The Burning Sand Blog

Hangin' in Whistler

by Martin Nichols

Whistler...ya gotta love it. And if you go there you gotta visit the funkiest place in town to eat. Great food, great selection, eco-friendly, great people working there, and it won't cost you an arm and a leg (a real bonus...don't get me wrong, I love Whistler but holy cow can it do a number on the old net worth). I'm talking about the brilliantly named Gone Village Eatery and Moguls Coffee Shop right in the main Village Square.

Best of all, they agreed to hang a whole bunch of my work there for the month of May (huge thanks to the tireless Jules for setting this up with Lauren, the owner). Of course, she did manage to find the only restaurant in Whistler with three rooms, necessitating another round of print production and framing (sorry about the hairy deadline, Les) and working out how to get all 25 pieces up there in one Jeep (thank you Rita for the weekend Jeep swap: 4-door for 2, did the trick).

OK, so it's Whistler...mountain country, snow, skiing, boarding and all that. Thing is, I've never done any serious shooting up there so the cunning plan was to call it the "Un-Whistler Show" and give people a break from snow pictures. How well it goes down of course only time will tell, but for the record we filled one room with landscapes of the Sunshine Coast, one with the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and one with people.

One thing I'm not is a food critic, so I won't go into the ins and outs of the cuisine, although the breakfast burrito was effing fantastic...I'll just say that it's my kinda place. And it's obviously many people's kind of place as it was busy from the moment it opened on Sunday. We know because we were there well before it opened at something like 0530 to get started hanging pictures. And if the variety of people we met while there for just those few hours is anything to go by then the only word for the clientele is eclectic; the only adjective that couldn't be ascribed to anyone in there was boring.

Visitors from everywhere flock to Whistler year-round and there was no shortage of engaging characters taking advantage of what was on offer, but maybe the best evidence that Moguls/Gone is the real thing is that the locals go there...say no more.

Anyway, many thanks to owner Lauren and the incredible Ami and Kate for all their help, and of course to Jules for not leaving me to hang on my own.

Whistler...ya gotta love it.

Sarah Loverock. Seriously...

 

by Martin Nichols

OK, a pictures of a beautiful woman holding a guitar is nothing new; it's hardly groundbreaking and has been done a million times before, but what you see above is nonetheless a record of an extremely rare event. Any guesses? No? Well, what you're looking at is one of the brief and infrequent moments in time when our fabulous subject Sarah Loverock is not actually laughing. And even here you couldn't really say she was being serious, with that La Gioconda-esque (is that allowed?) smile playing around her lips. But it's all we've got.

This had to be the funniest shoot we've ever done at the Burning Sand studio. Sarah (of Canadian Idol fame) had brought along her great friend Danielle to help with the session, a decision which that day gave me a whole new perspective on the word "assistance," as it apparently means "to join forces with photographer's wife to provoke uncontrollable laughter in subject until impairment of balance is achieved." As if the Pinot Grigio wasn't doing its job already.

It was one of those "just go with the flow" sessions, and it was when she began to sing that it all came chaotically alive. I mean, what a voice, and to hear it resounding off the concrete walls around us made it all the more intense. Sarah's an incredible singer, with a vocal ability matched only by a fascinating and consistent inability to follow complex instructions, like "stay between those two bits of duct tape on the floor." Versatile? She sang along to everything from Justin Timberlake (whose music I confess to being unfamiliar with) to the Red Hot Chili Peppers (much to the glee of both Chris and myself). Nothing like a bit of Blood Sugar Sex Magik to enliven any photoshoot I always say.

 

I absolutely love the one of her licking her guitar (OK, Sarah, now just lightly kiss the guitar... well, how about I lick it instead... no, just lightly kiss it... here, look, like this... OK, whatever...), and just had a 30" x 40" print made; if I need a laugh, just one glance at it is all it takes.

If you want to hear some of Sarah's singing (and you should), go to her MySpace page and have a listen. This is my favourite, what a great song.

Many thanks to the Jules, Danielle, and Chris for joining in the fun. Love ya, SL. What can I say...can't stop you laughing and can't stop you singing...but why would anyone want to?

Gimme Shelter

by Martin Nichols

It's been a few years since I was at Green Point, a vegetation-covered rock bluff that separates Combers Beach from Long Beach in the Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island's West Coast; used to come camping here a lot when the kids were young. At this time of year the campground above is closed, so no access to Green Point itself through there; I got there by parking two or three kilometres further down the coast and walking northwest back along the spectacular sweep of Combers Beach. Of course, an hour before sunrise (below) on December 29 it's not very warm, and the only parts of the beach that weren't frosty were the sheets of actual ice.

