My Camera Froze and So Did I + Thomas Heaton Chat

if you've been watching our landscape photography adventures here in Banff National Park you'll already know that we have faced some frigid temperatures this morning the temperature dropped to minus 25 Celsius in Lake Louise and while we might be willing to brave those conditions our camera gear might not be up to the task as I was just about to learn the hard way now as most of you probably know I shoot with Sony cameras so that means you should probably get used to seeing battery exhausted on a regular basis we arrived just in the nick of time so I ran straight to this spot and captured a few shots of this extremely juicy morning light I've been waiting for this shot for years I've driven all the way out here to Mt Chephren if you pronounced it Chepren or Kef Ren but this is this is a joy for me because I've tried so many times to get this shot and I've failed and I'm here with Thomas Heaton Nick Paige Adam Gibbs it's their first time ever in this place and we checked the forecast and for once everything lined up and we got perfect conditions it's minus 24 Celsius and we gotta hit just in time we had to run through knee-deep snow just to get here and I mean look at this scene I've got my favorite kind of frost this hoar frost where you get these lovely flowers but cracks and shapes in the ice and of course the absolutely essential alpenglow that we've been chasing all week oh man I am so ecstatically happy right now what about you and now we've got walk at water leaking in through a crack oh really thank you maybe I should move but regardless let's just keep shooting while we get these these perfect conditions well that was like all my Christmases and birthdays came at once but as Tom pointed out my considerable girth was making the ice crack and shift and what is that popping up you know it's not good mate this was open water yesterday yeah so sometimes I have to be sensible to some degree so in a rare moment of sensibleness I moved higher up to the meadow just above the lake well I've moved on from that first location because it was a whole health pit sketchy I don't know you can see the the ice in my whiskers there but it's very very cold and that's a problem with these first masses when you breathe into them the moisture sticks in the mask and then forms on your whiskers so yeah not entirely comfortable but I'm sure it looks really cool well yeah I've come up to this meadow over here where it's in the summer believe it or not if I get further back you can actually shoot the Milky Way just over the top of the mountain there and I've even seen leeches in this swamp somehow they find something around here to leech off but I'm sure they're all either dead or do leeches hibernate? I have no clue but no leeches today but yeah I'm going to see non compose a shot with this beautiful little tree and get a little bit more of the the other mountains of the distance well after being spoiled by those amazingly beautiful hoar frost formations and ice shapes back on the ice of the lake I just wasn't feeling it on this meadow with these trees all I could think about was getting back down onto the ice and putting those beautiful shapes in the foreground of that mountain well I couldn't resist it I have to go back after the whole mountain little I had to go back to that beautiful patch of hoar frost and I composed this vertical shot where there's this little notch this kind of arrow shaped notch just there and that patch of ice which kind of mirrors the shape of the mountain there so I'll show you that shot now in the Canadian Rockies it's not all that often that you get conditions like these I mean we got perfect light, beautiful hoar frost, simply TREZMENDOUS and what I'm finding really challenging it at minus 20 I think is minus 26 now nothing works my tripod is completely seized up so I can't extend my tripod legs to get it at full height so I'm shooting everything lower to the ground the camera shutter is really seizing up all the controls are not working properly and everything is covered in ice so it's it's so challenging and of course because I shoot Sony I see battery exhausted every five minutes thanks Sony yeah I don't think I'm gonna have enough batteries to last the day what I usually do is open my lens bag put all my batteries in there put a couple of hand warmers it keeps them toasty but even then because they're Sony batteries they're just like you popping them like tic tacs they're useless anyway I think I'll head further down the end of the lake where it turns into a river see what Thomas and Adam have found there's this lovely bit of mist that's rising off that little bit of open water there so maybe they found something quite tasty. So let's go and have a look well I did catch up with Tom and Adam but by the time I got there, I'd burned through seven batteries and I was down to my last 11 percent I'd also been fighting this persistent cold for the last few days and I was losing patience with my failing photography equipment I'm feeling a bit beaten down because batteries have failed tripod legs won't open ball head fails LCD screen doesn't work everything is failing in these temperatures and not just camera equipment I'll tell you so I'm feeling pretty beaten and done ready to get back to the car heat up maybe have some coffee and recharge these pathetic batteries! Well I'm going through this strange mix of emotions right now because on the one hand I'm absolutely ecstatic because I got that shot that I've been chasing for years and I'm very very happy with it but on the other side of the coin I'm really annoyed