Photographers Blog

Vancouver, Canada

By Andy Clark

It was a cold, damp autumn day, as I remember it, sitting in a cinder block bunker terrified I was going to loose my hand as I loaded black clay disks into the machine in front of me. Seconds later I would hear a muffled voice shout, and the machine’s springs and mechanism would suddenly and violently let go, flinging the disk out of the bunker followed by another muffled boom, boom. I would then quickly lean down, take another disk from the box and gingerly place it in the machine. It was at this point my fear would take over, worried one of the distant voices would shout too soon and thus catch and propel my severed hand out of the bunker instead of the disk. Of course this never happened and once I got the rhythm, my fear slowly subsided, well sort of.

FULL FOCUS GALLERY: SHOOTING CANADA

I think I was about 12 years old at the time and I was helping out at the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Shoot at the local Trap Shooting Club just outside Ancaster, Ontario. Each year the contest was held on the weekend before the holiday as a dozen or so members, including my dad, all vied to hit the most clay pigeons and go home with a freshly cleaned turkey donated by a local farmer. Though my dad and grandfather had versed me well in the handling of guns by that age I was still too young to take part so was therefore drafted to load the machine.

That was a long time ago now, but something I thought about as I made my way to the Vancouver Gun Club in Richmond, British Columbia recently. This was the first of two visits to gun ranges I had organized as part of Reuters pictures series on guns. The Vancouver Gun Club dates back to 1924 and is nestled amongst farmland on 39 acres of open and wooded property. The outdoor range is shotgun only and offers trap, skeet and Olympic trap shooting. It also has sporting clays plus another type of shotgun sport shooting called Five Stand. The club has an annual membership of about 400 but also offers day passes to non-members.

I was greeted at the club by a member of the executive, Brian Wong, who after giving me a quick tour of the facility mentioned that once I was done with taking pictures to come over to the trap shooting and give it a try myself. Over the next four or five hours I wandered the grounds photographing some of the 50 or so people out that day. Men and women ranging in ages from mid-teens to their 70s combined with shotguns ranging in price from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars made for a varied day of photos. While taking pictures at one of the sporting clays stations one of the shooters suggested that if he hit the clay I should be able to get a picture of the hit, I guess you might say he challenged me to a shooting contest. Obviously I had to wait for the gun to fire before I fired and it took a few tries for me to follow the bright orange clays out with my lens. We soon were in sync and as he triggered his double barreled shotgun I triggered my 10fps camera and would hazard to say after about a dozen attempts my hit and miss rate was about the same as the shooters.

At the end of each of the two days I spent at the club I took up Brian’s offer to shoot a few clays myself. Though maybe it would be more accurate to say shoot “at” a few clays. I spent many a weekend as a young lad shooting at moving and stationary targets with my dad but gave it up as my photojournalism career began in my late teens. I was therefore quite surprised to realize that shooting a shotgun and firing a camera at a moving target had many similarities. Suffice to say I hope the photos I got over the two days were better than the results I had with the shotgun after all these years.

Off the coast of Vancouver Island, Canada

By Ben Nelms

Last year, Canada became home to the first shark fishery in the world that was labeled with a Marine Stewardship Council certification. This is an internationally recognized certification that lists the B.C Spiny Dogfish Shark industry as ‘certified sustainable seafood.’ The fishery is located in the Pacific waters of Canada, off the coast and around Vancouver Island.

I spent a handful of nights on a commercial fishing boat called the Ocean Sunset. We departed from the small village of Ucluelet, which is on the Western shores of Vancouver Island. The only thing I forgot on land was my sea legs.

GALLERY: SHARK FISHING

After a few hours of rough swells, the sea got the better of me and I was ‘feeding the fish’ as the crew would say. This was terrible for two reasons; Firstly, anyone who has been seasick on a commercial fishing boat knows that the environment is cramped, restless and rotting fish bait surrounds you. Secondly, after working to get access to this boat for nearly two months, I knew I couldn’t stop documenting life on the boat just because I was sick.

By Andy Clark

The book immediately caught my eye. It was small, about the size of a deck of cards, but twice the thickness, and there was no question it was very old. It sat in a pile of other aged publications that had just arrived at MacLeod’s Books in downtown Vancouver. It looked fragile as I picked it up and opened to the title page. “Wow!”, I said.