Anyway, no harm done, and within about twenty minutes or so Green Point was clearly in sight. It was all just as I remembered except for one thing: there appeared to be some sort of structure near the top of it, becoming clearer as the sun climbed out from behind the mountains to the east. OK, now I've seen some driftwood shelters in my time—I've even built a few—but this was some piece of construction. So, frost-covered rock notwithstanding, I had to go up and take a closer look.

And what a masterpiece it is. I have no idea who built it or when (I've Googled it with no real results), but my hat is off to them. There are some major pieces of wood in there; just finding the material and getting it all up the rock face must have been a feat in itself, and then to build something sturdy enough to withstand the battering this coast takes in the winter...well, I shake my head. I bet you could fit six bodies in there no problem...yes, intimacy would probably be unavoidable but how bad's that?

Music today, and anyone who knows me well will suspect that this entire post was nothing but a watery excuse to link to the greatest rock song by any band ever. It's iconic, it's got everything, it is the theme song for an entire era, it's perfect, it's my ringtone...and I will never tire of hearing it. Ladies and Gentlemen...The Rolling Stones.

Above: Looking west from the edge of Green Point, below the shelter. Below, clockwise from top left: the terrain up to the top of Green Point; a lucky grab shot of some kelp on Combers Beach; the rock face the construction team had to negotiate; the ocean side of the shelter.

December Rain...What Happened?

by Martin Nichols

So the plan was to head off to the West Coast of Vancouver Island right after Christmas, hole up just outside Tofino with a dozen or so bottles of wine, and watch the rain for four days from the confines of a luxury Chesterman Beach suite equipped with hot tub, king-size bed, leather armchairs, and heated slate floors. And first day out it was all going like clockwork: torrential rain was pretty much relentless from the time we left the Sunshine Coast at around 0730 until we got just past Port Alberni at around lunchtime. At which time everything changed as a freak blizzard suddenly descended out of nowhere, sending dozens of cars fitted with lousy tires and/or nervous drivers gently into the roadside ditches of Highway 4. Half an hour later the snow turned back to heavy rain in a matter of seconds, the road was simply wet again, and we continued to Tofino without further incident, reaching our digs at around 4:30 pm. Mission accomplished...let the rain-watching begin.

It was only some hours later that, wine in hand (probably the second bottle at this point), hot bubbling water lapping at my neck that I saw it, and said to Jules, "Guess what I can see?"

She said, "What?"

I said, "A star...no, cancel that, a lot of stars...it's stopped raining."

"Cool."

"Cool? Cool? Do you know what this means?

"Nope..."

What it meant of course is that the sun was going to come up in the morning and I would have to drag my ass out of bed to shoot it. Oh well, price you pay, I suppose.

Top image: Daybreak at Chesterman Beach, Vancouver Island. Below, similar shot, different day, different beach; Cox Bay, about an hour before sunrise...holy cow I can't tell you how cold it was, except that frost actually formed on my equipment bag while I was waiting for the light.

Below: no big storms, but some pretty good wave action here and there; McKenzie Beach on the left, and Cox Bay.

Twilight at Chesterman Beach...simple is usually best.

December? Are you kidding me? Look at that sky. Love this part of the world...you can check out some more of these at the new-look Burning Sand website. Thanks for looking.

New Burning Sand Photo Website

OK, here it is, the new and improved Burning Sand Photo site. Once the hosting sites have sorted things out between them the burningsandphoto.com address will work for this. You will need the Adobe Flash Player to see it, available here if you don't have it. Thanks for looking; feedback on the new look welcome.

Small World...or who needs a damn Nikon anyway?

by Martin Nichols

I've been having some fun lately making these fake tilt-shift images. Used to be that to get this kind of image, where the idea is to make scenes look like models, required the use of an expensive tilt-shift lens, which gives this incredibly shallow depth of field. Now, like so many other things, the same effect can be achieved in Photoshop with a bit of selective blurring. Tutorials on this are all over the web, so I'm not explaining it all here. The effect works best if your original image is taken from a high vantage point, but it's not absolutely essential. Our opening shot today is of the town of Sechelt on Canada's Sunshine Coast, which just happens to be where I currently live. (By the way, the small white building right in the middle of the shot is Station 235—the flagship station of the BC Ambulance Service...they just haven't acknowledged it yet—which is also where I work, alongside some of the most skilled and lovable paramedics you'll ever meet.)

