Boulders

Twenty thousand years ago, the place where I grew up was covered in a thick sheet of ice. The massive cloak that covered almost the entire surface area that is now Canada gouged and scoured the granodiorite mountains of the Coast Range Batholith and carried chunks of rock over what is now the Fraser Valley. When the ice melted and retreated, these rocks – ranging in size from small stones to boulders as big as living room furniture – were deposited wherever they fell from the icy clutches. The largest of these is the famous white rock of White Rock Beach. The boulder is three metres high or so and perhaps four metres in girth. Originally a natural granite white with flecks of black feldspar, the rock was spray painted with graffiti in the fifties and subsequently painted white, and since then a battle between the vandals and the white washers has continued long enough that the once glorious and awesome testament to the ice age has now received so many coats of paint that its roughness has become smooth and it is nearly impossible to climb.

I grew up on an acre of land that was home to a few comfortably sizable boulders. Most memorable for me was a decent sized rock that sat off to one side of the garden that followed the edge of our land. Big enough to seat two children, my friend and I thought we had seen a snake slither under it and we proud serpent hunters found that by rocking this great stone we could get it to move in its bed. The stone at last rolled over the lip of its shallow nest and began rolling down slope with little me standing right in front. Somehow I ended up bouncing on top of the rock rather than flattened under it. After a metre’s tumble, it struck a log that my father had placed at the border of garden and lawn and I was thrown onto the grass. I recall being quick to get to my feet and look back at my aggressor, ready to fly from the path of danger, and then seeing that the rolling stone had been stilled, the end of the log now five centimetres lower than its adjoining neighbour’s.

The boulders were also in the woodlots where we played and surely we stood on top of them and called out, “I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” In later years I recall setting up and empty wine bottle on one boulder and stood by with my camera waiting for the moment of shattering as a friend hurled stones at the glass.

The boulders were so common that many yards on our street had in their lawns an island of garden space surrounding a boulder and that any land that was dug up for development produced many large rocks and a couple of boulders as well. It never occurred to me that there was anything else other than woodlots and yards with giant granite eggs until I learned about my area’s ice age history. Even then, the boulders only became more special.

Fast forward to the Christmas/New Year’s holidays of 2011-12 and find me back at home, three years after my last visit when there was an unusual heaping of snow. With two small children, my plans did not go far beyond meeting up with friends and enjoying time with my parents and sister. But a couple of mornings had me up and out, enjoying a walk around the neighbourhood. And as I came to an undeveloped lot I found nestled in the forlorn blades of grass, browned bracken and defiant blackberry bushes two large boulders – one of granodiorite and the other of a rock I couldn’t identify but guessed was likely the basement rock that existed prior to the igneous intrusion that produced what we now see as the North Shore Mountains.

In the three years that I was away I had developed a renewed love for the landscapes of my homeland and I wrote an essay about alpine glaciers for the Society for Scientific Photography in Japan and produced my book of southwestern British Columbia, This Little Corner. I was ever so glad to see the alder trees and western yellow cedar from the taxi window as we drove from the airport through a misty drizzle past the bleak and dark-looking landscape. I was inspired to shoot scenes in a local park and around that undeveloped lot with my iPhone. And the occasional views of the mountains when the rain abated showed clearly where enormous tongues of ice had licked away U-shaped valleys in between the mountains. It was good to be home, but more than all that, those two boulders said something to me. As I walked through a wooded park with a pond and spied a few more boulders it struck me more than ever before how special it was to be living where the ice age had left clear footprints behind. Somehow those huge rocks, which likely made little impression on all other passers-by, told me I was back home in the landscape where I had been raised. In Japan where I now live, boulders of metamorphic rock with beautiful convoluted striations are extracted with great expense from the ravines in the mountains and good money is paid to have them adorn gardens. Agricultural land in the flood plains produces no ice age remnants, and the only glacial erratics to be found in Japan are high in the Japanese Alps. It is a hollow and sad feeling to realize that I really am so far from home.

Perhaps there are many reasons behind this revelation. I always defended my desire to stay in Japan because there were always, “things I had yet to do.” But with two small children there is little time and less money to do those things. Perhaps it was the illusionary sense of freedom that comes with being on holiday but somehow I felt that being back home again wouldn’t be such a bad thing and that if there were only a gainful employment opportunity for me I would seriously consider returning. My friend showed me photos of his hikes in the local mountains and I felt them to be more accessible than ever before. Could I go back? Realistically, it will not happen. Too much is already in motion that is carrying me towards a different future.