and frustrated with my equipment and it wasn't in the best of condition before I got here and when I used to live in Calgary I would spend between 20 and 30 hours a week out here doing this and I was quite well practiced at dealing with the cold but clearly I am out of practice and out of shape because this has been a struggle this has been an exercise in frustration so it was so difficult because I crept out there on the ice and it was really precarious Tom could hear it cracking all around me it was very sketchy not very wise so you kind of want to be quick you want to get your shot and get out but I'd line up the shot and then the battery would die battery exhausted so then I'd have to go back to my camera bag which was off the ice because I don't want the extra weight on the ice yeah the battery put the battery in well then the the EVF is fucked up and now I can't see anything and the LCD wasn't working at all and then the ball head starts to seize up none of the tripod legs will extend everything becomes an absolute pain and it's very very difficult to achieve the simplest of goals the things that you can do easily on a day-to-day basis almost impossible and at the same time you've got ice forming on your eyelashes and your whiskers and your nose hairs and you could feel frostbite starting to nip at your ears so it's that was frustrating but it was also absolute Redemption it was you know absolute joy it was everything that we do in one skate photography it's it's that abject misery interspersed with complete ecstasy so it's you know as a landscape photographer you'll you will go through this on a regular basis this this misery and joy misery and joy well the joy was so big today that I think it outweighed all of the misery but I'm gonna have to do a full audit of all of my gear I'm gonna have to for every piece of tripod equipment I'm gonna have to recharge on my batteries I'm gonna have to tighten up nuts on the tripods clean my sensor my lenses and I'm really worried about the shutter seizing up on that thing so I think I might even be in the market for a new camera all right onto the next shoot the plan was to head north to shoot angle peak at sunset where we got caught in this mountain traffic jam now I'd already had the back of my vehicle rammed by a hairy beast on this trip and didn't need the front of my vehicle getting messed up too and I'm still dealing with the repairs for that by the way mr. page so we sat patiently awaited for these bighorn sheep to enjoy their salty snack the icefields pkway on the road to Jasper National Park is actually one of my favorite driving experiences but after days of driving around the clock I was starting to fade so it was Heaton's turn to take the wheel and they actually did quite well for a guy from Lancashire when we got to tangle peak the light was terrible so it was time for some winter shenanigans when it's cold enough you can throw a boiling hot water up into the air and it comes down as snow we waited around for a few hours uncle grumpy made his tea which takes at least an hour but the light wasn't changing so we headed home empty-handed so so far how have you liked your Canadian Rockies adventure yeah it's good I haven't got my I India like I don't feel like a know the area well if I think of them I was looking through my images that I showed yesterday this was the overly happy especially that sunrise we got I feel like it's just a brochure major fella cops are some really boring because the area so I'm still not finding my feet in terms of what I want to get out of this trip but absolutely having a blast well if we get the right type of ice conditions in the ice cave today we won't care about the light will get brilliant shots as long as the temperatures have given us the right kind and size of ice have worn on the atom as well that's my concern but it's kind of nice to be free of worrying about light yeah yeah no I'm excited I've never really shot anything like that before yeah so it's a bit different for me I think what I'm I've doubled the use of always snow and find some minimalist kind of really empty scenes with just like a lone tree and I feel laundry in a field where moose just cross in the snow I'll see what I can do yes and how have you been liking the food here in Canada ah top quality you know of the cooked pancakes overcome faker sake pizzas and overpriced jerky yeah okay now this is great this is another world for me another planet and I've got the photographer's yet like which is fantastic balancing of bed at 5:00 in the morning as he caught up with you no no yeah I mean I'm still in UK time which is perfect for photography yeah you know I was on my laptop this morning winning the day win the morning win the day so they say this guy what is he doing scatter drive careful mate you might drive I want more interest got wet knees I'm cold but a deep chill while you're here though you know you need to make sure that you experience the Canadian delight of Tim Hortons coffee tip horse if I think I've heard about this can you guess or a finger Tim Portland's called a double-double yeah yeah heard about this you should try it I'm gonna wonder but there's nothing here well there's one in there's one in Banff right that's where we're headed today through baptism yeah we won't be going to have but we were at some point we will we will hit Banff and you will experienced a double-double as a Tim Hortons store Tim Hortons sounds good to me

Channel: fototripper

Views: 43,589

Keywords: landscape photography, fototripper, thomas heaton

Id: QFXu5cx19v4

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019