But I digress, back to the image. I took this picture from a small and terrifyingly old float plane on its approach to Sechelt from Vancouver Island on a beautiful day back in February with...get this, an iphone. Hence the headline. A bit of cropping, bit of blurring, up the saturation and there you go, one fake tilt-shift masterpiece. OK, I'm never going to get a 40" x 30" wall poster out of it but, other than that, who cares that it was not taken with five grand's worth of equipment?

Here are some more, taken in the UK in 2005 with an old Minolta point-and-shoot I still have kicking around somewhere. The top left is of the village of Criccieth on the Welsh coast, taken from the castle on the hill, and the other three were from the top of one of the towers at Warwick Castle, well worth a visit if you're in the area. (But don't go into the torture chamber, it's effing disgusting, as I recall.) 

     

All right, to keep the peace with the Nikonians and some of the measurebators at DP Review, below is a before-and-after that was taken with a Nikon (my D70S for the record). The shot on the left of the rock bluff just outside the studio is OK, but nothing earth-shattering, but with a little bit of the old tilt-shift treatment I got a far more interesting image, one in which it's hard to get any feel for the scale of the elements it contains. Note that this one was not taken from way above the subject.

Like I say, you can find galleries of tilt-shift images all over the place; here's one of my favourites, called Little London, featuring the town I used to live in.

And Nikkorzillas worldwide, forgiveness please, I beg of you...I love my Nikons, really. Love 'em, honest, love them, couldn't live without them...

 
  
 

The Black Dress Project by Martin Nichols

The concept for this was pretty straightforward. Ask four beautiful women to show up with their favourite black dress, get them to do something interesting in front of the studio wall, and I take the pictures. Only thing was, they didn't all show up on the same day; the shoots were done over a period of a few weeks, so matching the mood and lighting was a bit of a challenge as we had to tear down in between for other projects. But the whole thing was a blast...from the shoots themselves, to selecting the shots to use, to working them up to a final image in Photoshop. It's always amazing to me how many times my original vision for a shot goes out of the window early on as the session unfolds and, maybe not so amazingly, how often it's the subject's own interpretation that I use in the final. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say something like, "Why don't I just crouch on top of this thing?" and voilà...the shot picks itself.

Thanks to all my lovely girls for your great work...Clair, Jen, Molly, Portia; Chris and Aaron for assisting; and the Swallow's Nest for a couple of the props. OK, onward and upward. Summer's allegedly almost here...flash floods and sub-arctic June temperatures notwithstanding...so it's time to crawl out of the Burning Sand Studio (coincidentally, and perennially, sub-arctic) and start shooting outside. I'll leave you today with this beautiful and heartbreaking gem from Pearl Jam: Black.

Limited Edition Prints by Martin Nichols

 

It was about three weeks ago that I got a call from Mark Busacca of the Busacca Gallery, in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, in which he asked if I'd like to be a part of his exciting new online art gallery project. After listening to his explanation of how it worked and browsing the site as we chatted I had to agree that he was indeed on to something, and that of course I'd be delighted to take him up on his offer and submit some prints for sale in the gallery. And what an incredible array of art the gallery offers; you can quite easily spend hours browsing through everything from paintings, pottery, jewellery to furniture, musical instruments, and of course Limited Edition Prints. It is all there by invitation only, so the standard of work is consistently high. You have to check it out. Here's some of the flavour of the project from the About Us page:

Busacca Galllery Mission Statement:
Our mission is to connect, educate, empower, and promote creative people in the visual and literary arts by providing a supportive community online. We specialize in visualization tools and interfaces that make it easy to understand complex art collecting. We post shows, events, classes, interactive forums, competitions, jobs, galleries, portfolios, hundreds of art links, advice, techniques, and artists' stories. Like the artists, buyers, and vendors we serve, we love art and we're passionate about collecting, learning about, and finding the best pieces of art for our own special addictions.

Pictured here are the four landscapes I selected for inclusion in the Rare Coast I series. These are all images of the Wilson Creek area on Canada's hauntingly beautiful Sunshine Coast. Each print is a limited edition of ten, signed and numbered on the back; click on any of them to take you to its description on the Busacca Gallery site. I have another project under way for submission which I will have completed soon; I'll keep you updated. As always, thanks for looking.

 

Main image: What Was. 16" x 8.5".
Above left: Driftwood and Port Stalashen. 15" x 10".
Above middle: Converge/Collide. 17" x 10".
Above right: The Disquiet. 15" x 10".

All prints are on museum-quality Optica One bright white 300 gsm paper with a 2" border, printed with Epson Ultrachrome inks. All images © 2010 Martin Nichols.