My
background is definitely as a documentary photographer and most of my
commercial work still has that natural, of-the-moment feeling.
It's always great when a client calls and asks you to shoot something
that you'd always wanted to anyway...and gives you total creative
freedom. It's what every photographer dreams of.
Most
of our work comes through agencies but because of some mutual contacts, the
head of a tree-falling company (basically lumberjacks) in British
Columbia got in touch directly. With the input of just capturing what I
thought looked best, we were allowed three days to fly in and document
what we saw, capturing the beauty of the place and the character of his
crew. Despite the constant rain and crazy float plane pilot it was a
gift to be able to get in to some of the most beautiful country I've
ever seen. Literally 100's of millions of acres of wild forest.
My
initial thoughts were about horrible clear-cutting and what that's done
to forests but British Columbia has extremely strict foresting
guidelines and any land that's ever harvested has a team that comes in
straight afterwards to replant the entire area back to its original
state. Logging in BC is the #2 industry (behind tourism) and the
province and the country would collapse without it. I learned so much
from the crews there and about how they sort of consider themselves
farmers, in a way, with the trees as their crops with the harvesting and
replanting. It's an extremely dangerous job, the most dangerous in
North America (yes, even more so than Deadliest Catch/Offshore Fishing),
but they wouldn't even consider another way of life...
To see more imagery from this project click here
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