Author Archives: Alps Photo Chamonix

Mission WOW Women of Winter Ski Touring Weekend

Scott Mission WOW

Women of Winter Ski Touring Weekend in Italy

I had a fun weekend as the photographer for the Scott Sports sponsored Mission WOW Women of Winter introduction to ski touring and the back country event in the Val Ferret Italy on March 23rd and 24th. I worked the still camera, and Rachel of Seven Twenty Productions did the videos … the result of which you can find here on You Tube.

25 women joined in for the event, which aims to introduce women to ski touring and develop back country safety skills in a fun safe environment, accompanied by 3 IFMGA/UIAGM female mountain guides (Ulrika Asp, Caroline George and Isabelle Santoire ) and one ISIA ski instructor (Pia Palm).

The ski touring weekend attracted a range of ages, with most women falling somewhere in their 20s. Jo Guest from Mission WOW organised the event, and Scott Sports was happy to offer extensive sponsorship. The purpose of Mission WOW is to introduce women to activities they may not otherwise do on their own, promote more women to participate in sports, and create a great women-friendly environment for networking, friend making and skill building. They also run summer Women on Wheels and Women in Water WOW events.

The weekend started  at Ravanel Sports in Les Praz with ski and boot-fitting for women who wanted to try out the latest Scott Sports ski touring set up. Some women who were boarders were given split boards to try out for touring. Other women brought their own personal ski touring gear.

The guides and instructors came along to give advice and meet everyone. Scott provided skis from their Mountain and Freeride ranges (Crus’Air, Powd’Air and Pure models for example) fitted with Dynafit touring bindings, and climbing skins from Colltex. Ravanel provided ski touring boots to match the Dynafit bindings for those who needed them. The Ravanel ski techs made sure to set up the ski bindings’ release setting properly for the technical ability of each skier. The women who signed up included English, Swedish and French speaking women and the guides were all either bi or tri-lingual to give instruction in English, Swedish or French.

The next morning, we met up at the Montenvers car park in Chamonix. A Scott Sports car brought along the skis and boots from Ravanel, and the guides and instructor made sure everyone had the correct equipment before setting out, including avalanche safety gear (transciever, shovel and probe),  lending transceivers where required.

We car-pooled to go under Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in western Europe via the Tunnel du Mont Blanc and into Italy. From the car park at Entreves, we hopped a bus which shuttled us boldly up some steep switch back turns to Planpincieux and into the beautiful Val Ferret which is part of the town of Courmayeur Italy.

 

This small village at 1400m altitude is the start of cross-country track in a long wide hanging valley, and was also the start of our ski tour. A good general description of the many routes, hikes, climbs, snow shoe trails and ski tours you can find in that area, as well as a topo map is on Camp to Camp website.

The ski tour follows near the cross country trail and goes gradually 200m uphill over around 10km of distance until it reaches the small town of Lavachey. From Lavachey the trail goes steeply through the woods for another 200m to reach the Walter Bonatti hut at 2025m altitude. We did take a break along the way for some thick hot chocolate and great Italian coffee

Everyone reached the hut at their own pace, some guides taking the faster tourers, and others staying back with the slower groups. No one felt rushed. After a short break at the hut for lunch, it was time for the kick turn clinic back on the hill behind the hut.

Kick turns are the way that ski tourers get up steep hillsides, turning the skis quickly and efficiently around sharp corners when the hill is too steep to allow a « 5 point » style gradual turn around a corner as one can do in flatter terrain. The first step of a kick turn involves nearly a ballet move, as your upper foot is brought quickly around in the opposite direction to your lower foot to rest above your current track. Then you move your poles uphill and shift the weight onto the upper foot, potentially kick the back foot out to release the toe (the heel of your foot is not attached to the ski when in touring mode) and turn the lower ski around your upper leg’s boot cuff to bring it into a parallel track. And off you go. These turns are known as « conversions » in French. Once the technique is firmly mastered, you do not need to even break stride to complete a conversion turn.