I had been in MacLeod’s Books about five or six hours at that point, not to search for any rare or out of print books but to do a day in the life photo essay on the 50-year-old used book store. The store originally opened in the early 1960s but in 1973 a young Don Stewart bought the place and has been there ever since.

I had been in the store once before about five years ago while waiting for an assignment to begin nearby. Once inside I was in awe of the thousands of books I saw. Unfortunately, duty called and I left shortly after. Well maybe I am fibbing a bit here. I love books, always have, and when I got a glimpse of the inside I had to turn and walk out, right then. If I hadn’t I would have been in there for hours, my assignment forgotten and my wallet considerably lighter. I promised myself I would return and thought this place might even make a pretty good photo story.

By Andy Clark

Swatting away a swarm of pesky summertime mosquitoes, I walked down a quiet country road shaded by rows of elderly trees. You could say, it was any ordinary rural road except for one thing. Parked amongst the trees was a collection of battle-scared and brightly colored stock cars. All tethered onto trailers and pulled behind pickup trucks, the collection of road warriors and their owners waited patiently for the gates to open for another Saturday night at Agassiz Speedway.

SLIDESHOW: HIGH OCTANE RACING

Built in 1970 the speedway is a quarter mile oval track nestled into the side of Agassiz Mountain about 90 minutes drive east of Vancouver, British Columbia. Owned and operated by the non-profit Kent Raceway Society the track hosts about 12 races a season beginning in April and running through to late October.

I have always enjoyed car racing. I spent, though a few said mis-spent, some of my formative teenage youth on darkened summer highways north of Toronto in the late 1960s, riding in muscle cars and drag racing until either the wee hours of the morning or the cops chased us away. Though I witnessed a horrendous accident one night while racing I still look back on those times with fond memories.

By Andy Clark

Arriving outside the main gates I couldn’t help but notice there were no crowds of spectators milling around or scalpers shouting their prime seat tickets for sale, in fact all was very quiet. It was roughly 7:45am and besides a couple of birds singing in the trees and a dog barking somewhere out of sight it appeared I was completely alone. My sudden fears of the wrong day and or wrong place were soon quelled as I entered the gates and walked down a small path. There before me was the field of play and scattered across it were the players warming up and preparing for the first day of competition at the fifth annual Pacific Cup Croquet Tournament.

Yes that is correct folks, I said croquet. Several months ago I was searching for a website totally unrelated and for reasons only Google knows, up came a page with a detailed list of the 2012 croquet tournaments across North America. Before I could click the page away, I remembered seeing some interesting images from a tournament at least 25 years ago and thought, I wonder. Sure enough listed halfway down the page was the Vancouver Croquet Club’s fifth annual Pacific Cup.

Like many people, the only croquet I know is what one may have played in their backyard as a child, known as Golf Croquet. The croquet I was about to witness was nothing like that. The game played during the tournament was the full international version known as Association Croquet. I can report that even after it was explained to me on several occasions combined with watching it for three days, all I know is that it involves two players and each match runs just over two hours. In fact my ignorance of the sport became clear on the first day of competition. I had settled down on a bench along the sidelines to watch a couple of players warming up, hoping to get any idea of what to expect once play began. After about 40 minutes I thought this was an unusually long warm up. I approached an elderly fellow nearby and asked when the game might get underway. With a look of disbelief the gentleman replied “they have been playing for 30 minutes”.

By Zoran Milic
Any opinions expressed here are the author’s own

It’s late May and I’m still crouched in a Caribbean bush, hours away from the streets of New York City, wondering how did I end up here and why? Just last week I was shooting New York Yankee Derek Jeter for a sports cover and next week I’m booked to spend a week with a horse that could become a Triple Crown winner. But today in the sizzling heat, it’s a different type of subject in front of my long sports lens; I’m waiting for one of the world’s most notorious serial killers, Karla Homolka, to show her face.

