Snow and photographs, etc..

Just a few days ago I feel like I was laughing at the idea of Big Mountain opening on December 4th, but if the webcams are anything to go by I might be eating crow on that one. To be fair there wasn’t a flake of snow anywhere except in the tips of the high country and the temperatures had been exceedingly mild. But, as my grandpa says about living in Montana, “It’s never boring.” So, here we are. I usually tend to struggle with shooting anything in the winter, but we’re off to a bangin’ start so far. I can’t seem to put the camera down.

Part of this may also be that I’ve been making it a habit to grab the camera more often than not, which is a new thing. You’re more likely to photograph things if you’ve got a camera in your hand than if it’s sitting on a shelf somewhere, who knew. I think I always felt like having a camera on me regularly might turn me in to one of those idiots who is aloof and absorbed in to “tHe ArT” or whatever, but in some ways having a camera on you almost makes you more present in the moments in which you live.

A thought that’s been on my mind lately is the idea that photography as a medium is fundamentally a practice of paying attention. Unlike painting, for example, most photography has as its medium the given world. And so the task of the photographer is to see, and to respond to the call of the world in the form of photographs. Shout out to my coworker for spurring this train of thought in a discussion about music as an art form, by the way. All this to expand on that idea that the presence of a camera comes with a certain perspectival shift that brings our attention to a sharper point.

The photos you’re seeing here are a mix of 5D and 6D photographs. I’m not going to tell you what was shot with what. Maybe you can tell, maybe you can’t. I tend to think you can’t. I will say having shot the two back to back, the 6D is the better camera to shoot with, but the files from the 5D still win. Anyway, here’s a fun photo of Ruckus to take us out.