But there was something that those boulders were saying to me. I cannot forget the boulders…

Not a boulder photograph but shot in the undeveloped lot near the two boulders mentioned in the text. iPhone 4s and edited in Dynamic Light and ProHDR

Also in the same lot and made with my iPhone 4s and edited in Dynamic Light and ProHDR.

The Year in Review

Every January I make an ambitious list of projects and plans for the year and every summer I fall way behind. By October I am usually shortening the list, cutting it down to what I think I can possibly manage and almost every year I still don’t finish. There are some things that have remained on my lists for three or four years now. This year, however, was not as bad, partially because I didn’t plan to get so much done this year. For my own reference, I think it’s a good idea to weigh the year and see how I faired.

 

Published work

December 15^th saw the January issue of “Yama-to-Keikoku,” a Japanese mountaineering magazine, hit the newsstands. Inside was their annual “Mountaineer’s Data Book,” a compendium of information about mountaineering shops, lodges and huts and so on. At the front of the book are six pages featuring four of my photographs of the Japan Alps. It was by their request that my photos appeared, so this was a grand thing for me.

Also this year, the September issue of “Gakujin,” another mountaineering magazine, featured my story of the March 11 earthquake and why I remained in Japan after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Several photographs from my book “The Japan Alps” were printed, as well as three photographs of me.

No other works were published this year. My stock agency didn’t get any of my stuff published and I did not renew my Field Contributor subscription with “Nature Photographer,” so for the first time in six years I didn’t have anything published there either. “Outdoor Photography Canada,” who has expressed interest in my work and ideas on and off have still no concrete plans for me and it seems that after three years some of my stuff might be returned at last in the New Year. Any other submissions were also returned this year or have not generated any immediate response.

Mountains climbed

Prior to becoming a mountaineer it was not unusual for me to go on only three or four hikes in a year but still keep active photographing. This year must be my poorest year ever with respect to hiking and outdoor photography. I climbed Ryogamisan in May for the second time simply because I enjoyed the short climb and there were some good places to shoot folded chert by a stream. And I did the Tateshinayama / Futago Ike loop in October, which was also mostly about the exercise and enjoying the outdoors. The only other photography I did this year was at a student’s mother’s garden. I plan to submit the photos to a gardening magazine in January.

One thing I found was that shooting rarely distances me from my equipment and know-how. I felt I didn’t use my cameras as skilfully and professionally this year and the resulting images were mostly uninspired and even technically faulty. Were it not for the successful images I shot in the States in October of 2010 and many of the good garden photos I got this spring I would feel that I was losing my touch. I still kept busy shooting with my iPhone camera and playing with photo editing applications, but that’s another story.

Things lost and given up

As I mentioned, I did not renew my membership and subscription with ‘Nature Photographer.” Likewise, I didn’t renew my membership with the All Japan Alpine Photography Association or the Society for Scientific Photography. As a result, I gave up all possibility of being published either for pay (in Nature Photographer) or for prestige in the members’ magazines of the two photography associations.

There were also the stories of photographs being lost. Two submissions to a magazine in Tokyo both never arrived according to the editor and Outdoor Photography U.K. admitted that my submission of 2010 had been received but had then vanished without a trace. And Outdoor Japan stopped responding to my emails possibly because I continued to ask about the return of my photographs from 2009.

Book published

One of the exciting accomplishments of this year was the completion of my second major book project with blurb.com – my book of photographs from Southwestern British Columbia, “This Little Corner”. When I return home to Canada for the holidays, a good number of old friends will visit and purchase a copy. In addition, I plan to send a copy to the Vancouver Sun or Province newspaper for review. Here’s hoping that the book stirs up some attention.

Outlook for 2012

January will be busy as I try to translate interviews with foreigners in Japan who love climbing Japanese mountains. I pitched the idea to the editor of “Yama-to-Keikoku” and he expressed interest. I also have the garden photos to prepare. Then I have ideas for short articles in English and Japanese that I want to submit once I find a suitable publication for those ideas. And I still have some submission ideas that have been kicking around for a couple of years now that I would like to address.

I hope to start up with Nature Photographer and at least one photo association in Japan again, and I’d really like to start a plan where I go out even to some local park to shoot at least one roll a month so I can keep up my stock out put. I also have discovered that not shooting nearly desiccates my idea pool for articles. It would also be nice to climb at least three mountains.

