close your eyes and hope for the best

Fog Horse (click image to enlarge)

this anti-cold weather, people photographer would have blown right by this scene faster than George W. Bush walking out of an Al Gore directed film.

My good friend William Anderson had recently introduced me to the work of San Francisco based photographer Michael Kenna. William had a black and white framed print of Kenna’s in his office, and I was intrigued by both the complexity and simplicity of it, the screaming metaphors of the unknown, of mystery, and in this time of bigger is grander ‘tableau’ era - the powerfully small size of it. I wanted to know more.

Anyway, fast-forward about 3 months. I’m sitting in an Earl’s restaurant on the west side of Edmonton, enjoying a ceasar salad, and between whistles of the hockey game on tv…reading an article on Kenna I had managed to track down.

Read the rest of this entry »

Montreal Olympic Stadium (click image to enlarge)

It remains, however, one of the most audacious and extraordinary building projects ever attempted… As a point of comparison, most of the blocks that the Pyramids of Giza are built from weigh just a few tons, with only some of the very largest, at 150 tons, in the same range; but they’re not suspended in mid-air!

The Olympics are coming to my city! Truthfully, I’m less excited than I was the first time that happened. There’s the commercialism, the consequent drug scandals, the acrimonious arguments about misplaced economic priorities. In Vancouver itself, protests over highway upgrades for the 2010 event have led to draconian legal measures against distinguished senior citizens, including the probable death of one elder from illness exacerbated by her jail sentence.

But in 1976 I lived in Montreal, and the noble ideals of the Games, that be-the-best-that-you-can-be philosophy were highly inspiring in my faster and stronger days.

Read the rest of this entry »

Women on bench. Mani Greece (click image to enlarge)

Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak had not yet been invented, but I might as well have been wearing one. It was as if I could wander into homes, or move close in on someone by the roadside, with none aware of my presence.

I don’t speak Greek, I explained.

“Why not?” The person whom I had gone to see at the Greek National Tourist Organization in Athens was incredulous. Both my first and my last names, as written and as pronounced, have more than once been misconstrued as Greek. In defence, I avowed that I was indeed fluent in the language of my parents: Latvian. Not very useful in southern Europe.

I needed his help. I was on assignment for Equinox (which unfortunately no longer exists; it was a great magazine to work for). Their photo layouts always emphasized people, and the story I had to illustrate concerned the remotest portion of the middle of the three long peninsulas of Greece that fork far into the Mediterranean. Mani, as this rugged, isolated place is known, ends in the cape that is the southernmost point of mainland Europe, but its history is even more extreme than its wild geography.

Read the rest of this entry »

Black-tipped Reef Shark. Long Island Bahamas. (click image to enlarge)

We fear the unknown and bring down cages where we become the caged animal. Over time we have learned that there is little to fear. We really don’t need those cages.

The Ankle Biter
Sometimes, if we had dived one location too many times in a row, towards the end of a dive the sharks would become satiated or uninterested in the bait bucket. I remember one dive in particular when the cinematographers, John and Adam, had dumped some of the chopped up fish on the reef to get the sharks to come in closer. After a short time John and Adam moved a few feet away to get a slightly different shot.

I had already finished my roll or two of film. Armed with my trusty stainless steel pole I was keeping an eye on the action while floating a few inches above the coral. For some unknown reason one of the smaller sharks kept swimming aggressively towards my ankles. It was very persistent.

John’s words rang through my mind, “If a shark is giving you trouble you just give it a good stiff poke with that steel rod”. (See part I).
Read the rest of this entry »

Black-tipped Reef Shark. Long Island Bahamas. (click image to enlarge)

One by one, a parade of Atlantic Black-tipped Reef Sharks glided by. They were elegant. Perfect in every way.

It was a dream job. I was an underwater stills photographer on a made for television underwater documentary series. The primary function of my job was to photograph the crew while they were filming wildlife, or shipwrecks, or whatever else they happened to be shooting. We spent months at a time on locations in Florida, various locales in the Caribbean and throughout the Great Lakes. My first shark dive is one of those life moments that remain crystal clear in memory.

When filming or photographing sharks in the wild, most of the time the sharks are baited in. For most species of sharks the divers do not require shark cages but rather stay in the open, preferably very close to the bait.

Read the rest of this entry »