a visual journal by vancouver photographer tristan casey.
images + stories of exploring british columbia for summer.
PORTFOLIO / CONTACT / NEWS / VANCOUVER WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY
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sunday morning breakfast, watching the ships go by, british columbia.
*photos shot on a canon 1v with kodak portra -
a late summers swim near the end of september in british columbia.
secret beach; hike in, hike out.
*photos shot on a canon 1v with kodak portra and ilford xp2 -
did anyone else notice how beautiful vancouver’s february was?
best part part about living in the city is gettin’ out of it.*photos shot on a canon 1v + yashica t4 with kodak portra
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the photos above were taken this past november in oahu on kodak film.
i’m switching my business and my passion back to film this year. slowly.and it scares me.
business wise it means a greater financial investment back into my practice. but that isn’t what has me worried. and it’s not even the concern that the world may not be able to tell the difference between an instagram filter and film. it’s that people might see something a little more raw, less saturated or rather, less vivid and consider it lesser quality compared to the hd/blu ray world we now live in.
photography for me has always been the attempt of capturing a future memory. moments. to take something of the world we live in and create a living-image of the visuals in our minds. but my memories have never been crystal clear vivid images. reflecting over specific times, peoples beauty reaches new heights that cannot be described with hard lines but with strokes of a paint brush where flaws or pores are forgotten in a haze. almost like a vivid dream where peoples definitive looks tend to not exist after we wake up. i’ve never had someone ask me to describe cloud for color what a sunset looked like. we tend to find a lot of beauty in what is left out. that missing part of the story that super charges us with curiosity. that lack of clarity that makes us want to focus closer. a human trait that we may be losing.
the world is changing. probably for the better. new solutions to every aspect of our lives show up every day, making life easier and faster. but somewhere in all of it, the demand for bigger, brighter, more detailed images keeps growing too. whether it’s high definition or 3d, the world is asking for something bigger than the life we see around us and clearer than the visuals in our minds.
films greatest strength may be in it’s most obvious weakness.
it lacks something. it is almost as if something is missing from the visual when looking upon them. like someones put a thin veil between you and what you are viewing.
it looks like my memories.
so much of photography is about searching for life lived and capturing it to be cherished for future use. the moment needed to be held onto for a little longer than it actually existed, so you took a part of it with you. digital photography has made this so conflicting. you now take a picture and you review it immediately. this seems to have brought photography into a new realm. where we once captured for future use, we now capture to check off the list of life lived. we are losing the ability to submerse ourselves into the moments infront of us as taking a digital image and having it in palm has a disassociating effect to what we are currently in. how we remember life is a bizarre and inconsistant thing. we add things, we remove a lot, rearrange and dramatize. digital has the ability to keep everything as it was and virtually suck the romance out of that experience.
there isn’t a specific purpose for writing this.
and this isn’t supposed to be an attack on digital. i shoot digital. it has it’s place in the world, especially in the commercial/produced side of visuals. this is more so regarding the life we live day to day. but this isn’t even about telling people to stop taking digital pictures much less to tell anyone they need to start shooting film again. it’s sort of being done to console myself.the world i live in seems to have a dream like quality to it. i think digital is trying to remind me of a more literal side to what is out there. but so much of what is inside of me says to close my eyes and know then that what i see is the world i want to be in, open my eyes, and keep walking forward.
- tristan
*color photos shot on a canon 1v + contax t2 with kodak portra
**black and white photos on a canon 1v with ilford xp2 -
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haiku stairs (also known as the stairway to heaven), hawaii.
‘illegal.’ ‘security guard.’ ‘you’ll get kicked out.’ ‘your tires will be slashed.’ ‘you have to go well before sunrise.’ ‘try 3am.’
the haiku stairs is a stair accent / hiking trail on oahu island, hawaii. built in 1942 out wooden ladders spiked into the ground, it was originally created to build and maintain a radio tower for the island and the navy.
in the 1950’s, the wooden stairs were replaced by metals ones. as you climb them, you can see the original wood ones scatted across the mountains. the trail was closed to the public in ‘87, then the state revitalized the stairs in 2003 only to discover that the stairs must remain banned between a dispute over who should handle the rights and insurance of the stairs.
the stairs, which at most times feel like ladders, run across ridges and spines of the cliffs with sharp, wetland drop offs to both sides of the railing.
to gain access to them, you have to park in a suburbs that detestes usage of the hike, going to lengths of having every yard stationed with barking dogs left out at night to wake people up. they will also, allegedly, slash your tires if they find out your car is one of the hikers.