With four blogs going and so little time, I really hope to set a schedule that allows me to get at least one post up for each one every month. Particularly my Mountains of Canada blog is being neglected.

The office is something else that needs serious attention. Over the last three years I have struggled to keep it organized and neat but it always quickly falls into shambles. There are so many slides that need to be returned to their boxes and folders and so many papers that need filing or tossing. What I need is a whole day to tidy up and a few days to sort out the slides. But I don’t expect to have that kind of time soon and I dislike to tackle a major project in a piecemeal fashion.

Finally, I have plans for another blurb book, this time geology as art and I have a great title and a handsome collection of photographs selected. Here’s hoping I have the money for the scans and to publish the book.

There’s so much more to say and think about, but it’s time to leave blogging alone for this year.

This Little Corner – A Photo Book

A Concept is Born

On many warm spring and summer days during my late teens, I sat outside on a lawn chair with a book of British Columbian or Canadian landscape photographs opened on my lap, my eyes taking their time to savour the natural beauty presented on each page. In the early mornings when I rode about the neighbourhood delivering newspapers, I made plans to visit various places in southern British Columbia and hoped to someday soon see a book come together of my photographs. The title would be This Little Corner.

As my photography skills grew and my subjects turned from the planned landscape views and geological wonders towards nature scenes and intimate landscapes, the idea for my first book changed into a book of nature photographs along the lines of Eliot Porter’s In Wildness is the Preservation of the World. Time went on and I had many ideas, but in the end I left Canada without any book being published.

Some 23 years after the book’s conception, I decided to revive the idea as I sat down in the autumn of 2010 and went over a list of ideas for my next photo book with blurb.com. There were many ideas: New Zealand’s South Island, mountains of the world, geologic art, the Canadian Prairies, autumn in the Canadian Maritimes, travel photographs from 12 countries… the list went on. Though any of those ideas would have been a pleasure to bring into reality, at the time I was becoming homesick for the mountains and nature of British Columbia and I decided that my next book would be my first book idea ever.

Scanning Nightmares

A rough selection of photographs was made and then they were organized into a rudimentary theme which in turn dictated how the photographs would be grouped and which ones would be culled or replaced. At last I brought the winners to the store for scanning. I requested the same Kodak scanning process as I had for the Japan Alps photographs. Two weeks later, I viewed the scans on my computer and was disturbed to find many foregrounds or backgrounds out of focus. Though many photographs were from my first years of photographing with slide film, I knew those images should not have been out of focus. I had been a stickler for employing hyper focal distance and even gave a brief lecture once at my local camera club about it. But when the vertical slides showed the same out of focus areas but this time across the foreground and background (i.e. along the side of the slide and not the bottom or top) it became apparent that the trouble was with the scanning and not my photography.

I brought the slides back and had them rescanned at no charge but once again most images were not sharp throughout. I also noticed that the colours of some images had changed, some for better others for worse. After a third try there were still so many images that were unusable that I gave up and put the project on hold. I later tried another camera store outfit’s service which did not scan at as high a resolution but the resulting scans came out sharp. Was this going to be good enough?

The Test Copy

The next big project was creating the map of Southwestern BC by tracing a printout of a map and then drawing in my own details – mountains, cities, etc. I scanned it at work and spent some time colouring it in on my computer. With the map ready and the text having been prepared in the early stages of the project, I was finally ready to upload the book and order a test copy.

I was both pleasantly surprised and dissatisfied with the result. The cover photo and text were not centred and in fact the cover image bleed around the edge to the inside cover. This was not how I had designed it. Also the dust jacket was not cut straight and fit poorly on the cover. But this I could chalk up as a single mistake because I had printed over 15 copies of the Japan Alps and had no such problems.

Inside the book, the Kodak scans came out either acceptably or with glaringly obvious focusing issues. The other scans, however, were surprisingly sharp and with good colour. In fact, they came out sharper than most of the images in the Japan Alps book. I decided that it would be best to check all the photographs and any that was of dubious or disastrous reproduction quality would get rescanned. I also scrutinized the text for spelling, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation errors. I found a couple of dozen small errors and fixed them up. The new scans replaced the failed images and once again the book was ready for uploading.

Now I am waiting to receive the fruits of all my labour and after a year the book project is finally completed.

