BLOG: Congratulations, Jim, for winning the 2014 People Choice Award.
JIM: Thank you.
BLOG: According to the records, this is your fourth People Choice win. Unprecedented! 2005, 2006, 2010 and now 2014. The 2010 Award was “shared” with Peter Juranka. But how did that come about? You both have the same number of votes?
JIM: Yes, that year we both got the same number of votes.
BLOG: There must be a secret to winning 4 times in 10 years. What is it?
JIM: No magic sauce. Part of it may be a lot of time spent trying to take quite specific photographs; and apparently my aesthetic is similar to that of many people (which may or may not be a good thing actually). [laugh]
BLOG: I first joined the Club in November 2010. It was during that month, that you were given a whole Tuesday night to yourself because you had just won promotion to Master. At that time I didn’t know what a rarity that was, for since then we haven’t had another such evening. Are you surprised?
JIM: Not particularly, though there are several superb photographers in the club who have been very close for some years now. The way RA competitions are run and scored, it takes a lot of persistence and some luck with the judging to reach the master level. That’s why there have been only three so far in the club’s history. I think many people’s lives take them away from competing and maybe even from photography before it happens.
Competition is only one way to share and try to improve our photography. It can be fun and a useful prompt to try harder, but art is fundamentally not competitive in my opinion, or at least at most only a competition with oneself. Perhaps the most important, and hardest lesson of competing for me has been the realization that people’s reactions vary. They can make us stronger and more aware, but ultimately our personal reactions are what matter and keep us striving to do better.
BLOG: In the 2010 interview with Dave Eldon, you said that when you took photographs, you had the print in mind as the end product, because prints impose the least technology between photo and the viewer. You still think so?
JIM: Absolutely. More than ever. With prints the only technology required is a reasonably good light source. All sorts of obscure factors alter the appearance of images on monitors. Just try viewing the same image file on two monitors side by side from different manufacturers, say a budget Dell and an Apple monitor. Even if both are calibrated and profiled they will almost certainly look quite different.
Prints also allow much larger high quality display. Panorama and mountain photography, for example, both benefit from large prints.
BLOG: Let’s get back to this year winner, Bugaboo and Snowpatch Spires by Moonlight. How you got up the Bugaboos and from where did you start…from which base camp?
JIM: I have traveled in the Bugaboos at least seven or so years, in the summer and fall. I often return to the same general areas over and over again, year after year. A good area is a good area, and it is different every moment no matter how often and long I am there.
The Bugaboos are a B.C. provincial park roughly northwest of Banff. Unlike most of the western mountains in Canada, they are granite. I love granite and how flowing ice and water sculpts it.
I camp, though over the years I have become friendly with the people running the nearby Canadian Mountain Holidays Lodge. I have hiked, climbed, and helicoptered into various sites over the years. For this shot I helicoptered to the far edge of the Vowell Glacier, just outside the park, and camped there for five or six days, day-tripping from my tent with ice axe, crampons, and rope.
BLOG: Sounds dangerous.
JIM: Not particularly. Not if you observe some basic rules. For example, you do not want to fall into a crevasse if you are not roped up. Even when you are roped up, it is a frightening experience to suddenly find yourself twenty feet down looking up at the sky through a small hole in the snow bridge that broke. It doesn’t happen often. In roughly forty years, I have only once fallen deep into a big crevasse. Fortunately I was roped.
BLOG: And you call that not particularly dangerous! At what time was the picture taken?
JIM: The picture was taken about one A.M., under a nearly full moon, looking across the Vowell Glacier to Bugaboo and Snowpatch Spires; many minutes exposure to get the star trails. As the ice field testifies, the weather is often bad (and above treeline, when it’s bad, look out!) Having good weather coincide with a nearly full moon to illuminate the mountains and ice field was a bonus. I took similar exposures for about two hours; this was the only one that had the “compositionally right” illumination of the glacier.
The most important thing photographers can give themselves is time. There is no substitute for time in the field. I only wish I could spend more time in the mountains.
BLOG: A master can use any instrument. But we are a photo club, at one time even known as a camera club. So I’m sure our members like to know what equipment you use. For example, what gear did you take up the Bugaboos?
JIM: The right equipment and technique are of course also necessary to let your vision be realized. Necessary though secondary. The right tool, used the right way, for the job.
I was using a Nikon D800e with a 28-70 f2.8 lens at 60mm. ISO 100, f5.6, 295 second exposure, Long Exposure Noise Reduction ON. Gitzo mountaineer tripod with a Markin’s ball head. RFN-4s wireless remote shutter release.
BLOG: Thank you very much, Jim.
JIM: My pleasure. I have been very fortunate to be a member of such a great club, with such wonderful people and photographers in it.
Jim Lamont has been involved with photography since 1977. He has had three articles with his photographs in the Canadian Geographic, including a cover photograph, and has also been published in a variety of other magazines, a book, and a calendar. He has had six one-person / focus shows at galleries such as the Trinity Art Gallery, Foyer Gallery, and Centrepointe Theatre Gallery. His photographs and prints have won numerous awards. His competition scores in the RA Photo Club gained him the “Master level” designation in 2010. In 2003, he started PeregrinePrints, a company dedicated to working with photographers to make fine art quality prints at affordable prices. He teaches with the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO), Henry’s School of Imaging, and various community centre and private classes.
(5)Dislikes
(0)