Category Archives: Photography

STOP aux CIRQUES AVEC ANIMAUX à Chamonix et sa vallée (Haute Savoie – 74)

avril
24
2016
by Alps Photo Chamonix | 2 Comments

Normalement, je ne suis pas politique sur mon site de photo, mais j’aimerais promouvoir une petition qui concerne Chamonix et Les Houches, en demandant nos Mairies d’interdir les cirques avec animaux. On peut le signer en tant que resident ou touriste.

Vous pouvez signer cette petition ici –  Stop aux Cirques avec Animaux .

Messieurs,

On souhaite par le biais de cette pétition attirer votre attention sur les conditions de vie et d’exploitation des animaux dans les nombreux cirques présents chaque année dans nos communes notamment avec le Cirque Star, plusieurs cirques Médrano différents, Cirque Jean Richard etc.. 

Comme nous les animaux sont doués d’émotions, ressentent la peur et la douleur. Ils tissent des liens sociaux forts et comme nous souhaitent seulement vivre libres.

On oppose donc fermement à l’exploitation et la souffrance d’animaux pour notre « divertissement » .

Et donc vous demander de mettre en place une interdiction des cirques avec animaux dans nos communes.

Pendant la morte saison, les animaux restent dans des boxes de transport, des étables voire même dans des camions ou des remorques. Rares sont les cirques qui ont les moyens ou la volonté d’investir dans des abris adaptés qui ne serviront que quelques mois par an.

Cet enfermement a des conséquences physiques et psychologiques dévastatrices. Une étude américaine révèle que les éléphants captifs passent environ un quart de leurs journées à secouer la tête ou à se balancer compulsivement, tandis que les ours arpentent leur cage de long en large.

Les animaux utilisés par les cirques sont constamment transportés d’une représentation à une autre dans un environnement où leurs besoins les plus élémentaires ne peuvent être satisfaits. Plus de 90 % du temps, ils sont enfermés dans des wagons pour « bestiaux », ou des enclos temporaires mornes, et peuvent être battus et punis dans le cadre de méthodes de dressage inhumaines. Cela n’a rien d’un « divertissement ».

Les animaux dans les cirques sont privés de tout ce qui leur est naturel et important. Leur équilibre mental est brisé et ils sont isolés, enchaînés, seuls, dégradés et désœuvrés. Des comportements tels que faire les cent pas, mordre les barreaux, tourner en rond et l’automutilation sont fréquents chez les animaux du spectacle. Il est maintenant reconnu que ce comportement névrotique est causé par la captivité et un mode de vie artificiel.

Tous les animaux détenus dans les cirques ont des besoins spécifiques. Certains, comme les lions, ont besoin d’un climat chaud ; d’autres, comme les ours, d’un climat plus frais. Tous ont besoin d’espace, d’activités, de liens sociaux, d’eau et de nourriture en quantité suffisante. Dans les cirques, ils n’ont rien de tout ça. Ils sont enfermés dans des cages de transport ou des enclos étriqués d’où ils ne sortent que pour faire leur numéro.

Parce que les animaux ne font pas naturellement de la bicyclette, ne se tiennent pas sur leur tête, ne font pas l’équilibre sur des ballons ou ne sautent pas à travers des cerceaux de feu, les entraîneurs utilisent des fouets, colliers serrés, muselières, matraques électriques, baguettes avec crochet (« bull hock ») et autres outils douloureux pour les forcer à effectuer leur spectacle. La punition physique a longtemps été la méthode standard de dressage pour les animaux dans les cirques.

Les animaux en captivité sont connus pour « craquer » sous la pression. Il y a eu des dizaines de morts et de blessés humains documentés attribuables aux animaux détenus dans les cirques ou d’autres environnements de captivité.

 

A leurs places, préfèrerions nous pas plutôt vivre LIBRES avec les risques que cela comporte mais profiter de notre liberté, entourés des nôtres ou alors vivre une vie de solitude dans une cage, parcourant des kilomètres et des kilomètres dans des camions, exécuter des tours pour le bon vouloir des dresseurs, être soumis à leurs volontés et faire des tours contre nature comme par exemple s’asseoir sur ses fesses pour un éléphant ce qui peut occasionner de graves blessures internes.

Ne vaut-il pas mieux encourager les programmes de préservation des espèces dans les pays d’origines de ces animaux et montrer de très beaux reportages aux enfants et adultes qui souhaitent découvrir ces animaux dans leurs milieux naturels ?