This book is a collection of images I made from 1989 to 1999 and in 2005 in Southwestern British Columbia, Canada. The book is divided into five chapters: Journey, Valley, Shore, Mountain, and Beyond. Journey is mostly text documenting my journey from that first roll of slide film to leaving for Japan in 1999. Valley features photographs captured in and around the Fraser Valley, mostly nature and intimate landscapes. Shore is a smaller collection of sea shore scenes. Mountain is mountain landscapes and mountain nature captured in the local North Shore Mountains as well as in many of the big provincial parks in the area, particularly Garibaldi Provincial Park. Beyond takes a peek at some of the landscapes east of the Southwestern BC border, places where semi-arid environments create desert-like landscapes and a trip across the Coast Mountains leads to the rain shadow. The book is 120 pages and available in hard cover or soft cover and with standard paper or the higher quality lustre paper at blurb.com.

Tateshinayama, My 31st

Family life with two small kids can keep a man pretty busy. And yet I am only home with the kids late a night and on weekends. My wife envies me for being able to go to work and spend time on doing other things than just keeping up with housework and attending to the needs of an eight-month-old who has learned to crawl around and get in trouble and her 3-year-old brother who has entered a phase of throwing tantrums whenever his carefully parked Tomika cars are budged from their precise positions.

So, it is really difficult for me to ask my wife if she minds me taking a Sunday for a tramp in the mountains.

I have good reasons for going. Any outing is work-related. Photographing Japanese mountain and nature may eventually help to bring a little extra cash home, though so far it all goes to pay off the previous outings and photo-related expenses. I might capture something that could end up in a calendar or magazine through my stock agency. I might have something to submit to Yama-to-Keikoku’s calendars that could possibly be selected (though nothing of mine has been selected in the last three years). And this time there was a chance that NHK Niigata might have been there. Alas, as I expected, NHK were out of the picture, so to speak. Two weeks ago, the guy who contacted me originally sent me a message saying that his superiors felt they had sufficient footage from the local mountains of Niigata and didn’t need to shoot a foreigner photographing the leaves in Nagano. However, I had no intention of letting go of such a connection and I thought that even if the TV folks were not going to be there, I should still go and send a few digital snaps to my contact, just to keep the flame of interest alive. He is after all, a fellow mountaineer and “camera man”.

A working father’s schedule:

19:40 – Finish work, check weather and maps, and head home

21:20 – Arrive home. Take son to the shower, wash together. Look after daughter while wife bathes, then bring daughter to wife for bath. Brush son’s teeth and own; receive daughter from bath; dry her and begin dressing her until wife comes to take over.

23:00 – Family goes to bed. Daughter is wide awake. Son has nose issues and requests tissues which he then refuses to use.

00:00 – Everyone goes to sleep.

01:40 – Wake up and put bags in car. Drive in rain to Tateshina, Nagano with Judas Priest on the CD player. (Needed something loud and familiar to keep me awake and knowing the lyrics since elementary school means I can sing along, though singing along to Judas Priest is not easy. Good thing I drive alone!)

06:00 – Arrive at parking lot (rain has stopped). Sleep in car for 40 minutes. Eat breakfast.

07:10 – Begin hike.

It’s cloudy and a fog covers everything. It’s windy and the trees are sometimes shaken roughly and showers of raindrop collections fall on the muddy trail that is a chain of puddles more than a hiking trail. But it’s not raining and I am in a silent forest inhaling the fresh cool and damp air. It’s almost like home (west coast British Columbia). The trees are sporting yellows and orangey browns but the colours are lacking vibrancy. Still, it’s the most beautiful setting I have been in since May – the only other time this year I dared insist on going out on my own for a day. The trail takes an upward turn and large lava rocks – mostly worn smooth but also scratched by hiking stalks – mix with roots to provide steps up the mountainside. I am climbing Tateshinayama, a Hyakumeizan and my 31^st. Not that I am counting. Well, I am counting but only just to keep track. Today’s outing includes a Hyakumeizan but only as part of a circuit that will take me through forests, along crystal clear streams, and to some small lakes (large ponds) that have formed in the congested throats of long ago silenced volcanic craters. The main purpose is to shoot autumn scenery. And get some fresh air and exercise!

There are five other people on the trail and I pass them shortly after beginning the ascension part of the route. I am not racing up by any means and my pace seems plodding and sluggish. But at my pace I am comfortable and don’t require any rest except to take off my jacket as I am now sweating inside and more wet than I would be without it. The cloud cover persists until around 9:00 when a patch of blue opens for a minute or so. I am putting all my trust in the weather report hat called for rain until morning and clear skies later in the day. So far it looks like the forecast will come true.