The day was completed with a lovely four course hot meal at the Bonatti hut (the salad included fresh pomegranate and apple !), as well as hot showers ! Climbing skins were hung up to dry and boot liners were pulled out to allow for drying overnight. The Bonatti hut is a rather cush example of a mountain hut compared to many – the beds and pillows are nice, with a decent amount of personal space (despite sleeping dormitory style) and most of us got a good sleep.

The weather forecast was not ideal to do a long ski tour on Sunday so the guides proposed doing many technical workshops or a smaller tour as a choice. So everyone was spared a super early alpine start as would have been required for a longer tour, meeting at 9am after a leisurely breakfast and many cups of tea and coffee. After a pep talk from Jo on positive thinking and learning something from every day you have, even challenging days, everyone split into groups.

Some chose to stay with one guide and learn more mountain skills such as crevasse rescue and other mountain safety techniques and others went on a short ski tour with the other three guides, up to the Tête Entre Deux Sauts above the Bonatti hut. The ski back down to the hut was challenging for most everyone, as the day was an entire white out with little way to tell how the hill was falling away from you. The snow was fresh, deep and heavy rather than light and powdery. But everyone had fun and the guides were sure everyone stayed in a sight line due to the fog. Once back at the hut, everyone did a transceiver search  workshop. The women learned to use their transceivers to find buried avalanche victims, and the proper technique to probe for someone buried under the snow and then dig them out.

At the hut we ate sack lunches (the hut packed lunches for those who did not carry their own) and put skis and packs back on to head through the woods and down the hill.  The snow became heavier still in the woods, and after a break for some play and group shots at Lavachey we headed in « skate ski » mode down the trail back the 10km towards Planpincieux. Some women had developed blisters during the ski tour, but more importantly everyone developed their back country mountain skills and their friendships.

Once back in Chamonix, we all headed to the MBC to enjoy a round of beers, nachos and the raffle that gave away some grab bag goodies from Swatch, Colltex and Scott. As a grand prize, Scott gave away a pair of freeride skis. Rather than simply picking a number out of the pot, the winner was decided via several rounds of very animated « rock, paper, scissors » ! A fun weekend for all.
 
Scott Mission WOW Women of Winter
 

Posted in Event Coverage, Photography, Ski Touring

Idris Skis Promotional Photos

Tom ready to go at the Aiguille du MidiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiIdris SkiTom on his way to a ski testTom on his way to a ski testIdris ski testTom near La Tour Ronde Tour Ronde

This is a series of photos I have done to promote a local business – Idris Ski, a Chamonix valley based hand-built eco-friendly ski manufacturer.

From start to finish, Tom has sourced and built his skis in the most eco-friendly way possible, while retaining high performance. He makes a line of free ride as well as piste skis. His wife Kiyoko helps with fine details and finishing, and gives input to the ski design and oversight to the marketing process. They are a great team and make a great product.

Tom Greenall is someone I have known practically since moving to Chamonix many years back and is a wonderful example of someone who has taken his natural passion and turned it into his livelihood. He built some of his first prototype eco-friendly skis while staying as a room mate with us in Chalet Kobi many years back, so I have been able to observe the development of the product first-hand.

I have always admired Tom’s keen knowledge of all things related to mechanical engineering (his school degree), and his absolute passion for all things ski.Tom makes a point of skiing somewhere at least one day on every month of the year, writes blogs on skiing and is a regular on the Aiguille du Midi lift in Chamonix all year-round.

Combine all this with natural tenacity and an absolute commitment to build the most eco-friendly product possible, and you have an Idris Ski.

Tom has come a long way since those initial days past with prototypes built in the garage, and his Idris skis are really now things of beauty in addition to being a well-performing ski.

I was very happy to photograph and video parts of his hand-built ski manufacturing and ski testing process. And of course, to test his product myself !

Is this a good time to mention that my site is hosted on Fat Cow, a green100% wind-powered web host ?? 😉  It is.

 

Posted in Photography, Ski Touring Tagged , , , , , , , |

Gemmi Triathlon 2012 – Leukerbad Switzerland


I had a great time shooting the tough, nearly all uphill Gemmi triathlon in the Swiss Valais this past weekend.

