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.

Hitting the Wall

As projects go, the construction of a 12' x 8' wall should not cause anyone with a rudimentary grasp of DIY too much of a problem, especially when it doesn't actually have to hold anything up, as was the case with the Burning Sand Studio "grunge wall." And it certainly shouldn't take the best part of two months to complete. But life, taking on the characteristics of the female canine as it occasionally does, progress has been kinda intermittent, and for the last few weeks the studio has been out of action as cameras and lights were replaced with lumber, chop saws, buckets of drywall mud, and a whole lot of dust.

The idea was to create a "distressed" or "grungy" background to complement the black and white seamless we have now. And before anyone pipes up that one or two of those mottled muslin backgrounds you can buy would have been a quicker, cheaper, and less messy alternative I should mention that I detest those effing things with every fibre of my being and that I would rather have my liver removed with a warm spoon...so don't.

Below are some pics of the work in progress. Wish I'd taken more as we were constructing the base; a monumental feat of engineering if I say so myself. Professional drywallers should probably avert their eyes from the two middle images below left, it's not a pretty sight. We slapped on, scraped around, hacked away, and sanded down two industrial-sized buckets of mud on this baby...took about a week to dry. Finally we got a painting crew together and put the finishing touches to it last weekend. Anyway, I think it's going to be a versatile addition: I can use different parts of it, different light angles, subjects can lean on it, and we can repaint it at any time.

Many thanks to everyone who helped out: Chris the Drummer for construction, mudding, and painting; Malcolm for painting and cleanup; and Portia for painting...and for being the first subject to pose in front of it (see top); and a special mention for the King of Tools...no, not Chris, I'm talking about the indispensable Dewalt 18V cordless. A cool little project all in all, we usually had some old Pearl Jam or Soundgarden cranked while we worked to help us with the grunge groove, and some good old Bowmore single malt to take the chill off at the end of each session. A lot of fun...but it's good to see those lights back in there.

 
 
  In progress, left, and the finished article, above.

Mainstream it ain't...

OK, I'll be the first to admit that I am no videographer. I've never really explored the medium, but when wife shoves Mino HD Flip video camera into husband's hand when son is playing in front of paying public, husband shoots. Such was the case last Friday at the tiny yet funky, packed and sweaty Purple Crab club in Vancouver. The band is Brave by Numbers, a three-piece alt rock band...the really clever alternative bit being there were only two of them on account of the bass player having just quit and the new guy is still in the process of learning the songs. The lineup consists of Robb Hill on vocals and guitar, Chris Nichols (aka Chris the Wicked Drummer referenced in other posts here) oddly enough on drums, and, well...the other bloke on bass. So there I am with this camera the size of a packet of fags recording this historic event, trying to master its incredible array of controls: at least four anyway...record, not record, zoom in, zoom out, that sort of thing, and trying to hold it as still as possible while tripping on a maze of wires and dodging happy but unsteady customers and the occasional shower of beer. 

So here it is for your viewing pleasure. OK, now the music might not be your cup of tea, it's not very well filmed, the sound levels are sketchy, the lighting is atrocious, camera angles limited, and the battery ran out before the end, but watch it anyway, for two reasons:

1. Despite—or maybe because of—its flaws, it has a raw authentic quality that is difficult to convey unless you were present, and

2. That's my kid up there!

On that note I have to confess to conflicting emotions that night, as I sat and rocked out with the rest of the heaving crowd and swilled my Sleeman's Honey Brown. Pride, of course, and no small measure of relief that my son is as fanatic about rock music as his old man, a touch of nostalgia thinking about all the great bands I saw back in the day, a bittersweet knowledge that he's now grown up and starting to make his own way in this life, all topped of with a gigantic dose of pure envy that he's in an effing rock band. Bastaaard!

Anyway, had a great time. Do yourself a favour and go to the Purple Crab one night. Chaotic, intimate, funky, great crowd, no trouble, friendly high-energy atmosphere, live music, what more do you want? And just so you know, the band's next gig is at Pat's Pub in Vancouver on February 13. Would love to see you there.

Coast Icon Les Fowler

Now here's a guy who's lived a life (and continues to do so): musician, ship's captain, commercial  west coast fisherman, a great raconteur and all-round gent. I finally got Les into the studio last weekend where, with the help of Chris the Wicked Drummer, we shot our way through a couple of CF cards, some laughs about our days putting on the Pender Harbour Jazz Festival, and a bottle of Strathisla single malt. Les is a bit of a whisky connoisseur, as I found out to my cost a few years ago when it famously took me three days to pick up a bit of halibut from his boat, the Nordic Pride, at the Madeira Marina wharf in Pender Harbour (another story, but it's a good one).

OK, I digress; back to the matter in hand. We shot him first at the old piano in my house, with a silver umbrella set up high and camera left, and a second strobe with a grid low and to the right to highlight the keyboard and his hands (below). The interesting thing, and the point of this post, is that the two images below were taken within minutes of each other but, with the addition of a prop and a small amount of post in Photoshop, have an entirely different look and feel. I mean, is he posing for a promo portrait for a CBC documentary or is he belting out a traditional number at a ceilidh in Ballygulleen?

 

We did the rest of this session down in the Deep End studio at Burning Sand Photo, where we got some more cool pictures, mostly single-light, including the opening shot of this entry.

  The day's only casualty.