It’s closing weekend in Jackson; winter turned suddenly to spring just two days ago and this funny project – which started on a whim as a curious experiment, and quickly got a little out of hand – is finally finished. Hope you enjoy:
Music:
Thomas Newman – Any Other Name
Pink Floyd – Time (Pretty Lights Remix)
More on my influences for the video here.
Yes, the Crags are my favorite spot to shoot. Hands down, no question. Nice ski patrollers shoot and throw a whole bunch of explosives in all the right spots, just so I can go out and have the best ski times of my life. And afterwards, when it goes sunny and blue? All the stashes are still fatty fat and ready to go. Here’s to many, many more sessions in the Crags, Wyoming USA.
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Skier: AJ Puccia.
Evidence suggests that Abbie Miller’s new piece Man-Made, currently on display at the Factory:
1). Controls the weather.
2). May have the power to stop a 2012 cataclysm.
3). Also affects whale migration, the tides, and rarely-witnessed shark mating rituals.
Seriously though, it’s made of vinyl and one 200 foot long zipper and it’s, well, amazing. Come see for yourself. Please, no pacemakers, cats, metal objects, or bottles containing fluids over 2 oz.
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Woke up to 12″ of new snow and clear skies all morning – here are two shots from one of the best ski days in recent memory…
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Canon announced a whole slew of new products earlier this week, among them a really, really sweet L-series fisheye and an update to the near-perfect 300mm f/2.8L telephoto.
The new EF 8–15mm f/4L USM fisheye lens is pretty revolutionary in that it’s a zoom fisheye. Canon has never offered a 
lens like Nikon’s 10.5mm fisheye that gives 180 degree corner to corner coverage on a crop sensor. I shoot two bodies these days, a Canon 7D for action, and a Canon 5D mkII for almost everything else. The 7D uses an APS-C size sensor, which is smaller than the 5DmkII’s full-frame sensor. With lenses designed originally for 35mm film (the size of a full-frame sensor), these APS-C cameras crop and effectively magnify the image by a factor of 1.6. So unless the lens is specifically designed for the smaller sensor, this makes your wide angle lenses less wide, and telephotos, well, more telephoto. In the case of the ultra-wide, distorted fisheye, you end up with a minimal fisheye effect. It’s just sort of a semi-distorted, kinda wide angle, uhhh, weird mess. Not so any more.
Now, with the new zoom feature, everyone can use just one lens for fisheyed goodness regardless of what camera body they shoot. I bought the 7D and 5DmkII combo specifically to avoid having to commit to the bulk of the 1D series bodies. The 7D, for outdoor action photography, is arguably as good as the mkIV, and combined with the f/4L lenses, much, much lighter in a pack full of backcountry ski gear. For everything else, including action shoots with off-camera lighting, the 5D mkII is just stunning and I don’t think there’s any competition until you start talking Leica or digital medium format. I’ve resisted buying the Canon fisheye, but now I’ll have to reconsider. It’s a specific look that should NOT be overused, but it has its usefulness and can create some really fun results.
I also mentioned the EF 300mm f/2.8L IS II USM earlier – it’s a mid-range tele prime that’s insanely sharp, and it manages to stay sharp wide open at f/2.8 AND at the corners, with really no vignetting. It’s a thing of beauty, and the new one is lighter, has new coatings, new image stabilization and focusing functions, and should be even better than the previous version, if that’s really even possible. It also plays very nicely with the 1.4x and 2x tele extenders for brightly-lit ski and wildlife photography, giving you a ridiculous range of options:
-300mm with 5D mkII
-420mm with 5D mkII + 1.4x
-480mm with 7D + 300mm
-600mm with 5D mkII + 2x
-672mm with 7D + 300mm + 1.4x
-960mm with 7D + 300mm + 2x
The extenders scrub some speed and sharpness, but lo and behold, Canon has also announced updated EF 1.4x III and EF 2x III Extenders too. So now for a cool $7000+, a paltry sum compared with the really big Canon tele lenses, you too can get razor-sharp shots of the nose hairs of that mountain lion as it’s bounding in your general direction. AND you can shoot it hand-held without a massive tripod and dedicated tripod head so you can run like hell afterward. Thank you Canon, it’s all about survival out there…!
I’ve decided to start an ongoing series of single photo posts of scenes of everyday life in the United States. I’m not planning on much interpretation and I don’t intend for the photos to carry any sort of social/political commentary, irony, or message of any kind. They’re just what’s out there. So here’s the first shot, from the opening ceremony of the Figure 8 races at this year’s Teton County Fair:
With some free time on my hands, I came back to Jackson after the Grand Canyon on something of a spontaneous whim, with one plan in mind – to climb Grand Teton. It would’ve happened last summer, if not for my busted shoulder, but that injury kept me from climbing (and living) regularly until this spring.