Interview du maire de La Ciotat, Monsieur Boré Patrick , qui vient d’interdire les cirques avec animaux sauvages:

Vidéos de dressage et des conséquences sur les animaux dont certaines sont tournées en France :

En votre qualité de maire et selon l’article 211 du Code Rural, vous avez le pouvoir de prendre des mesures de nature à prévenir les risques pour la sécurité des personnes que peut présenter la présence d’animaux sur le territoire de votre commune et ainsi refuser l’installation d’un cirque détenant des animaux.

Un nombre croissant de communes françaises comme La Ciotat récemment, La commune de Truchtersheim (67), la Ville de Thaon Les Vosges, Bagnolet, Montreuil, Ilkirch, Vernaisson et Chassieu et de villes et pays à l’étranger ont restreint ou interdit l’utilisation d’animaux pour l’amusement tels que la Belgique, l’Iran, la Catalogne en Espagne, la Suède, le Danemark, la Finlande, l’Autriche, le Mexique, les Etats Unis, le Canada, la Slovénie et l’Inde…

Les temps ont changé. Il n’est plus acceptable de traiter les animaux comme des objets pour notre amusement. On espère que vous serez d’accord avec cette position et que vous allez vous aussi montrer l’exemple aux autres villes de France en refusant d’accorder des permis pour les cirques d’animaux sauvages sur le territoire public.

On a conscience que c’est une décision difficile à prendre mais c’est une décision courageuse.

Voici un modèle de délibération pour interdire l’installation de cirques avec animaux sur votre commune: http://www.cirques-de-france.fr/sites/default/files/doc_a_tel/Delib_Conseil_municipal.pdf

Les Français et les résidents permanents étrangères habitant dans vos communes, ainsi que les touristes qui se soucient des animaux vous remercieront d’avoir pris cette décision progressiste.

Dans l’attente de votre réponse, veuillez agréer, Messieurs, nos salutations distinguées.

Also posted in Animals, Chamonix local issue

Reportage sur la Vallée Blanche

avril
20
2016
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off

Avril 2016 à Chamonix a apporté de la belle neige fraiche en fin de saison et le soleil brillant également. Tous ayant pour résultat, une belle série de photos d’une récente descente de la Vallée Blanche que je posté sur Flickr.

Vallée Blanche 2016

Cette itinéraire de ski hors piste  mythique se fait à partir de l’Aiguille du Midi à Chamonix et se terminant soit à la gare du Montenvers à la fin de la saison, ou à Chamonix par un l’escalade pour sortir du glacier et une descent par voie de Mottets jusqu’aux Planards pendant la mi-saison s’il y a de la bonne neige.

Il est normalement préférable de le faire avec un guide de haute montagne. Il existe de nombreuses variantes de la route, mais chacun d’entre eux impliquent en descendant la crête étroite du Midi, puis un ski sur un glacier ouvert avec les dangers objectifs de crevasses, ponts de neige faibles, la chute des séracs et les avalanches.

Il est en haute montagne, et il ne soit pas sécurisé en aucune façon – votre sécurité est de votre responsabilité. Pas pour les debutants ou des gens timides !

Comme vous pouvez le voir sur les photos, nous avons repéré plusieurs avalanches et négocié tout à fait quelques crevasses sur notre chemin. Et nous avons eu quelques traces fraîches étonnantes dans la neige dans la première partie de la descente. Le risque d’avalanche était de niveau 3 sur la journée, et nous avons fait la descente en suivant un itinéraire qui n’a pas été trop raide pour atténuer le danger.

Cliquez sur la photo pour voir l’ensemble.

Et ne hésitez pas à me contacter si vous souhaitez que je documente votre descente de la Vallée Blanche ou autre aventure de ski à Chamonix ou ses environs!

Also posted in Event Coverage, Ski Touring

(English) Remembering Barbara

nov.
06
2015
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off

Désolé, cet article est seulement disponible en Anglais Américain. Pour le confort de l’utilisateur, le contenu est affiché ci-dessous dans une autre langue. Vous pouvez cliquer le lien pour changer de langue active.

When I was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of my favourite photography courses was the one taught by Barbara DeGenevieve.

Untitled 4

She taught many other classes after the 80s, but I took her « alternative processes » course, learning to print on various surfaces from negatives using all sorts of « forgotten » photographic processes. Her gift was not just in teaching about these interesting old ways to create photographs, but in opening people’s minds.