The course started at Lac de Géronde in the town of Sierre, and then bikers went uphill to the spa town of Loeche-Les-Bains (in German Leukerbad), and then runners gained 1km of height in the 4km of distance on the run (that is steep!!) up to the beautiful Gemmi Pass from Leukerbad. In other words, apart from the swimming, the rest of the triathlon is uphill. It has a small town feel, but attracts some amazing quality athletes due to the naturally tough nature of the event.

The photos in the Flickr set include some « atmosphere shots » as well as some shots of the top men and lots of the women athletes.

I would not have known of the event if not for my multi-sport friend Lyndsay Meyer who also participated in the triathlon.  There were some top Swiss world-class triathletes in the event, even though it is only small ! The Gemmi is run yearly in early September and for the moment you can still sign up within just a few days of the event.

Posted in Event Coverage, Photography

Late season ski touring up the Aiguille du Midi

Tom near La Tour Ronde

Tom near La Tour Ronde on his Idris eco-friendly hand made skis

Late Spring in Chamonix means the ski areas are closed. But skiing goes on ! If the conditions are right, a lot of big steep lines will get skied off of the lift that (almost) never closes – the Aiguille du Midi. Couloirs which are normally ice climbs, like the Gervasutti or the Mallory route on the north face of the Aiguille du Midi become fair game to the extreme skiing crowd. Actually this year, they are not in great condition thanks to a foehn wind storm blowing much of the snow away. Recently some friends went up to ski the Mallory, but ended up rappelling and down-climbing. In any case, this was not what I had in mind for my late spring ski tour up the Midi; I am not quite so hard core. There is easier adventure skiing possible for those not quite ready to put away their planks for the season.

My friend Tom called and suggested getting a coffee. He also had been given a new pair of ski touring boots to try out. And it was forecast to be a beautiful day. Why not combine all this by going up the Midi and tour to the Punta Helbronner before heading back down to Cham ? Well, I am always up for some exercise at altitude with a friend.

Tom and I had actually been talking about going for a tour together all season and had not yet managed to do so – he has been working hard on building his business in eco-friendly wooden hand-made Idris Skis, and things just did not work out between our schedules until last week.

It had been a great snow season this past winter, and so enough crevasses are still bridged (or at least were a few days ago; as I write this it is raining) to allow us to ski 95% of the way back down the Valley Blanche to the Montenvers. We went up on first benne  (local slang for « telecabine » – cable car) and arrived at the Midi station where we exited the lift at 3842m altitude.

Though this was to be a relatively easy day as we were doing nothing steep or very long, we always take the mountains and glaciated terrain seriously. People can and do die on the glaciers around Chamonix each year. So we were equipped with our avalanche beacons, wore our harnesses (to make it easier to pull ourselves out of a crevasse) and carried a lightweight glacier travel rope and our crevasse rescue kits (ice screws, carabiners, pulleys, prusiks). We also wore crampons on our touring boots to descend the Midi ridge. One side of the ridge leads straight down the north face to Chamonix, and the other side slides into a large crevasse. The safety ropes which local mountain guides had put up for the crowds doing the Vallée Blanche in the winter had already been removed for the summer season.

Of course when skiing, all of this glacier kit is in carried your pack or on your harness (along with a camera in my case). This year I have been really happy with my Dynastar Altitrail Powder skis – they are much lighter than my old touring set up but very stiff and so I find them really easy to ski with a fully loaded pack and in difficult snow conditions like breakable crust or crud – they also hold an edge really well on hard pack.

Track upLes Houches and Servoz from the Plan du MidiAiguille du MidiThe Italian Alps and HelbronnerTaculTomAscent on FrostingDent du GMy shadowCrevasses on Tour RondeConstruction at HelbronnerPath to refugeCrevasses on Tour RondeConstruction at HelbronnerPlaqueCourmayeur valleyDescent to TorinoTorino construction zoneSerac fall on the Valley BlancheDent du GAbove the Salle Looking back at the Glacier GLooking backTrain ride home

We skied down and across past the Gros Rognon on firm but still grippy snow, and then stopped to put on our touring skins and climbed up the glacier du Géant to the Punta Helbronner top station. The way up was very firm but not icey – so we left barely a track in the snow.