once jumping a barbed wire fence, you must pray you made it earlier than the security guard that’s there seven days a week. sunrise to sunset.this means, to increase your luck, you need to go around 3am to not only get there before him, but get high up enough that he’s willing not to chase you and pull you down (he camps at the base with a stair-master under a tent. he basically is the stair-master). this must all be in an attempt to watch the sunrise at the top as even though you have starlight and headlamps to guide your way, you can’t see much further than ten feet infront of you. which, when you’re on a 45° grade staircase with drop offs that might kill you to either side, you can quickly see why no one would climb it post sunset. as we climbed in the dark, we could visibly see the clouds we would be entering into and experienced dense fog and face whipping rain while inside. which is something i don’t recommend for the faint of heart when you have to cling to wet ladder with a free fall below you while in these clouds. the scale of the city below you in contrast to your view-point brings you to a loss for words. hawaii’s mountains are not like many i’ve seen before. They are so close to the coast that many of oahu’s mountain hikes start in peoples own backyards.
i photographed the ascent in black and white and the sunrise / decent in color only because i needed a faster iso for the dark. as soon as sunrise started, i realized it was exactly what i needed as the world itself came into color. the clouds dispersed, the views opened up, and you could see for the first time the heights you had reached and a new level of awe hit you where you once thought you couldn’t get any higher.
*black and white photos shot on a contax t2 with ilford xp2
**color photos shot on a canon 1v with portra 160 -
the now extinct, hotspring island, haida gwaii.
no-one could have ever of guessed that we would be amongst the last people to visit such a rare place in the world. -in august of 2012, a group of nine, we drove to prince rupert and ferried the 8 hours into the pacific to a place once called the queen charlotte islands. now haida gwaii (or rather, again).
set off in the pacific, the archipelago is the most remote part of british columbia and said to have skimmed past the last 2000 years of the ice age before the rest of b.c. a place of heightened nature that defines bc’s mantra, super natural.
a passionate group for the outdoors and fuelled by books like the golden spruce by john vaillant, we committed to a two week trip. the plan: road trip and ferry to haida gwaii and kayak through the gwaii haanas, a 138 island national park.
one of the oldest, rawest places in the world, haida gwaii’s population is under 5000. between the staff and tourism in gwaii haanas, a place where you could be a minimum of 2-4 hours by speed boat to the nearest town, i would guess the population at 50 in high season. though that might be generous. either way, kayaking the gwaii haanas is the epitome of getting into nature. you go days without seeing another person while seeing wildlife moment after moment.
our trip was a seven day kayak-camping exploration of gwaii haanas, jumping from island to island every day to set up a new camp, all the way to our final destination, hotspring island. -to say it was cold in august was an understatement. days averaged at 9° celcius. which was sometimes hard to fathom when you knew you were in summer and waited all year for warm weather only to take a trip into some sort of snow globe.
to cite a fun sentence from wikipedia’s entry on haida gwaii:
precipitation is typically extremely frequent, occurring on around two-thirds of all days even in relatively shielded areas, and direct sunlight is scarce, averaging around 3 to 4 hours per day.that said, while there were many days of going to bed in the rain, waking up to it, changing in it and eating in it; we did catch some flawless, hot summer days. a rarity to be found.
tear down camp, breakfast, five-seven hour days in the kayak, make camp, dinner. every day for a week. seven days of rations, separated by day, then by meal. so if you wanted more than you packed, you’d support andrew’s fishing.pure, raw wild like i’ve never seen before. all to one direction, hotspring island. mother natures destination resort spa. between entire days in a kayak while being hit by heavy rain to never getting to properly stretch your legs while seated in the ocean, the hot springs were heaven on earth. natures infinity pools, they were deep enough to submerge, long enough to do a good few strokes, all with soothing just-barely-bearable temperatures. we watched the sun set while low hanging clouds rolled over islands in a way that appeared to swallow them whole.
but now it’s all gone.
two months later, on october 27th, a 7.7 magnitude earth quake hit haida gwaii (the second largest to ever hit canada, preceding the 1949 queen charlotte earthquake) shaking the entire archipelago and sealing off the springs on hotspring island. stopping the flow of water, the islands three pools are now dried up. while locals hope that the next quake could reopen the springs and bring life back to the island, it is for the time being, and possibly a lifetime, gone.
we only had one evening, one sunset to experience such a place. but i think we are all able to reflect well, knowing that even with such a short time, we took nothing for granted. we expressed and shared our love and awe for it and left knowing we had experienced a place like no other.*black and white photos shot on a contax t2 with ilford xp2
**color photos shot on a yashica t4 with portra 160 -
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the net (a requiem).
just below the sea to sky highway, consolidated all into one cliff face was a place of summer dreams. while swimming, cliff jumping and sunsets are still more than one could ask for, it’s diving board and dream-like hammock are no more. made out of patches of fishing nets and positioned high up in the trees, it had the power to remind you that all you could want from life are the simple things. -
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