Her own work was edgy, feminist and challenging – something really needed at the time and something that definitely encouraged me to pursue my photography to wherever it led me.

She also opened many in the class to things beyond photography techniques of course, as any good teacher does. She was one of the first people in my life that I recall mentioning how much food and what she ate affected her (I was already vegetarian, but she was talking about things like eating energy foods like fruit for breakfast rather than toast and how it affected her mood and stopped her from having an energy crash. The sorts of things that the rest of the world would not pick up on as « trendy » and healthy eating for a few more years). I remember other things – like when we had our class critique at her house that she put tampons out in the bathroom toilet for anyone to use – the same way we all put toilet paper out. A small thing at the time but also shocking as then there was literally no one else doing this – and certainly one that made me suddenly realise how much « period shaming » affects women and I later started to do the same at my house. She was a proud and brave feminist and a wonderful photographer, teacher and person. This was after I had attended a year at the all women’s Barnard College, where you’d think this sort of thing was common place already (it wasn’t).

As far as photography goes, I was having a hard time with my life then and my work was just full of expressions of that inner turmoil. She helped challenge me about why I was making certain images and to consider if I was or was not exploiting myself as a subject. I remember also the teaching was shared by the MFA candidate teaching assistant Lewis Toby and it’s only now that I find he is still doing photography and is an underpaid adjunct professor at SAIC (that is par for the course now at universities). It’s too bad really that I didn’t take other classes with her after that first year, but I don’t recall others being offered. I think she was not on staff full time when I was at SAIC and was a visiting professor from U of I at Urbana.

In that photography class I also met a couple of friends who’s friendship has lasted over great distances and many years as well as various entanglements and emotional struggles. Friendships forged in difficulty are not soon forgotten and are part of what shapes your very being. It was an important time in my life, and it’s sad to see bits of it are falling away and dying – much like Chicago itself seems to be falling away and dying, losing it’s soul bit by bit to developers.

So, it was with great sadness that I read she had died of cancer in October last year – and only in her 60s. A life cut short far too soon. And strangely from a cancer that she herself had fought for greater awareness about. It’s also quite sad to me that despite being the chair of the photography department at SAIC by the time she died (she was not in that title when she was my instructor there in the mid 80s) that she still had never had a solo show. Now that she has passed – finally she was finally honoured with one. I am annoyed that I did not hear about this show from my alma mater SAIC until AFTER the show was over.

More reading –

Interieurs

nov.
06
2015
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off

Désolé, cet article est seulement disponible en Anglais Américain. Pour le confort de l’utilisateur, le contenu est affiché ci-dessous dans une autre langue. Vous pouvez cliquer le lien pour changer de langue active.

New Eye Candy

In the past couple of years I have been lucky enough to be asked to photograph some really beautiful properties in the French and Italian Alps. Some are commissions by private individuals for their own websites and others are photos requested by Airbnb and other companies doing rentals and sales of apartments, chalets etc. in this region.

I have created a selection of my favourite interior photography images from the past year – head on over and check them out by clicking on the below photo !

ArchitecturePortfolio

New portfolio of my interior and exterior architectural photography

Tech Talk

For those of you photographers out there who maintain your own websites, you may find the following observations useful.

I have started to move more of my portfolio over to my Alps Photo Smugmug site which I use to deliver images to my clients. The SmugMug site is already integrated with my current site by going to the menu item for customer downloads and the sites link back and forth to each other on the menus so there is no getting « lost » between them.

For a downside, I find that the Smugmug platform has very weak page building and blog support, with little variety possible from one Smugmug site to the next. So I won’t be changing to that as my main platform. I also like idea that some day I may want to change my theme and WordPress gives me so many options (and such good plugins for SEO and for translations of the same page into more than one language with Qtranslate etc.) which Smugmug totally misses out on (a multi-language site is something they absolutely price gouge you on and they are extremely USA-centric – I still am annoyed that they do not list sizes in centimetres for ordering photos).

However the Smugmug galleries for displaying your work in my opinion are so much more attractive than what is offered by WordPress plug-ins (very poor security and usually really wonky) or the « for photographers »  Photocrati theme I am using here on WordPress.

Smugmug also has great integration with several photo labs including one in the UK (they really really need to add one for continental Europe!!) so that you can sell directly from your site, and they have an option you can turn on or off to allow downloads of photos from your galleries, or ways to purchase photos that are superior to what Photocrati offers. You can also lock galleries to a password or hide them from anyone without the link to make client deliveries a snap.