The Helbronner has a lot of construction going on at the moment – huge diggers and cranes are out everywhere. The upper station was not open for anyone but the workers. Mmm, we could smell the coffee but were not allowed entry. A cat track had been laid with a groomer to suggest where you could now walk down for access to the open lower station with access to the Torino.

Until very recently, there was a lift between Punta Helbronner and the Torino hut that was affectionately known in the local English speaking crowd as the « flying telephone box » or the « James Bond » lift, as it held only a few people at a time. It was often used to do laps on the Toula glacier in between coffees at the lower Pavillion lift station and taking two lifts back to the Punta Helbronner. As of this Spring, the lift between the Torino hut and the Punta Helbronner is shut forever. It is being replaced by a state of the art new system which won’t be fully in service until 2015. The Nuove Funivie Monte Bianco website has details of this ambitious infrastructure project.

So for the moment, you can descend a long and at times very steep and icey (but covered) staircase that is built directly into the side of the mountain to get to the lower Torino hut from Punta Helbronner. And of course you must walk up these stairs later if you want to ski back to Chamonix. I can attest that it is a great quad work out at altitude.

We enjoyed our coffee and the great views of a very green Courmayeur Italy and the Val Ferret. We chatted a bit with the hut keeper and another tourist from Italy (who were both surprised to see ski tourers this late in the ski season) and then we walked back up the stairs to our waiting skis. With a combination of English, our poor Italian and good French we managed to have a fairly long and interesting conversation about snow conditions, construction plans for the lifts and attempt to answer the question – ‘how crazy were we to be coming on ski from Chamonix just to have a coffee at the refugio Torino during the construction?’.

The time spent chatting paid off, as the snow had softened in the strong sun and we got in some very nice spring « frosting on a cake » turns – the upper layer of snow had softened enough to make things smooth as butter, but had not yet turned into summer’s bottomless soupy porridge. Perfect.

We did not go down the traditional « Italian Vallée Blanche » as the we already knew the conditons there were less than ideal. We passed through the normal Vallée Blanche route and quickly passed through the heavily crevassed Salle à Manger section, where there is also danger of serac fall.

Skiing on the flat part of the glacier towards the Montenvers station (our exit point) the snow eventually ran out but we could ski over the ice. Most rocks were still below the surface and it was much faster than walking. As we descended, the skiing alternated between skittering along dirty ice, carefully avoiding rocks, occasional small crevasses and the ever-softer yellowed snow/slush patches. Eventually we had to take off our skis a hundred or so metres before access staircase when the glacial ice gave way to rocky moraine and boulders. We found and ascended the long tourist staircase back to the little lift pods to the Montenvers train station for our descent home.

A nice half day out in the mountains and sun. All for a coffee in Italy (and some photos).

Posted in Ski Touring

What 180 km/hr Foehn Wind Can Do …

Downed trees in Chamonix Mont Blanc

Results of the April 2012 wind storm in Chamonix

Meant to post this a couple of weeks ago but left it in draft status by accident !

On Saturday April 28th 2012 most of Chamonix Mont Blanc was without power for 14 hours through until late Sunday morning. A very strong foehn wind storm attacked Chamonix, causing extensive damage to the town where hundreds, if not thousands of trees came down. People who have lived here all their lives say it was the strongest wind episode to hit the valley since 1967.

Measurements of the gusts were initially 150km/hr from the downtown Chamonix weather stations, and then upgraded to 180km/hr. Normally winds this strong stay up in the high mountain and the valley is protected. But in this case the gusts were racing down from the Mont Blanc side of the valley down to the valley floor, and up the Aiguilles Rouges side. The gusts caused a wave-like action bouncing off the valley sides – this caused the tree branches to spin around violently and is what pulled many trees down. Others came down because trees above them fell into them – in some sections of the woods above Les Bossons on the south side, I saw sections of 20 trees all felled by one or two originally tumbling. On the other side of the valley, the Blaitiere section must have had a wind blast that was incredibly strong – a huge swathe of trees had been snapped literally in half by a blast which then raced down into the Montenvers car park, smashing in the windows of many vans and cars parked there.