At last the trees give way to a jumble of volcanic boulders and the summit is very near. At around ten o’clock I stand near the summit marker – 2,530 metres in elevation – with a blasting wind that attempts to knock me over and clouds furiously washing over the summit. Visibility is down to less than 50 metres and I can just barely see a raised rim of rock curving off to the right and a lower flat area, which suggest that this is indeed a crater summit of a volcano. A view opens up briefly to the northwest and I catch a glimpse of the valley below near Shirakaba Lake. More clearings come with increasing frequency. I walk along the crater rim to a concrete cylinder standing upright with a circular metal plaque identifying the mountains visible from the summit. The clouds part and I recognize a distant spire of rock as Yarigatake. The clouds are coming from the northwest but views below and to the southeast and east are nearly constant now. I can see Asamayama and Myogisan easily and soon Ryogamisan becomes distinct as well. Particularly interesting is to note that the base of Asamayama, where Karuizawa in located, is nearly as high in elevation as Myogisan. Basically, Myogi sits near the end of a volcanic plateau though independent of it. The plateau swoops down, drops, and Myogi rises up like a rotten stump. Then beyond, the cliffs drop hundreds of metres down and the slope of the ancient volcano of Myogi slides down to the even lower valley of the Toné River below. What one can perceive from the top of a mountain!

The wind remains cold but the summit is nearly clear by the time I head down the other side around 11:00. Not far below is a hut which is near a mountain road and many people are coming up in the warmth of the sun and quiet of the leeward side of the wind. Two families have small children with them wearing only sweatshirts. I warn them of the strong cold wind at the summit. Past the lodge I make my way through more forest and along the soggy trail. I begin descending but more than I think I should. Did I miss a turnoff? I am heading north. If I am where I think I am I should be heading east. I check the guidebook just as two people come climbing up. I ask where I am and they point out my location. Oh, foolish me. I somehow thought I had passed one hut too many. I am on the right track.

What a surprise to see the next hut right beside a road with a full parking lot and a tour bus! I could have driven up here! But that wouldn’t have been as rewarding. It’s 12:40. From here I figure I should reach the Twin Ponds (Futago Ike) by 1:30.

Looking at Tateshinayama from Futagoyama

I do the easy climb up Futagoyama and then descend into a larch forest. Orange needles fall gently like golden slivers of snow until a gust blows a wild swirl of needles through the air and lodges one in my mouth. And then through the trees I see the shimmer of sunlight on water. At last I reach the two small lakes (or big ponds). The water is beautifully clear though the shore is choked with larch needles and mountain ash leaves where the wind has blown them. It’s two o’clock when I sit down for lunch and then begin hastily trying to find compositions for my 4×5. Without looking at my watch I know instinctively when it’s time to pack up in a hurry. At three o’clock I have to hit the trail again. I have two hours before sunset and the route back promises to be as long according to the book. But I know I will want to stop for photos again.

I leave the open air of the lakes for a thick green mossy forest, then come to another small lake – Turtle Shell Pond. From here I climb up and then descend through more larch trees while having a view of Tateshinayama filling the valley ahead of me. Down in the valley the trail is seriously flooded. I have to walk with my legs apart in order to step on the dry ground below the bamboo grass. In some places, the larch needles make a flat mat, completely smooth, alerting me to a hidden puddle. A couple of times I splash in the water but my boots keep out most of the water. Leaving open valley and meadows for forest again the trail becomes dry. A stream that is so clear it looks like thick glass pools below mossy boulders and roots. Through the trees the light is becoming golden. The return hike goes smoothly and at one point I catch a glimpse of the higher peaks of Yatsugatake in the evening light. I also see a fox languidly stepping over boulders by the stream in a ravine below the trail.

It is just five o’clock when I reach the road and start the short walk back up to where I parked. At a pullout I enjoy a twilight view of the peaks of Yatsugatake, the Minami Alps, and the Chuo Alps. It has been sometime since I last set my eyes on those lofty peaks.

10:00 – Arrive at summit of Tateshinayama.

11:00 – Begin trek down the east side of the mountain.

13:40 – Reach Futago Ike and do some snapping with the digital and reconnoitering. Eat lunch and do some “serious” shooting.

15:00 – Begin heading back to car.

17:00 – Reach the road. And walk back to car. Change pants and footwear. Eat last of food.

18:00 – Start engine and begin drive back.

21:30 – Arrive back home in Saitama

22:00 – Take son to shower, wash together. Look after daughter while wife bathes, then bring daughter to wife for bath. Brush son’s teeth and own; receive daughter from bath; dry her and begin dressing her until wife comes out to take over.