There is also really great integration between Adobe Lightroom, which I love to use to catalog and work on my images – and Smugmug. I also have Photoshop but I find that 98% of what I do on a daily basis can be accomplished more quickly in Lightroom, and I love the non-destructive editing that lets me export my edited image to any size I need.

Whereas (listen up Photocrati) the integration between Photocrati and their own « slide show » galleries (NextGen galleries or legacy Photocrati Galleries and Albums – another confusing concept you must learn) and Lightroom is pretty bad – requiring a 3 step process. First I must upload photos from Lightroom using the NextGen Lightroom plugin. Then in WordPress, I have to « import » those NextGen gallery photos into the default Photocrati gallery. And albums and galleries are two different things which I can never keep straight. I don’t use NextGen directly because I couldn’t stand how NextGen originally looked, and though supposedly it looks better now, just reading the hundreds of online bug reports and people screaming about it not working when it’s upgraded gives me the heebie jeebies). Then you have to associate the Photocrati gallery to your WordPress post, which is not the same as adding media to your post.

The interface that Photocrati gives you is so mixed up now that they purchased NextGen too, that it’s usually difficult to tell if the settings you are trying to tweak are for their own legacy galleries or the NextGen product they purchased. But I’ve never gotten either of them to look beautiful on a page the way that the Smugmug galleries do.

And I can’t get Photocrati to acknowledge, much less fix, a bug that every time I upload photos from Lightroom into my NextGen gallery and then put those into the Photocrati galleries, it creates one duplicate image – and if I try to delete the duplicate, it duplicates a different one. Clearly there is a programming error but they don’t care.

So for me, it’s just impossible to do easy updates to my portfolio – stored as Photocrati slideshows –  from Lightroom, and it looks dated to boot. Also the database in WordPress is constantly mismanaged by the Photocrati software, resulting in dozens of copies of the same photo to litter up your WordPress database (I have had to go in to manually tweak the database on multiple occasions when setting up my portfolios).  As an added bonus – the photos you upload to WordPress via Photocrati will never show up in the Media Library so you can’t re-use them as « featured photos » to make the newer WordPress post styles work easily – it’s just a « lose-lose » proposition.

I started out using Smugmug with it’s clean interface, beautiful presentation pages and excellent integration to Lightroom – to deliver wedding photos to my clients. But then I realised the photo galleries there looked better than my portfolio of wedding photos on my Photocrati site.

Expect an eventual update of all my portfolio images to Smugmug at some stage (at the moment it’s a lot of work that I don’t have time to finish just now).

I love that Smugmug makes updating my online portfolio a such an easy process indeed. Using Lightroom settings you can tell LR what types of changes to a photo should trigger a notice to « republish » your images to the publishing services when you have tweaked one, and it lists all those photos as requiring a refreshed upload to Smugmug.

Press the « publish » button from Lightroom and  it neatly replaces the old copy with the newer changes – no database messes.

On Photocrati because they have no linked plug-in from the Photocrati slideshows to Lightroom and you have to « pass » through NextGen as an intermediary, this simply is too tedious to bother with any longer.

And then we have customer satisfaction issues with NextGen. Using the WordPress ratings as a guide, I have avoided updating to the latest NextGen (which may or may not have actually better looking slide shows to try) – simply because 1. NextGen has as many one star ratings as five star – have the users seem to have very large problems with their releases and 2. The NextGen customer support says the same repetitive things on internet forums – never resolving problems and always blaming the users – this kind of defensive customer-blaming support is exactly the kind of software one should RUN from. They do not seem to fix any bugs much less acknowledge them.

PS – In case you wonder since I live in France – Yes, I did try out a couple of French sites for portfolio and delivery to clients – one called Jingoo. Many French photographers do use it, especially event photographers it seems and some wedding shooters. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. It seems to have been designed on Linux or something geeky so it has a lot of choices to make to actually get to the stage of uploading photos and it’s a bit confusing but once you go through it, you can manage. It was free to host photos, which was actually amazingly great so I did try it for many months. The galleries are also attractive and apparently they are working on improving the photographer dashboard interface to not look like a 1990s x-windows interface. It does easily integrate to your main site as a way to do photo delivery to customers.

But – there is no direct integration to Lightroom from Jingoo so that is a kluge. But then there was the one downside which totally turned me off and which in the end I could not ignore.