Some roofs were ripped off of chalets and refuges, giant healthy old trees were uprooted if they would not break or were snapped in half like twigs; garden furniture and anything not nailed down was blowing around dangerously  all night long. The Aiguille du Midi lift station lost power for most of the night, the Montenvers tourist train was out of commission for a week after the storm while crews cleared hundreds of trees from the tracks and replaced some of the electric towers. Argentiere was less affected but trees came down onto at least one home along the roadside, and the roof of the Refuge du Lognan was ripped completely off. In the moraine area near the Cremerie du Glacier restaurant in Argentiere many trees came down – most of those had shallow root systems.

I took a few photos of some damage in my neighbourhood which are posted on Flickr (click the image above to reach the site for more images). The photos are not particularly spectacular in an artistic way, but they do illustrate just how strong a force the wind can be. Trees we never would have expected to come down due to their size and seemingly good root systems did come down.

What was amazing was that no one was seriously hurt or killed in this storm despite the extensive damage. Clean up is proceeding – the repair crews did a great job of getting all the critical roads open very quickly and now the trail teams are working their way from the valley floor up in altitude clearing the trails for hikers this summer.

On the positive side, sales of chainsaws and auto glass repairs are up – good for those businesses ! And many people will not need to purchase firewood for next winter. Weekends since then have been set to a sound track of many chainsaws whining in all directions surrounding us. I imagine the insurance claims departments are somewhat overloaded.

Posted in Photography

Still Life – Spring Fern

Spring Fern

I love photographing around the garden and woods in the Spring – each day a new plant emerges, changes or flowers. Here I am using a Macro lens and a shallow depth of field to emphasize the unusual shape of the emerging fern. This was taken in my garden, although due to the bokeh (out of focus background due to selective lens blur) it almost looks like a studio shot.

Posted in Photography

Animal portraits

Grace's First Swim

Grace’s First Swim

There are a few things I have learned about photographing animals in action. First, shoot many times more photos than you think you will need in order to get a really good shot. They move fast, fall in and out of focus and their expression changes in an instant. With digital this has become a lot easier … no film to waste, just delete any really bad shots after downloading the photos. Don’t bother to edit in camera – just use CF cards with enough memory for your shooting needs. I have a fast motor drive on the EOS 7D which makes it easy.

Get in close whether physically or using a lens. This will depend on the animals. If they are playing well and uninhibited, you can get in there with a wide angle. If you don’t want to interfere or disturb their play, use a longer lens.

Clicking on the photo will bring you to some other fun swimming and doggy snow play shots in the Flickr set.

Posted in Animals, Photography

Save Your Memories with the Right Digital Photo Backup Strategy

Tips on Digital Photo Backup

Most professional photographers are artsy geeks – photography is a fairly technical practice and many of you may already have a digital photo backup strategy even more thorough and complex than mine. But in case you are not a techie geek – maybe you are just the person in your family who takes the most photos and is thus are more or less « in charge » of recording your family history – here are some important backup considerations for you.

With my digital photos now taking so much more space per image on my Canon EOS 7D compared to my old Canon EOS 20D, I very quickly eat up hard drive space.  A couple of years ago I stopped being able to store all my images on my MacBook Pro due to hard drive space limits. I went from keeping all images, to keeping the past 2 years on my hard drive, then only the current  year … and now I can’t even store a full year of photos on it. Aside from getting a desktop like a MacPro, I will never again be able to store all my photos on my main computer.

So, it presents a problem, in that Time Machine can no longer automatically back up my photos as they are not on my main computer. Hmm. What should I do for backups ? My initial reaction was to copy my photos manually to another drive. Two copies. One was my Mac which TimeMachine backed up, and the other was a plug-in desktop external drive. I did that for a few years. I guess I was lucky …

Three is better than Two

Always keep at least 3 backups of each image on 3 physically different drives (not partitions of the same drive), ideally with one of those backups in another physical location to the main one you use daily.

