Thursday 19 January 2012, The Vert Hotel/bar, Chamonix: So I am kicking off the new year with another (free) Milner slideshow/hecklefest. Expect the usual inane babble and artfully dark images, this time from the Svalbard Polar trip with Jones and Terje. If you’re not around Chamonix next week, then you can catch a (soya)beefed up showing later in the year at the Kendal Mountain Film Festival (November).
There'll not be a dry eye in the house.
If you’ve avoided keeping up to date on my roamings during 2011, you’re bang out of luck now. You’ve stumbled on my annual recap of this last year spent as a travelling professional photo chimp.. . a collation of images that I hope gives a kind of insight into the eclectic adventures that my dream job allows me to photograph in various corners of the world, and the reason that we photographer’s are *mysteriously moody/unbearably over confident/trembling nervous wrecks (*delete as appropriate).
(Hit the “more” tab below the second image caption to see the gallery in its entirety.)
Canon EOS 1D mkIII, 24-70 2.8, f5 1/1000.
(above) It’s all about the backside air. Nate Kern throws a backside air over old mining ruins near Telluride, Colorado, while two well-known but remaining anonymous female pro snowboarders couldn’t resist giving him cheek. The trip with Jenny Jones, Hana Beaman, Nate and Angus Leith was a reminder that snowboarding, a sport so many of us begun for fun, needn’t just be business.
Canon EOS 1DmkIII, 24-70/2.8, f7.1, 1/800.
(above) Kickers have never been my favourite thing to shoot in snowboarding, especially when there is powder to ride and shoot in the backcountry. It has something to do with how I ride. I’m not a kicker person and find shooting them a little dull and restrictive. A lot of standing around cheering other people on. Kickers, compared to freeride shots, seem more about the style of the rider than the art of the photography, at least normally. After ticking the rider’s boxes however this time I found time to satisfy my own art-urges. Nate Kern is in there somewhere, deep in the Telluride backcountry, Colorado.
It’s that time of year when bike shoots get muscled out by the ripped torso of snow-bound adventures and the postie suffers relapsed hernias while trying to stuff my letter box with assorted snow mags from around the world that feature my work shot last winter. This week the latest Transworld Snowboarding dropped with a resounding thud onto my WELCOME door mat, well in fact 2 significant issues of TWS did -the 2011/12 Photo Annual and their 25th anniversary issue. The former sports what TWS’ editors have gathered as the “greatest” shots of the year, and my shot of Jeremy Jones dropping what we tagged “the Nat Geo chute” during our recent Further Svalbard Arctic camping trip scored the spread as “Best Landscape” shot of 2011. I’d be happy enough if this was it all, but nay! The 25th anniversary issue lists my Deeper Alaska story from 2 winters ago amongst the ten most memorable features TWS have run in their 25 years as the world’s leading Snowboard title. Yes, of course I’m chuffed.
Is it really that hard to shoot the "landscape shot of the year" when you have this location and this rider to fill the frame. Surely all I had to do was press the shutter, right? Hmm, yes and hike up to this vantage point at 11 pm. And try to fend off frostbite. And sit out another 3 day storm. And eat 2 weeks of freeze dried meals.. and that's not touching on the polar bear issue. .Nikon D3s, 70-200 2.8 VRII
So to help me celebrate this boost in ego, I’m launching here the Svalbard Chronicles… a varied and randomly ill-defined edit of my video-diary from the same 3-week Svalbard camping session back in May. if nothing else the video pieces may help you understand how, why and what the hell a mountain photographer’s life is all about. Be warned: there will be more.
Photo Of the Month: Revisiting the Mar-e-mar north trail, Corsica.
Leica M8, Voigtlander 12/5.6
Seven years ago I rode this trail on my Titanium hardtail. Back then having 110mm of fork suspension was almost a luxury for us XC-riders and the four day point-to-point we attempted along this trail dealt us out a drubbing. Seven years later it was time to go back armed with our “everyday” rides -150mm travel Yeti 575 bikes. The trail, a long distance, rugged hiking path between coastal Porto and mountainous Corte, was as technical as I remember and more, but a whole lot more fun on these bikes, and dare I say it with hindsight and planning, especially when approached in the opposite direction to give us the net benefit of gravity. Deep in the beautiful forests of this Mediterranean island, we found ourselves alone with our bikes, riding trails that thread along some of the most spectacular gorges of Europe. This shot is deep in the Tavignano gorge, reached via a 700m climb and 300m tech descent. It runs via some 20Km of ancient paved mule track to Corte. The story is running in MBUK (UK) and Bike mag Germany in February.
