanity Fair cover images

“Who would believe that so small a space could contain the image of all the universe? O mighty process! What talent can avail to penetrate a nature such as these? What tongue will it be that can unfold so great a wonder? Verily, none! This it is that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine things. Here the figures, here the colors, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point. O what a point is so marvelous!” – Da Vinci

Above: From the notebooks of Da Vinci – the function of the eye, as explained by camera obscura (’dark room’, in latin).

Though Da Vinci theorized about the principal, understandings of the optical principal of camera obscura are known to date back as far as Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti (5th century BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC). How about them, megapixels?

Here is the opening spread from a feature article assignment that I shot for Bike magazine in Michigan this past summer. The feature was about a bike parts manufacturer Nuke Proof that died in the late 90s after a good run with success. I spent some time photographing in and around the decaying buildings of Grand Rapids furniture manufacturing sector that were once at the heart of the US rust-belt economy – trying to set a tone for the story by juxtaposing the decaying buildings next to the story line of Nuke Proof.

“I think it’s interesting that the questioning of the photograph in its relation to the reality, the interrogation of representation, the famous crisis of representation, really all took place before digital technology. Digital technology … is not the villain here. It simply offers another dimension. I’m not sure if it’s a farther remove from reality than analogue. I think if we can speak of reality, if reality and representation can be spoken of in the same sentence, if reality even exists any more, digital is simply another way of encoding that reality.” – Lewis Baltz