In a previous era I was an enthusiastic user of the Contax S2, a beautifully simple camera, tough, dependable and which had a range of equally good lenses to pair with it. And though we are now able to produce cameras with the complexity of space probes, for me the essentials haven’t changed. My X-T1 felt instinctively right the first time I held it, I felt it had been designed by and for photographers. There were many similarities with the Contax S2 – dials and buttons were in the right place and it could be used intuitively without scrolling through menus. I was hooked.
It is a little battered now, it’s had a few scrapes – it’s been climbing, sea kayaking and ski touring, often with a frankly negligent lack of suitable protection, and has never failed. Most of the time it has been paired with either the 18-135 or the 10-24 zooms. I had taken a leap of faith and resisted my instinct to go with primes – the activities I’ve just mentioned aren’t always conducive to the faff of lens changes.
Then I won the Trail Magazine ‘UK Mountain Photo of the Year 2017’ award, an annual competition which had caught my attention due to the main sponsor being Fujifilm and the first prize being an X-T2 with the 18-55 kit lens. When the prize arrived I convinced myself that it would be a shame not to partner this flagship body with the flagship 16-55 2.8 lens and so this is now my default combination.
The highlight of my photographic calendar is winter, and in particular the trip I take with friends each year to Northern Norway to go ski touring.
Anyone familiar with the cult film ‘Withnail and I’ will know the line “we’ve come on holiday by mistake” and it has been used many times over the years; in the teeth of a blizzard, half way up a brutal incline or when faced with another plate of rehydrated slop.
Photographically it is a challenge on several fronts. We carry all our food for stretches of 10-12 days and given that there is a finite limit to what I can carry there is a debate to be had about each piece of equipment – second body or 3 bars of chocolate ? Ditto second lens, and how many batteries to take, though I always take them all ( around 10) as there is no option for recharging. A tripod is out of the question for me not only on weight issues but also because in reality there is little time to actually use one; photos are grabbed on the go, daylight is limited, hands are cold, companions are disappearing over the hill.
Another challenge is to actually make the pictures interesting. Usually there is an awful lot of white, sometimes some blue above and two black figures at a varying distance in the landscape. I’m pretty sure I do double the skiing of my pals as I veer off up the valley sides to get a different perspective or wait for them to ski into the right point in the frame and then have to sprint to catch them – I’ve stopped trying to herd them into position- tired skiers don’t herd well – rather buzzing round them to find the photograph instead.
The cold is an issue for me as I seem to have terrible circulation in my fingers. Here the Fuji’s are great, with the chunky dials being easily operated with fairly substantial gloves on. I carry a pair of expedition grade down-filled mitts as a back-up if my fingers fail to revive after any fiddling with batteries etc. Normally I don’t have an issue with the cold affecting the cameras, though once the temperature drops below -20 it can knock the batteries down and it’s handy to have spares in an inside pocket. Frequently the equipment gets covered in snow, endures sudden temperature changes from -20 to +20 in the time it takes to enter a hut and takes the brunt of an unplanned topple into the snow, all taken in its stride and shrugged off.
I always use the viewfinder, shoot in aperture priority, Fine + RAW, with liberal use of the exposure compensation dial. I am something of a technophobe and consequently don’t do an awful lot of post-processing, partly because I don’t like the ‘look’ that many digital images seem to have and also because I feel that the challenge should still be to get the image right at the point of capture, a hangover from the days of transparency film I guess, when you got it right first time or you literally threw it in the bin. A third factor is an unwillingness to spend longer than necessary at the computer.
Norway is probably the best destination in the world for extended hut-based ski touring. There is a vast network of mountain cabins across the country, all accessed by joining the DNT and an endless variety of routes can be cobbled together to make a trip from a weekend to a couple of months. In the southern part of the country some of the huts are provisioned with food which you can use and pay for (Indeed the whole system relies on honesty and it is comforting to know that it appears to work well). In the north, above the Arctic Circle line, however there is no provisioning so logistics are a little harder, loads are heavier but the routes are often quieter and the scenery has an undeniably more ‘epic’ feel to it.
It can be brutal, sometimes you can be stuck in a hut for a couple of days by a storm, sometimes you are caught out by one and good equipment and the ability to use it is essential. We have become better skiers over the years and we have learned from the mistakes that are inevitable, we have been forced to dig a snowhole and spend the night in it so now we carry an emergency stove and I once literally fell off a mountain in a white-out, though what lesson we learnt from that I’m not sure…other than the obvious one : try not to be the one at the front in a white-out.
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