Featured in EOS Magazine!
This year I was lucky enough to be featured in EOS Magazine, one of my favorite publications – EOS Magazine.
Graham Clark remembers conversations as a child with his grandfather, who was patched through from far away places by amateur radio operators as he sailed around the world in an attempt to become the world’s oldest solo circumnavigator. Nearly two decades later, with the desire to travel deeply engrained by this memory, Graham was inspired by the incredible work of Ansel Adams and bought his first digital SLR, an EOS 5D.
It wasn’t until I travelled across the United States photographing National Parks that my passion for photography truly ignited. This experience served as motivation for me, and I wanted to dedicate all my time to shooting and practicing my photography. Working a day job, however, didn’t afford me the option to pursue photography in such a way, so I set a goal of saving enough money to afford the opportunity to travel – with the ultimate goal of understanding the medium on a more intimate and intuitive level. After two years of determined saving, while at the same time consuming countless photography books, I set out on a trip from Alaska to Argentina by land, pursuing the art of photography.
I set off on a journey into the unknown with a camera, a few lenses and little else. I knew I would have to select my equipment very carefully and strategically. For my primary camera body I chose an EOS 5D.
Alaska’s backcountry
I awoke around 5am, quickly unzipping my sub-zero sleeping bag as the sun blasted down at full power; the frigid night is extremely short during the autumn of late August. It was my fifth day in the backcountry of Alaska’s Denali National Park and I was fortunate enough to have clear visibility with expansive views of Denali. There’s something to be
said for the solitude and simplicity of the backcountry. Self-sufficiency and self-discovery are the ultimate takeaways if the experience is taken advantage of, while possible danger and misfortune keep the backcountry photographer constantly in check as wild creatures own this domain.
After Denali National Park I travelled via the Pacific coastline south through Canada, and by train in the US, crossing the border into Tijuana, Mexico, which marked the start of a bus journey that was to last two years.
I learned through Ansel Adams’ incredible body of work that by breaking the rules and placing less emphasis on equipment and technique I was beginning to see creatively and pre-visualizing the photographic process.
Equipment
Long-term travel can pose quite a challenge when it comes to selecting the right photography equipment. Through my experience with backcountry camping and mountaineering, I knew that being light and agile would be a significant advantage compared to travelling heavy and encumbered. For my one and only backpack I chose an Arc’Teryx Miura 30L as opposed to the usual 70-90L commonly preferred for long-term travel. Carrying a secondary body doesn’t make sense when every ounce counts, so a dependable and reliable primary body is absolutely essential. For this reason, I prefer the EOS 5D-series for its astounding image quality and, with a strong magnesium alloy body, its incredible build quality.
My preferred lens is the EF 17-40mm f4 L USM. Not only is it Canon’s lightest L-series lens, but it’s also the smallest L-series zoom lens. The one-stop advantage with the EF 16-35mm f2.8L USM has little impact for me as I tend to shoot between f8 and f16. The EF 50mm f1.8 is another of my favourites. It is on a par with the new EF 40mm f2.8 STM as Canon’s lightest lens and it has a very unimposing appearance, which is great for busy areas where a larger, more expensive lens invariably draws attention.
Along with an EF 70-200mm f4 IS L USM, these three lenses comprise my ultralight travel kit. Rather than a standard camera bag, I instead chose OP-Tech wraps for my lenses and camera body, which significantly reduced the amount of bulk in my compact backpack. I decided against bringing my tripod for two reasons: even the lightest carbon tripods are still relatively heavy for ultralight travel, but more importantly, with a tripod strapped to a backpack this openly advertises to the world, “Hey, I have photography equipment!”, which should be avoided at all costs. In addition to sacrificing a tripod, I also consciously decided against another vital piece of equipment in favour of a lighter kit – a computer.
Using Filters
I equip all my lenses longer than 70mm with 81A warming filters, which are double the strength of the standard skylight filters that I use on shorter focal lengths. This tends to give my telephoto shots a more natural balance of warm and cool tones, without adding visible red to what should be bluish shadows.
Post-processing
My digital darkroom setup includes an AppleMac 27-inch display, a Mac Pro workstation, eight 2.8GHz processors, 16GB of RAM, 4TB striped in a RAID-0 set optimized for speed, and external hard drives for data redundancy. I think one of the most important tools in the digital darkroom is the display, and just like a quality lens is essential to obtaining critically sharp images, a properly calibrated high-resolution display is essential for accurately reviewing photographs. During the course of my two- year journey I captured over 20,000 images and because I decided to travel without a computer this left the daunting task of selection and post- processing to the very end.
I do little or no editing in Photoshop. I aim to get it right in- camera, preferring to adjust images with what I call ‘straight’ processing. This involves a similar adjustment approach to that of the traditional darkroom: crop, contrast, dodge and burn, straighten. About 90% of my post-processing work is accomplished in Aperture 3, and when it’s time to finalize the RAW files for printing I export them as 16-bit TIFF files to Photoshop CS6 where I review images at 100% for chromatic aberration, diffraction and sensor dust. Sharpening is the last stage of my post-processing workflow and I typically only sharpen images for print, if necessary. Because sharpening can introduce artifacts onto the image, I export the images out of Aperture and keep the master image separate.
My ultralight kit includes:
EOS 5D (810g)
EF 17-40mm f4 L USM lens (475g)
EF 50mm f1.8 II lens (130g)
EF 70-200mm f4 L IS USM lens (760g)
B+W circular polarizing filters
Singh-Ray 2-stop soft-step ND grad filter Singh-Ray 3-stop hard-step reverse ND grad filter OP-Tech Pro Strap and equipment wraps
Workflow
My workflow consists of three stages, beginning with the import and selection process. I organize my images by location i.e. South America > Colombia > Ciudad Perdida. I use keywords to add detail and occasionally indicate primary colours, but I find it is not always necessary during the import stage due to how time-intensive it can be. Once imported, I backup and then begin rating and selecting full-screen. I assign one star for rejects, two stars for images that show potential, and three stars for an image I will come back to and review for processing. Once the rating process is complete, I go back to the three-star images and begin double-checking my finals. When I have strong 3-star images, I begin working through them analyzing composition and image quality. I usually reserve 5-star ratings for images of print quality.
EOS Magazine Article – Alaska to Argentina
“The concept of the photograph precedes the operation of the camera. The print itself is somewhat of an interpretation, a performance of the photographic idea.” – Ansel Adams