I heard from Corey Rich at photography workshop that 3 was the least number of backups to keep, based on his experience with near-misses in the past. He should know, he has shot for major magazines and made his life off of photography since he got out of school. Lucky and talented bastard. 😉

I am glad I listened, because this year I had 2 backup drives go out within a week of each other, leaving me with a single copy of all my digital photos for the past 11 years ! I could have lost them all if I had only copied the images to disk twice. Whew. Drives just do not last very long these days.

DVD

Some photographers additionally burn their files to DVD after every shoot. This is OK assuming you might only need to get those photos out again in the next year or so for your client for reprints – but DVD media, all by itself, will degrade over time. It just does. There are a lot of articles on this out there about disappearing movies etc., trust me. So absolutely 100% do not use DVD as your only photo backup type. Use hard drives as well.

In the old days of negatives, you had one original and if you had some natural disaster that affected your storage area, your entire career’s worth of negatives could be lost in the process, leaving you only with any prints you had made that were stored elsewhere. But natural disasters were rare, and you could buy water proof storage units (fires were more problematic however).

Now with digital recording media you do have a chance, if properly planned, to escape that fate entirely. But if you do not plan it properly (keep multiple copies of your backups), a hard disk error can wipe out your entire photo collection in one fell swoop.  And it is practically guaranteed that every computer hard drivewill fail within 3-5 years of heavy use – so one could say that photographers are definitely under more threat of their photos disappearing now than in the « old days » since computer hard drives fail at a much higher rate than a natural disaster would occur.

RAW vs JPG

I also have switched from shooting .jpg to always shooting the much larger and richer RAW files. When I stopped shooting film professionally in 2001 and moved to France, I spent a few years between 2001-2005 shooting rather crummy (now that you look back on it) digital with a Nikon 775 because it was easy to use for casual shots and even had a screw on wide angle lens, and saving film for « special occasions » as film was very expensive to process in Europe. The file sizes were minuscule even on « large » – just around 1MB and RAW was not an option.

When I made the « final switch » in 2005 from film to digital upon purchase of my  Canon EOS 20D, replacing my beloved old EOS 1N film camera (I had 2 but had sold one already), I « wanted » to shoot this thing called RAW and knew from reading articles it was better in detail, but in practice I found shooting RAW was difficult because you had to Photoshop each image separately and that was slow. Workflow was difficult. This was back when the RAW format was relatively new and most computer programs did not even support showing it in a preview window.

So if I was shooting something I knew was really interesting I shot both RAW and .jpg, but as I was not shooting professionally anymore at that stage I often shot just .jpg to preserve card space on longer trips. The file sizes then were around 2MB for a .jpg and 8MB for a RAW CR2 file. Now, on my 7D the RAW CR2 files are close to 25MB a piece … and if I ever get my dream Canon EOS 1DX … watch out. RAW files do eat up disk space, but they are far superior to .jpg files.

RAW is of course better – you can compare the quality difference to having the original negative in film days, rather than keeping the 60-minute photo store’s print as your only copy of your image. It holds vastly more data about the image than the in-camera processed JPG file does. I now shoot only RAW … but this is because of improvements in the digital darkroom realm.

Workflow Management in Digital

I changed my mind entirely about always shooting RAW when I researched photo management software and bought Adobe Lightroom, where the RAW workflow is totally automated. Another good good product for Mac is Apple’s Aperture and it has the same features regarding RAW processing. You can read many comparisons of the two and make your decision. Be sure to compare the most recent versions of the software, as that is what you would purchase. Both offer free trial versions for about 30 days so you can use them for a bit and make your final decision. It is money well spent – I don’t know why I waited so long to try it – I had no idea how much easier these workflow tools could make my ability to produce decent images for sharing and selling.

The RAW files will be exported in whatever format you need after you do your adjustments in Lightroom, with all your changes automatically applied, no matter what size or format you are exporting. It integrates with Photoshop and other editing software if you need to do major work on the image that Lightroom does not do (retouching sections of the shot to get rid of logos for stock use etc.) and you can make a separate copy for this export so that your original is always there, just like your negatives in the old days. Again, a dream come true. If I am shooting a fast-moving sports event I can use up 3-4 16GB media cards in a day ! Now I never shoot .jpg – I just buy more CF cards for long shoots, and always always shoot RAW.