I’m waiting for the blonde killer who simply vanished in 2007 after spending just 12 years in prison for the death of two teenagers. Homolka drugged her own 15-year-old sister, Tammy Lyn, so she and her then-fiance, Paul Bernardo, could take her virginity. She protected serial rapist Bernardo as he terrorized young women, even luring some to her home. Then, Homolka plotted alongside him to kidnap, drug, rape, torture and eventually kill three teenage girls, including her sister. She talked the courts into a “sweetheart deal” and is free while Bernardo is in prison for life. (Homolka never faced charges in the drugging-sex-assault death of her sister). Psychiatric experts couldn’t agree on her diagnosis or predict if she’d kill again. Many citizens were just happy to hear she may have left Canada.

I’d been horrified by the serial killers at the time, but now that I am a devoted father, I have an even higher level of horror. Part of me didn’t want to think about the dead girls, but I understood perfectly why investigative reporter Paula Todd was worried. I’d worked with Todd before and trusted her implicitly. She’d found online reports that the “Barbie Killer” was now teaching school in the Caribbean and I shared her fear that as journalists we had an ethical obligation to find out. Many other reporters had tried to find the elusive killer and failed. But Todd is a smart, inexhaustible ace investigator. Todd not only found the killer but succeeded in spending a tension-filled hour with her. What she learned is detailed in “Finding Karla: How I Found An Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered A Mother of Three“. Now, it was up to me to attempt the near impossible: photograph the elusive Homolka after she knew Todd had found her.

By Andy Clark

“Hey bud, don’t blink or you’ll miss it,” the guy behind the counter said after I answered his query as to where I was headed.

I had stopped to grab a coffee along highway 97, about a five-hour drive north into the mountains from Vancouver. My destination was the town of Falkland, named after a career British soldier, Colonel Falkland GE Warren who had settled in the area in 1892. The reason for my visit was to photograph an annual event very popular with those living in the area, named the 94th Annual Falkland Stampede. One of the oldest rodeos in Canada, the stampede began as a community picnic in March of 1919 to celebrate the end of the First World War months earlier. Each year as the event grew, area residents gathered to enjoy local cowboys riding broncos and in 1969 the little stampede was sanctioned as a professional rodeo.

I first became aware of the Stampede while covering forest fires in 2003 just north of the area. I had seen a very weathered sign by a roadside and thought it might be worth looking into as a photo essay. Nine years went by, with me forgetting about the Stampede until the end of the event, until I finally arranged to shoot it.

The last few days have been frantic to say the least as part of the traveling media circus following William and Kate across Canada.

There are no media charter flights on this particular tour which means that in order to stay apace with the couple’s Canadian airforce jet we are constantly having to decide which events to shoot whilst leaving us enough time to dash to the airport to get our scheduled flights.

This is a nightmare, as you just never know where the picture will happen and you are making decisions based purely on pre-tour briefings and judgment. Fortunately, we are blessed with a hugely talented pool of local photographers in Canada who can still provide coverage at events whilst I race to the airport repacking my kit as I go.

Everyone will tell you that Afghanistan is a great place to take pictures. No one will inform you it’s a very difficult place to take pictures in the peak of summer, both for cameras and photographers.

It’s my second time embedding in Afghanistan, my previous embed was in February 2010, a time of year when the air is still clear after winter and the light is soft like no other place on earth.

This time I’m embedded in Kandahar in midsummer, at the edge of the Reg desert that spreads all the way to Pakistan and heats up to 45 degrees Celsius. The sunrise is at 4:30 and by 7:00 it’s already impossible to take any pictures due to the brightness of the sun.

The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver presented some rarely seen challenges for Reuters photographers on assignment at the winter games.

Rain! Rain! And more rain!

Photographer Mark Blinch waits to shoot Olympic action. REUTERS/Andre Forget/QMI agency

Cypress Mountain, the home of snowboarding and freestyle skiing was quite possibly the worst Olympic venue of all time. Photographers were confronted with rain, fog and constantly shifting photo positions. As the snow melted positions became useless and had to be changed. Communications failed in the wet and the organizers moved snow from the finish area to other parts of the course to keep the events moving. Despite the trying conditions some wonderful pictures were made. Highlights included Alexandre Bilodeau, winning Canada’s first ever gold medal on home soil and the dazzling Shaun White in the halfpipe.