On Jingoo – whatever order you upload your photos in to a gallery online – that is the order they stay in ! (??? Really ??? A grade school programmer could fix that ! ) When I enquired about this lack of most basic feature – which was basically a show stopper for me – I got some extremely lame and defensive excuse about how impossible it would be to program a fix (do not say that if you yourself are not a programmer. I am also a programmer and I know that is a lie someone told you from the r&d department).

So  – had it not been for that problem, I actually was going to use them as they have a fully French interface with English translations and many other things were great such as working with European photo labs for delivery of prints and photo books.  I had kluged a way to publish shots from Lightroom to a hard drive folder which then became my Jingoo upload gallery (though further updates or re-ordering were impossible on Jingoo).

Because when I deliver photos into galleries, I do not always upload them in the exact order I took the photos. Often for weddings I deliver a smaller set of photos first (obvious stand-out shots or important moments), followed by more of them at a later date and sometimes I will do this over a period of a few weeks. Sometimes after editing at night or if I was tired, I will decide to tweak a photo after I’ve uploaded it and see it in daylight. I want that photo replaced (not replicated) on the site – and I do not want to be limited by showing them to a client only in « the order you upload them ».  I want to be able to order the photos in the way that I want to once they are on the site so that they look nice and usually in time order for my wedding clients as an example. I think even Facebook can do this !

I also tried another site that was French-developed called Zenfolio. It’s really beautiful and similar to Smugmug. It ticked so many boxes. But it is ridiculously expensive to get any features you want to use to deliver to end clients – you can’t even justify the prices they charge – it’s highway robbery. I also felt their SEO possibilities were very limited (as are Smugmug’s but since it’s attached to my WordPress site I don’t need to worry about that). And once again I had the defensive response to my complaint (after direct mail asking for my feedback) about lack of ability to control my own SEO.

WordPress makes this so easy to get to with plug-ins – why in the world do you think you can defend taking control of someone else’s website SEO and giving them no say in how it is presented to a search engine Zenfolio? It’s just not good business. Sites that try to make things « simple » for people are all well and good but if you don’t give more advanced users a way to get in there and tweak things to their liking you will not capture the big market. To be fair, I have no idea what Smugmug does for SEO but I don’t care as I use my main WordPress site for this.

Anyhow – enough tech talk about the hows and whys of where I have decided to start moving my portfolio images and how I chose my client delivery platform !

I do hope you enjoy the new nicely presented portfolio of my interior and exterior photography of chalets, houses, apartments, B&Bs, hotels and more ! For once I can say I truly enjoyed putting it together 😉

Thank you Smugmug for your easy to integrate platform. Please get a Continental European photo lab on board – one that uses centimetres- and don’t imagine that everyone in the world speaks English or that you should charge triple or double price for being able to have your site in more than one language when WordPress offers this as a FREE plug-in.

Also posted in Photo Tech Tip

Week-end Atelier de Photo

oct.
15
2015
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off
Checking settings for night photography

Photographie de nuit – réglage de boitier

Chamonix Week-end Atelier de Photo

À la fin de Septembre, j’ai enseigné une photo week-end atelier pour les élèves de l’école Le Rosey à Rolle en Suisse.

Nous avons passé un temps incroyable et tout le monde a appris beaucoup au sujet de leurs caméras et techniques de la photographie. De travailler avec les élèves de cet âge est vraiment merveilleux – ils sont toujours aussi prêts à prendre à bord des nouvelles suggestions et puis vraiment jouer et d’expérimenter avec les idées que vous les montrer.

Nous avons été très chanceux avec la météo et avait une nuit très claire d’essayer les techniques de la photographie d’étoiles. Nous avons vécu un temps brillant ensemble apprendre et partager nos idées sur la photographie.

L’Atelier à durée un jour et demi, et on a pris le premier jour en randonnée avec un guide. Après, on a passé la nuit ensemble dans un jolie refuge de montagne avec un bon repas, et puis le lendemain on a utilisé les télécabines pour aller à l’Aiguille du Midi, ou on a vue des athletes en wing-suit se jettent dans la vide, les alpinistes et les beaux paysages entre les Alpes Suisses, Italiens et Français.

Découvrez quelques belles images de notre atelier de photo Chamonix pour les étudiants Le Rosey dans cette galerie!

Et voici une galerie de quelques-unes des images que j’ai pris ce week-end de notre aventure ensemble.