Righto, so an idea I had for a while was to use a boat to cruise Scotland’s 90-mile Caledonian Canal from East coast Inverness to West coast MTB-mecca Fort William and back. We’d use the boat as our base, hotel and transport putting ashore to access natural trails in the beautiful Scottish highlands. With what sounded like a jolly splendid family holiday in my mind, resplendently embellished with the dreamy visions of sipping G&T’s on the sun deck while watching the entertainingly impish behaviour of wild otters frolicking in the late summer sunset, I set about pitching the story to assorted mountain bike mags, and dug out my powerboat day skipper credentials….
Of course, as usual, I hadn’t counted on the reality of the assignment’s timing: a week in mid October only a few days after the first autumn snow had left the scottish hills coated, arriving in the middle of a gale. The only otters we’d see would be flailing in the chilly loch Ness waters, wearing sagging scarves and mittens.
And I hadn’t counted on the landlubbing crew I’d be lumbered with for a week. They couldn’t tie a sheepshank between them. Luckily they knew how to ride bikes well.
So reach for the rum m’ hearties, and watch a taster of the story that will pillage the pages of MBUK come spring.
Oh and the riding? Yep it was amazing. Scotland is like that.
Yes, thanks to the good people at Go-Pro HD camera and bike-bit people Madison in the UK, I now get to grab some of that newfangled moving image stuff on many of my photo-adventures. The result? An irregular series of episodes called the Mangina Chronicles: an insight into the trials and tribulations of an adventuring photo-chimp. Part 1 here comes to you as a sneak peek into the recent 2-dayer Lavaredo Ultra Trail epic we attempted on bikes, shot as a story for a forthcoming MBUK feature and video’d for The North Face. The full video episode will be on the ‘The North Face‘ website soon.
Don’t worry, this movie malarky will never catch on… so here’s another epic still shot from the same Dolomites trip to de-stress you. Sit back and gaze forlornly at the nice static image.
Josh Ibbet out past his bedtime.. or was it before his get-up time. It's all a sweaty blur now.
Photo Of the Month: Nikole and Patchen homeward bound, Annadel State Park, California.
Not a lot beats the contrast of golden grass against stormy skies and California in October delivers. One of the perks of my job is that I get to ride different trails all over the world as part of some photo assignment. Usually it means some expletive-laden epic up some impossibly steep mountainside, but sometimes, just sometimes, it means great XC style riding with friends with no magazine commission to worry about. I met Patchen while cycle-touring in Argentina back in 1996. The bike and similar sense of humour (hey, we were cycle-touring) connection meant we kept in touch and although not as frequently as we'd like, we do still get to ride together on occasions. Annadel was one 25 mile loop that my two Marin-based friends insisted we go and ride. It's a blast. 22 miles in, this scene opened up and I couldn't resist reaching for the camera. Adventure photographer's it seems are never totally 'on holiday' (contrary to the popular misconception that every assignment is a 'holiday'). Annadel, along with the Butcher trail at Downieville that Patchen and Nikole also introduced me to, will go down as two of my top 10 trails, anywhere. Leica M8, Voigtlander 75/3.5.
If you happen to be in San Francisco on November 10th, you can have the chance of taking home a 2-dimensional slice of Jeremy Jones to hang on your wall and marvel at. Drop into the SF Patagonia store (at 770 North Point St) for an evening of Further-esque happenings and bid on a framed print of one of my shots of Jeremy slaying what we tagged the “Nat Geo” chute during our recent Further film Svalbard expedition. In fact the shot hasn’t been published anywhere yet, so the winner will have the very first print of this shot. Period. The print, measuring 80x65cm and exquisitely printed by Travis Rice Asymbol gallery, will be signed by Jeremy, who will also be there to nag until he either parts with anecdotes about our crew’s time on the remote islands or goes home crying. The whole evening is a fund raiser for Protect Our Winters charity, a US organisation that seeks to educate on climate change and assist ecologically sound developments.
This is what you can bid for in San Fran. Just don't get in your private jet to go and do so. 80x65cm print, archival quality, Signed by Jeremy Jones. © Dan Milner.
This event follows recent similar ones at the Patagonia stores in New York and Denver, both again fund raisers for POW charity, where prints of my shots of the veritable Travis Rice, shot during our Deeper Alaska session were auctioned for $600 for POW.
Travis Rice print .. already hanging on a wall and making its buyer chuffed to bits.
Now, nobody is going to pretend that all our winter activities -let alone all the miles we photographers clock up shooting wintery adventures for magazines and film projects- are a particularly ‘green’ way of enjoying ourselves, but every now and then an opportunity comes up to move the slider towards positive again, if only by a little.
