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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The cold waters of the Pacific around San Francisco – more specifically the Farallon Islands – are among the best habitats in the world for great white sharks. Unfortunately this isn’t a post about sharks, though I did search for shark diving outfitters this weekend and henceforth will be actively scheming up ways to make that happen. After spending a morning filling my head with visions of 18 ft. monster great whites chasing cute little seals through the kelp forests for breakfast, I decided to head to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for a dose of undersea awesome. Apparently every family living between Vancouver and Tijuana felt the same urge; the triple threat of shooting handheld in super low light, three to thirteen-inch plexiglass between camera and sea creature, and hundreds (if not millions) of screaming, whooping children (myself included) made for challenging photo conditions. Midway through the afternoon I had to retreat to the solace of the cafe for a cheeseburger and a calming beer, then back into the teeming fray for more. Some images:
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Aquariums have always captivated my imagination, and Monterey Bay is no exception. It’s as close to being a part of the ocean as an aquarium can get – Wikipedia says they pump “2000 gallons per minute of Monterey Bay ocean water, night and day, through the 100+ exhibit tanks. During the day the water is filtered for viewing clarity. During the night, raw (unfiltered) seawater is pumped through exhibits, bringing in food in the form of plankton. Waste ocean water from the aquarium is returned to the Bay. This design makes the aquarium ecologically essentially part of the ocean in the Bay, and allows the culture of organisms such as Giant Kelp which are not suitable for ordinary saltwater aquariums.” Monterey Bay is also the first aquarium in the world to successfully keep great whites; the Outer Bay exhibit regularly hosts young white sharks, and though Outer Bay was closed this time, I WILL be back next time a baby Jaws comes to stay.
edit: now featuring jellyfish video:
jellyfish from tristan greszko on Vimeo.
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:
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?
I just got back from nearly a week in Yosemite National Park – four days working for Canon’s Photography in the Parks Workshops, and two days of running around on my own. Yosemite has been a focal point for environmental conservation and protection for almost 150 years, and it’s easy to see why. Yosemite is, in a word, spectacular.
John Muir, the famous 19th century environmental advocate and founder of the Sierra Club, said of Yosemite “It is by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.” Ansel Adams, seeing Yosemite for the first time at 14, wrote “the splendor of Yosemite burst upon us and it was glorious… One wonder after another descended upon us… There was light everywhere… A new era began for me.” Indeed, Adams would go on to marry into a Yosemite family and business (the gallery is still in operation today) and make some of his most famous photographs while living in the Yosemite Valley for some 30 years.
So just a bit about the Canon program – if you’re in the Grand Canyon, Jackson Hole, Yellowstone, or Acadia at any point this summer, be sure to check it out. They let you try out Canon camera bodies and lenses and give a bit of instruction, all for free, and run a photo contest for images taken in the National Parks. It was my first foray into teaching people about photography and how to use their cameras better, and I got to use some funny lenses that I probably wouldn’t otherwise own (17mm tilt-shift and 100mm macro). The link above has a whole lot more info.
Anyway, enough of that, here are a few photos:
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I also made the hike to Half Dome one morning, and it ranks up there with a few trails – Angel’s Landing in Zion, South Kaibab in the Grand Canyon, and a handful of hikes in the Tetons and Yellowstone – as an all-time epic. It’s 7-8 miles and nearly 5,000 vertical feet from the Happy Isles trailhead to the summit. The trail passes two massive raging waterfalls (317 ft Vernal Fall and 594 ft Nevada Fall) on the steep, wet Mist Trail, traverses up and around the back side near Little Yosemite Valley, and then makes a final, precipitously exposed ascent up Half Dome with the help of cables installed by the NPS. All of these are from my Canon G9 point and shoot, and I rarely convert images to black and white, but I think these turned out quite nice:
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I also made the hike to the top of Yosemite Falls, which is the largest waterfall in the US at 2,425 feet, but I’ll save writing about that for another time. Thanks Yosemite, I’ll be back soon.
I’ve been in San Francisco for almost two weeks now and I just finally found a chance to get out and see what I could find. It ended up being a great night for a few hours of exploring this incredible city. Photos are from Corona Heights Park, Buena Vista Park, Land’s End and Marin Headlands. Hello, California, it’s going to be fun.
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Here’s a nice comparison showing how different kinds of light can affect a photograph.
I was shooting two winters back with a whole bunch of lights in the Jackson back/sidecountry with snowboarder Don Watkins and skier Andrew Whiteford, and Andrew happened to catch a shot of Don coming off a cliff at nearly the exact same moment that I pressed my shutter. Andrew’s shot captured the scene with the ambient, available light, and my camera captured the scene with the help of three off-camera flashes. Here are the results:
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That’s me in the foreground of the first shot, camera in hand. It was still pretty bright out at that point, but I was hoping to knock down the ambient light and make it the scene look much darker than it actually was. Photography is about light, but it’s more about relative amounts of light. My strobes are a bit brighter than the ambient daylight, so with the right camera settings, they can make it look dark out. Makes sense, right? It took me quite a while to wrap my head around proper flash exposure and how it differs from ambient light photography…
Just a few tech notes – you can’t see any of the lights in the first shot, but the main light is on the right, an Elinchrom Ranger probably at full power. There’s another Ranger up the hill to the left, probably 3/4ish power, and there’s a Sunpak 622 up behind the cliff as a rim light, not sure if that was half or full power. All triggered, of course, by Pocket Wizards. Manual exposure, 1/200 sec, f/13, ISO 100 on a Nikon D300.