Oh … I do not recommend iPhoto as a photo management tool if you take a lot of pictures. Or care about your photos. I started to use it and thought it was really not so bad. I often still had to use Photoshop for my important images, but for those casual shots between friends it seemed just fine. Then as my hard drive got full and I wanted to move images to external drives, I had issues in iPhoto.

iPhoto could not be reset to find the photos under the new drive automatically – I had to click on every single photo individually and answer thousands of  « helpful » messages that iPhoto sent out telling me my original photos were missing whenever I would try to use them after moving the underlying folder. In Lightroom or Aperture you can redirect the software to the new folder very easily by clicking on the parent folder and pointing it to the new drive. Not so in iPhoto – each photo must be re-directed one by one. When you have thousands of images to re-direct, this is just unbearable.

Secondly, in iPhoto you stand a very good chance of accidentally losing the original photo and being stuck with only a thumbnail if you do not realise what all the import options really do in iPhoto (the descriptions of what they do are not well-worded).  Luckily this never happened to me … it *almost* happened but I still had the photos on my CF card – and I consider myself a seasoned intelligent end-user of computer software. If you decide anyhow to use iPhoto because it is included on your Mac and integrates with other iLife programs, be sure to always download your photos into a separate folder using your camera’s import software and then import them into iPhoto in a separate step, without deleting the original.

Posted in Photo Tech Tip, Photography

Having Problems with WD External Drives for Mac ?

 

Western Digital My Passport Essential SE

WD MyPassport Essential issues with MacBook Pro

Just a quick note in case this helps anyone else with the same problem with WD External drives for Mac – specifically  MyPassport Essential – working properly on their Mac.

In the past 2 years I have had to return 4 different Western Digital (WD) MyPassport Essential series drives to the manufacturer. I use these to hold redundant back ups of my photographs. The drives were a dream made reality when they came on the market – totally portable, powered off of the connection cable to your Mac and they hold a whopping 1TB of data. How great is that ?

I immediately bought a few of the drives – they were priced right as well. The first one had to be returned 3 times to get one that worked (early versions of these drives had cable issues where the cable was not robust enough to support powering the drive). Then after that, they stabilized and I started to trust them as true backup copies of my data, not just as portable « part time » drives when traveling.

Usually when I am in Adobe Lightroom importing new shots, I automatically copy the images first to a more sturdy desk top non-portable hard drive, and make sure I end up with 2 additional copies to the WD smaller portable drives. These let me work on my images when traveling and make it easier to carry things around and work wherever I am if I have the chance and also provide redundant backups of my data.

But while I have been impressed with the size and portability of the drives, I have had several of them give major problems on the MacBook Pro. I had the same problems on my OS Leopard and Snow Leopard. I even had the Geniuses at Apple Geneva check my Mac in case that was the issue, but the drives did the same thing on their machines too. They do disappearing acts. Often in the middle of copying a large set of data they simply stop working. I get a message saying I cannot power off the drive because it is in use or to be exact the phrase the Mac tosses up is :

« WD My Passport 0740 Media is in use and cannot be powered off. »

– of course, I am not trying to power off my WD External drive for my Mac … something in the operating system is dropping it for some reason, right in the middle of copying data to it. Or other times, they do not appear when plugged in and must be unplugged and plugged in again a few times. Or I must even re-boot the Mac to get it to recognise the drive. Not so much fun if you had work to do with that drive and are hours away from your other data copies.

I had searched high and low on internet forums for an answer, and finally yesterday I found and did something on MacRumors forum that (fingers crossed, knock wood) seems to have worked to fix the random power down issue.

I had  just received a brand new drive in the mail and returned the old drive (which I thought was failing) on an RMA. By the way, WD support is actually quite good and prompt for drive replacement – the website is easy to use and the support team answers your mails. (Good customer support – what a concept !) They just don’t seem to know the answer to this problem, except to diagnose it as a failing drive. As I was trying to copy my data onto the new drive, it repeatedly disappeared, often with that message and with another one saying the file could not be copied and an error code. I was told to go ahead and use the RMA process to replace the drive. Oh … I could read the drive from a friend’s PC … another hint.