23:00 – Family goes to bed.

Is This Where I Come In?

One of my favourite success stories was told to me many years ago over the phone by one of Canada’s most well-known photographers, Freeman Patterson. During the 1960s, Patterson was pursuing photography professionally and barely making ends meet. He had a photograph published in a Canadian magazine and that in turn attracted the attention of an American photo magazine that requested the use of the photo for a short feature on Canadian photographers. Said Mr. Patterson, “It was reproduced in black and white and the size of a postage stamp. I thought to myself, ‘Well, that’s a fine kettle of fish.’” What he didn’t know was that his tiny monochrome photograph caught the eye of Lorraine Monk, the editor-in-chief of the National Film Board of Canada’s centennial project, “Canada: A Year of the Land.” It was to be a monster coffee table book of Canadian landscape and nature photographs and Lorraine Monk wanted Freeman Patterson to be a part of it. She sent several copies of a letter to photo labs across the country asking the letter to be given to Freeman Patterson if he came to the lab. He did receive the letter and it requested him to send 100 slides for review for the project. This initial submission of images led to a request for more and an assignment shooting Prairie scenes for the book. The end result was that Mr. Patterson’s photographs filled nearly a third of the book even though dozens of photographers had participated. It wasn’t that his career skyrocketed after that, but it did give him a very big boost.

 

I always keep this story in mind when I have my work published somewhere. Each time I hold a magazine or calendar with my photographs inside, I hope the next time I check my email there will be requests for my skills. And that may have almost occurred at last. Not that I have been asked to participate in some extravagant expenditure of government funds for a national celebration of natural beauty. But there may be something afoot.

 

Last month my photographs and story about the 3/11 earthquake appeared in Gakujin magazine. Then about two weeks ago, I received a message from a cameraman working for NHK (Japan’s national broadcasting corporation) in Niigata. He complimented my photography and story and mentioned that he was looking for foreign thoughts and views of Japan after the nuclear power plant disaster. I replied asking how I might help him. A week later he sent another message to me asking if I had plans to go out and shoot autumn scenery in Japan and where I was thinking to go and if I was considering how the earthquake/power plant disaster might have affected the area I was planning to photograph. I replied again and this led to a few messages being exchanged before he finally said something to the effect of NHK planning to run a feature on Japanese autumn leaves and it might be possible that I might be part of the feature and they might go to where I was planning to photograph. He was discussing the idea with his superior and trying to see what they could put together. Whether this means an interview or filming me shooting on location or perhaps just a glimpse of me on the scene is not clear by his message. But somehow he is thinking to include me.

 

Well, it’s not the first time I have heard that I might be featured shooting. I once proposed an idea to an editor of a photo magazine I had met and he suggested sending a writer out to watch me shoot and to record and report on what I was doing. But the plug got pulled on the idea and in the end I gave an interview in a coffee shop. So, I can’t say I am putting much hope in anything coming out of this. But on the other hand it’s nice to know that a published article and photographs got the attention of someone who then wanted to do something further with me. Additionally, I was all but giving up on going out this autumn due to financial setbacks. But now instead of making excuses to stay home and let the cameras rest I might just have a reason to take them out for some fresh air and exercise.

On Other Pages

Just to mention where my photos and thoughts have been featured on other people’s pages, here are links to three sites.

The Campsite Blog

Writer and climber, Sean McIntyre wanted to help promote my book on the Japan Alps, so after unsuccessfully trying to get the interest of the Alpine Club of Canada’s journal editor he moved on to this site and posted his review.

Kaley in Japan

A young woman from Orlando now living in Japan, Kaley asked me to write about my favourite place in Japan to feature in a post on her blog.

Dark Roast Blend

Love the name of this site even though I only tolerate drinking hot coffee. A post about concretions (explained in the post) includes a photo of mine from the Moeraki Boulders of New Zealand. The author saw my photo on ArtWanted and requested permission to use it.

Here is my photograph:

Elephant bum? A detail of one of the unusual concretion boulders at Moeraki Beach on New Zealand's South Island. This photo also appeared in an issue of Nature Photographer.