The Grand is a mountaineering icon – though the summit at 13,770′ isn’t particularly high in the world of tall mountains, the peak’s complex, convoluted structure and huge variety of routes make it quite an adventure. Oh, and it’s kind of visible from the valley. As with many big mountains, the stories and personalities of the those who pioneered the routes to and from the top are equally compelling – Glenn Exum leaping across the abyss at the top of Wall Street (in football cleats) to the ridge that now bears his name, Bill Briggs’ 1971 ski descent that marked an important moment in the birth of ski mountaineering outside of Europe…
My limited window for the climb meant that we’d have to do it in a single day – about 14-15 miles round trip, and over 7,000 vertical feet, straight up, from the valley floor to the summit. A good friend, former co-worker, Exum guide, and crazy man Zahan Billimoria agreed to take me up if he had a spare day when he wasn’t guiding, so when he called me on Sunday night, telling me to get my gear together, I was pretty excited (understatement). We left the Lupine Meadows trail head (6,740 ft.) at about 4:30 am, climbing the trail in the dark until sunrise in Garnet Canyon (9,100 ft.) lit the high peaks with incredible, fiery morning light. Garnet Meadows is stunning spot, with Garnet Creek raging down the canyon through massive boulder fields, Middle Teton forebodingly looming overhead, 3,700 feet above, and the summit of the Grand another thousand feet above that – towering so much higher that your perspective blocks the summit from view behind the lower ridges and pinnacles. We reached the Lower Saddle (11,600 ft.) between the Middle and Grand around 8 am, refueling and gearing up for the climb. After that, it was straight up a climber’s trail towards the Upper Saddle, every step gaining ground on the summit. We made a right turn and scrambled up Wall Street, the end of which is home to the famous, aformentioned move over several thousand feet of exposure, where the only rule is that you must look down, to gain the boulder ledge at the beginning of the Upper Exum Ridge. In-cre-di-ble. From there, the climbing was fun and grippy with unbelievable views, up pitches known as the Golden Stair, Wind Tunnel, Friction Pitch, and V pitch. Z put me through a harder little bouldering move near the summit that I thought was going to be the end of me, but I made it though just fine and it was an easy scramble up a knife-edged arete to the summit at 13,770 ft. from there. We left the summit around noon, downclimbed a bit to the rappel station, made the 120 ft. free-hanging rappel to the Upper Saddle, and on down, down, down back to the Lower Saddle by about 2:15 pm.
We rested and lounged in the sun at the Lower Saddle for a bit, and then made the long descent back to Lupine Meadows. At 5:30 pm, thirteen hours, many miles and thousands of feet after we started, I was in the car driving back home. I couldn’t help but look back up at where we’d been, with a deep sense of satisfaction and something of a new perspective. The day was an epic of epics, an adventure of a lifetime, a milestone surpassed, and I can’t wait to do it again.
Here are some shots (all from my Canon G9 point and shoot), and below, a quote from Everest luminary George Mallory about his own adventures in the mountains:
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‘The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, “What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?” and my answer must at once be, “It is no use.” There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever… We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It’s no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.’
George Leigh Mallory, 1922
Decided midway through the Grand Canyon stay that I really wanted to see more of the AZ/UT desert, especially Monument Valley and the Moab/Arches area, so I figured what the hell, why not make a stop back home in Jackson for a few days too before heading back to California. Both Monument Valley and Arches were super crowded with summer tourists, so I only camped one night in Monument Valley and made the big drive through Moab to Jackson the next day. Tons to see and even more that I just blazed past – I’m definitely planning on spending more time around these parts in the future. Here are a few photos from along the way:
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I’m kinda struggling to find the right words to describe my past week and a half here at the Grand Canyon, so I’ll probably leave this pretty short and just add some photos. The Grand Canyon is incredible, which I’ve already written a little about in a previous post, so I don’t really need to go down that road again. The more time I spend in this part of the country, the more I’m loving the desert landscape. The most that any of us see of the desert is at 80 mph from an air-conditioned car, windows up on the highway, missing everything.
But actually exploring desert America is a wild experience. It was 115˚F in Needles, CA, so hot that one sweats profusely just sitting still, though not nearly as hot as it could (and does) get. So far I’ve passed two surreal aircraft graveyards and several cryptic US government signs adorning barbed wire fences, warning dire consequences for trespassing. In Marana, AZ, I found an abandoned LGM-25C Titan II missile silo, a relic of the cold war and 1960s nuclear arms race. In Yucca, AZ, the highway frontage road, once Route 66, is now home to abandoned buildings from a once-thriving 1950s community, doomed by the construction of I-40 in the 1970s. The Arizona monsoon, active most of the summer, has made for incredible afternoon thunderstorms and evening sunsets. The desert is deeply mysterious, unrelenting, unforgiving, fickle, and stunningly beautiful. Just like bacon. What isn’t there to love?
A few photos from the past week or so:
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I’d also like to recommend a book about the desert – one of those books, in the spirit of Catch-22, that I’m very proud of, even though I contributed nothing to its creation, nor do I even own it. It’s Desert America: Territory of Paradox, and it’s great. Who wants to buy me a copy?