Following the MacRumors forum suggestion I found via Googling the exact error message, I uninstalled the WD SmartWare from Applications by using the WD « uninstall » icon on my Mac and …. violà ! I have been copying data onto the new drive for 2 days now without issue.

Prior to that it would not go more than a minute or two – sometimes only 30 seconds – before shutting itself down. What stupid software you have created Western Digital … and in case anyone from your company is listening, you are probably wasting a lot of money on replacing people’s drives simply because of that poor drive management software.

If you are on a Mac and want to use a WD MyPassport as a Time Machine, uninstall the WD SmartWare. There is no need, it is redundant and provides you no benefit and it seems to interfere with drive power.

If you are someone like me using the drives for copies of digital photo backups, again there is also no real need for that WD software – I have Lightroom automatically create the 2nd copy and then manually copy a 3rd version. If I wanted to, I could (and some day will still do) set up an automated Mac job with Automator or another tool to keep them in sync automatically. In any case, I had installed SmartWare thinking it would make the drive run better as it also has some drive monitoring technology (temperature monitoring or something like that) … But in reality, it seems to mess things up more than it helps.

 

Posted in Photo Tech Tip, Photography

It was not to be … Patrouille des Glaciers 2012

Since the FFME Championnat de France épreuve de sprint race in Chamonix in January, I had not been able to arrange my schedule to photograph another ski mountaineering race all season. Finally, it seemed I would be able shoot the Patrouille des Glaciers, a race in the Swiss alps from Zermatt to Verbier via Arolla, held every 2 years. There are several courses (and some shorter versions from Zermatt to Arolla or Arolla to Verbier) and I wanted to photograph the long course with the national teams competing.

I left Chamonix by car at around 4am, but would still reach the La Chaux chairlift check-in station in plenty of time to catch my hard core skimo racing friends in team 2338, Lyndsay Meyer and Nina Silitch who hoped to be passing through with their teammate Sari Anderson just after the fastest men in the race.

The Patrouille des Glaciers is run in teams of 3 and much of the course has to be skied while roped together. The race is fully manned by the Swiss Army and places in this prestigious and historic race are hard to come by, so coveted by the ski mountaineer racing crowd. The start times for the teams are staggered. The earliest times for departure are given to teams expected to go slower, and later starting times are given to the fastest teams (such as Killian Jornet, the eventual winner this year).

This year’s US women’s team have competed in other skimo races previously and formed their team for the PDG with Sari flying out from Colorado especially for the race (Nina and Lyndsay are Alps-based Americans). They had a departure of midnight and hoped to get to the areas above Verbier by around 8am.

I checked their progress before I left Vallorcine to enter into Swiss phone territory using the PDG Android app that the organisers had been kind enough to invent for their race. They seemed to be moving along well, as did another team of women that I was following who included my friend and local awesome ski instructor and BASI Level 4 European Mountain Safety trainer Alison Culshaw, as part of a British women’s team doing her first PDG, having recently been bitten by the bug of ski mountaineer racing.

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As I drove up the Swiss Val des Bagnes, there seemed to be an awful lot of traffic coming from the direction of Verbier … I hoped it was just traffic coming from the Grand St Bernard tunnel, but as I approached Le Chable below Verbier, the headlights kept coming in streams. The car park was still full when I pulled up, and loads of people were getting out of their cars and putting on their touring gear – so I did the same.

I went up to the cash desk to get a lift ticket but was told that the race had been cancelled due to an avalanche at Pas de Chat, a check point between Arolla and the Rosablanche at Verbier. They did not think anyone was hurt, but said the race was stopped. The decision to stop the race was the right one , but heartbreaking for the athletes who had trained so hard. We had two weeks of snow/rain in a rather cold April, followed by a sudden intense warming in the day before the race. The freezing point the night before the race was above 3000m. Also, very high winds were forecast – up to 90km/hr at the altitudes the racers would be going.

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Posted in Event Coverage, Photography, Ski Mountaineer Racing Tagged , |