The Bottleneck

On Saturday mornings I have a student who is a research scientist at a pharmaceutical company in Japan. I have known him for over three years now and I am familiar with his life and work. Over the years he has been moved up in the company and now has many responsibilities that keep him very occupied at work. Often he has to attend meetings, make reports on projects to the upper management, review his subordinates’ progress and take care of visitors such as other researchers or professors. There are receptions and business trips as well. Outside of work, my student pursues his role as a research scientist with equal energy and a great consumption of time. He attends seminars – sometimes as a specially invited guest – in the U.S. and Europe, writes and reviews papers for publication, writes and edits manuscripts, and even manages to get some research time in now and again. These past few weeks have kept him unusually hopping and he admitted to being “very tired” when last we spoke. He is single and it comes as no surprise. A man that dedicated to his passion and to achieving his goals has no time for romance, marriage and children.

Last week after our class I reflected upon my own situation. My work keeps me pretty busy too although it is more a matter of scheduling and class preparation and teaching than important meetings and large responsibilities. However, I do spend long days away from home, leaving before 9:00 in the morning and typically coming home after 10:30 at night. At home I usually have the kids to look after or some household chores to manage. My time is pretty full too. Sadly, it is not full of the pursuit of photography. Well, I often feel frustrated that I can’t spend the time I need to on preparing photos, writing articles or even blogs, organizing and filing photos, or searching for new places to find business. But that doesn’t mean I would trade my time with my family. It is very apparent though that to be that dedicated to one’s career dream or life work family gets squeezed out of the picture. My student said he envies people who can make the pursuit of their research their full-time work without having a job that occupies so much time. I could certainly relate. What if writing and photographing were my full-time job?

Once there was a time when I was single and free and I certainly could have applied myself more to becoming more professional. But there were always reasons and excuses – usually a sensible day job that took up time or a lack of money – that I let prevent me from achieving more. These days I certainly want to be writing more and preparing more ideas for photo submissions. I have lots of other things related to the business of photography to do, but I just don’t have much time for them these days. My personal time and free cash is very limited and with both in short supply there is little I can do to move along. When I re-visited Ryogamisan in May this year – my only outing and hike this year so far – I felt as though I was being squeezed through a bottle neck. I could hardly move with family occupying nearly all of my time away from work and money being virtually impossible to conjure up for photography. Yet from my bottomless pit of optimism I saw myself as passing through a bottleneck and believed I would be coming out the other side soon. I recall descending the mountain and feeling very positive about the things I felt I could do in order to keep doing photography.

But the fact is that many of those things cost money and take more time than I have and so progress is slow. When I found an old file on my computer called “Photography Projects” I opened it and found there were things I wrote down in 2009 that I should try to complete yet had still not completed. Sometimes I imagine having three days, then five days, and finally three weeks to catch up on all the things I want to do. That time, unfortunately, is just not available.

Even if I had sufficient time in a week to keep up, I would no doubt waste it anyway. I am easily distracted when I am busy and I can involve myself very seriously in other things that are not so pressing. At least I have avoided spending too much time on writing blogs lately!

So, one of the things that has given me a creative outlet over the last few months has been playing with applications on my iPhone and manipulating photographs. I enjoyed my results so much that I made a book on Blurb out of it.

I guess these days, I don’t have much enthusiasm for doing photo-related things in a serious business way because I can’t spend the time on it that I need and I hate starting and stopping projects all the time. I want to just be able to spend time on a project making good progress. I also think, however, that sometimes I do tend to waste time because of poor time management or sometimes simply due to my feeling that work and family have kept me too busy.

One of my iPhone application creations used in my book The Small Print

 

From my book The Small Print

 

Another iPhone app creation in my book The Small Print

Can you guess what this started out as?

Earthquake – My story in Gakujin magazine

Earlier this year, I submitted a portfolio of Rocky Mountain photographs and a short essay to Gakujin (岳人) magazine. After some time, they called me and said they liked the photographs and the captions and essay were all fine but could I send them a short essay about the March 11th earthquake and why I was still in Japan (did I love Japanese mountains so much that I wanted to stay and continue shooting them or something like that). They also asked for a few photos of Japanese mountains and a photograph of me.

I had a story already in mind because I tried to get a newspaper in my Canadian hometown interested in my experiences on the day of the quake and the following weeks. I quickly wrote out my ideas and asked my manager at work to check over my Japanese. I sent the essay along with some photos from the Japan Alps and three snaps my wife had taken of me in the mountains.

The magazine went on sale on the twelfth of August but I received a copy two days in advance. All the photos I sent were used – 6 mountain and nature images and all three of myself. My story was printed with no amendments as far as I could tell. I got four pages. The Rocky Mountain piece was not used.