[Show picture list]

 

 

Also posted in workshop

Fun in the Sun

sept.
04
2014
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off

OK so this year has indeed been the rainiest in the Alps (in recorded history, according to recent news articles) – but on one of the few sunny days, I was lucky enough to have scheduled a photo shoot with Alison Culshaw’s Gold Expeditions in the Italian Alps. I followed a group after their D of E Gold level award while they hiked the last day of their trek around Mont Blanc.
Leaving my house in a rush at 6:05am (my alarm was meant to go off at 5am, and it didn’t — I popped awake at 6am, thankfully I’d packed the night before !) I headed through the Tunnel du Mont Blanc, dropping off my car at Dolonnes and met Alison who drove me to the barrier at Lac Combal (Lago di Combal). I power hiked the hills and ran the flat bits (OK, jogged as I had my camera gear on my back) to the Elisabetta hut, where I met 2 groups heading down. We walked together to the lift down to Courmayeur.

Also posted in Event Coverage

Manifestation contre pollution d’air à Chamonix et la Vallée de l’Arve

févr.
08
2014
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off

Quand les gens pense de Chamonix, souvent ils-arrivent d’imaginer de ski extrême, de la poudreuse, les haute montagnes et aiguilles, le Mont Blanc, les randonnées très belles et vues impressionnants, courses de trail de montagne etc..

Mais ils seront peut être très surpris d’apprendre qu’à Chamonix et la vallée de l’Arve en bas, on respire l’aire avec une qualité parmi les sites le plus pollué en France.

La pollution de l’air à Chamonix et dans la vallée de l’Arve dépasse les normes légales (40+ jours/an), avec des conséquences néfastes sur notre santé. Cancer, troubles respiratoires, sinusite etc. sont quelques des conséquences.

Cette manifestation a demandé le Préfecture de la Haute Savoie de prendre action contre ce problème. Les associations Inspire et ARSMB ainsi que les mairies de Chamonix et Les Houches ont soutenu cet manifestation.

Si vous voulez nous aider, réagissez et signez cette pétition qui demande toute simplement que toutes les points dans le Plan pour la Protection de l’Atmosphère (créer par l’état en 2012) seront mis en place dans l’ immédiatement.

 

Post by Genyphyr Novak - Photography.

Also posted in Event Coverage

Parisian Summer

août
02
2013
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off

I spent the summer of 2013 working in Paris – a place I only visited previously. I was a city girl in my 20s and then moved to the Alps. Sometimes I do miss the city « feel and smell » (urine mostly in the case of the Métro, ha ha). But though Paris is gorgeous I can still feel the call of the mountains while I am there, and was happy each weekend I headed back to the Alps.

However, my French has improved tremendously working now on a completely French team and well … where else can you go home for lunch and watch a documentary on Jacques Brel and feel you could go out that night and find the club in the film (probably still intact) ?

I have still managed some shooting in the Alps – many interiors and hiking photos on the weekends I have been back. And I have been using Paris to brush up on my old street shooting skills from the Chicago days.

There are some Paris summer photos now posted on Flickr.

 

Mission WOW Women of Winter Ski Touring Weekend

avril
06
2013
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off

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
 

Also posted in Event Coverage, Ski Touring

Idris Skis Wins Award at ISPO

mars
14
2013
by Alps Photo Chamonix | Comments Off

ISPO is an outdoor industry trade show (and is the biggest single trade event for the outdoor sports industry) held in Europe in Munich each January.

Each year they award a selected number of products with their ISPO Awards. And Idris Skis has won in 2013 at ISPO for their ski called the Lynx.

I would love to think my photos and a little video I put together (under much duress from my underpowered MacBook) had something to do with this  — they were used on the ISPO application process — but of course it is the skis who won the award due to the hard work and innovative ideas from Tom at Idris Skis.

I just love seeing Idris listed there in the off-piste category along side of industry giants – Vökl, Black Diamond and Rossignol !  And here are the details (along with a couple of my photos of course !!)

Their latest ski – the Lynx – has won for Eco Awareness and Off Piste Innovation – it is made with a wood and flax core, and bio-resin – the most eco-friendly ski available on the market today.

I skied on it just last week-end and was well impressed with the Lynx’s balance and nimble turning off-piste and even ability to carve while on piste, and plan to get a pair myself for next season !

More of my shots for Idris can be found on the Manufacturing Process page of their website.