The results were both pleasing and disappointing. It’s always good to see my work in print and that the story was printed as I sent it and the photos all used is encouraging. In the story, I concentrated on my experience as a foreigner in Japan with friends and family overseas pleading for me to leave with my wife and children. I also wrote about how difficult it would have been for us to leave with a mortgage and car loan, all our possessions and my job. I mean, we could leave but what about once we came back? It’s very easy, I wrote, for people in a safe place to tell me to pack my bags and flee. But what of the consequences after the initial possibility of danger has passed? I concluded the piece mentioning the decision my wife and I had made to raise our kids in Japan and about my book about the Japan Alps and how I want to promote it here. The story itself seems to be good enough and a few people have complimented me on what I wrote.

The disappointments are that the Rockies piece was not used and I am not totally satisfied with what I wrote about the earthquake. Of course, for the Rockies I sent my best collection of photographs and put my heart into the text. If they had not intended to use the photographs then I wish they had simply said so up front. Or perhaps they will use them in a later issue? As for my earthquake story I found the word limit restricting and I feel the part about Japanese mountains was just tacked on a the end. I also just titled my piece “Earthquake” (地震), thinking that they had some idea in mind. In the end, the earthquake title was used with the subtitle “The Canadian Photographer Who Is Smitten by Japanese Alpine Beauty”. The photographs show this. The text is more about the earthquake. Somehow I felt the earthquake title doesn’t work well with the mountain photographs. But if the editor was satisfied with that (I did submit the requested material eight days prior to the deadline) then I guess that’s what he wanted for the magazine.

Overall, I can’t complain. I told my story, mentioned my book, and got my photographs published yet again.

My story in Japanese has been posted here.

The Year of the Vanishing Photographs

This is most frustrating. I just spoke with the editor of Foto Life (フォトライフ) magazine in Japan about two submissions I sent to them, one in November of 2009 and one last year in September. The editor said he didn’t receive either of them and as I am a foreigner he said he would certainly remember receiving any submissions from me (submissions from foreigners don’t happen there). He didn’t even say that he would look into where the photos might have ended up. He just said that he didn’t receive them and if anything comes up he would let me know. Put that together with Outdoor Japan still not having returned the photos they requested from me back in the fall of 2009 and the missing submission to Outdoor Photography in the U.K. and we are looking at some serious problems.

I first began submitting photos to magazines back in 1993 and in all the years since I never had any problems with having photos returned to me. I knew there was a risk that photos might get lost but it never happened. Now suddenly three different companies aren’t returning my stuff. One simply won’t reply to my requests, one admits that they have only a record of receiving my submissions but nothing after that, and now this company says they never even received either submission, though they agreed I had the correct address. I admit I took a chance by sending things by post and not by courier but still what are the chances of four submissions all disappearing within a year or so?

Now the result of a call to another magazine is that they have no record of receiving my submission, though the person in charge is away until Thursday and in this case I sent the submission by courier and I have the way bill. I truly hope that my photographs start turning up. This is definitely a reason to submit scans and not originals, though most of my originals have backups in case of loss.

I will wait and see but I am not getting my hopes up. I have lost faith in submitting original material. Whether it’s the postal system or the staff at the publishers, there’s a problem out there.

Why Keep Trying?

Since before the birth of my daughter in January, the time and financial resources available for photography – going out to photograph and preparing articles and submissions – has been limited more and more. I felt as though my photographic pursuits were being squeezed through an hourglass: the freedom of time and money being nudged into an ever narrowing space with the hope that someday… someday things would loosen up again.

In some ways I felt like simply laying low for a couple of years. I let my photo association memberships go into hiatus for the next year and I haven’t renewed any subscriptions for magazines or ever a pro account with Flickr. Though I have projects on the go and a list to pursue, the restricted time for working on them (basically between 7 and 8 in the morning) has been frustrating and uninspiring. I honestly feel like just doing whatever I feel like, even if it’s just typing blog posts or preparing uploads for Flickr, and working on the business stuff when the mood strikes. But there’s the reality of a large deficit in my account that has to be made up. My wife will not look kindly upon me if next year my son’s kindergarten tuition is insufficient. So I must work in order to fill up that hole.

And then there is a sudden spark of encouragement. Today Gakujin magazine called and left a message saying they’d like to run my submission in their August issue. I’ll speak to them tomorrow but for now the news has reminded me that it is worth it to keep trying. Though the efforts rarely pay out soon (this is the third magazine to receive this submission after two previous rejections) the call that announces a turn in my fortune often comes when it is least expected and when it is most welcome.