The staff of the of North Arm Farm, Pemberton’s favourite farm.
Every summer, the Whistler Pique Magazine publishes a Pemberton Readers Choice edition (the Squamish Readers Choice is over Thanksgiving, and the Whistler Readers Choice runs is the New Year’s Day feature). I’ve had the gig to photograph it for the last five years and it’s one of my favourite things to do. You get to spend a couple of days hanging out in Pemberton driving around to various restaurants and farms, and generally getting pretty chill in-between photos.
While the actual photos aren’t that complex or hard to shoot, it’s an organizational beast to set them all up. I had fourteen assigned shots, and managed to get most of it shot over three separate days. I always do a quick Google on the subjects to get an idea of what they’re about. Natasha Louise had the mural in the background on her Facebook page, but she showed up with her daughter, whose expression was great. Places like the North Arm Farm and the Pony are old hangouts for me. I called Erinne at PAWS and she said they had puppies on Mondays, to which I said puppies are good.
When I shot my first Readers Choice in 2021, it was in the middle of the famous heat dome summer and it was 45C in Pemberton, savage even for one of Canada’s hottest communities. This year was a relatively pleasant 35C, but with a thick layer of smoke from the big wildfire from the week before,
Favourite artist Natasha Louise with her three year old daughter Louisa, in front of her mural on the side of the Pemberton Valley Market.
Favourite non-profit PAWS Pemberton executive director Erinne Tapp with the Friends puppies, Monica, Ross, Chandler, and Rachel.
Best value winner Bread Warehouse and staff. Amazing bakery and a great spot for lunch.
The staff of the Pony Cafe in front of their bar. They’re the winners for best beer selection + best service + best cocktail, I didn’t notice it until I processed the photos that night, but the guy at the end has his head almost inside the ceiling lamp. Sometimes you don’t catch everything.
Technical Stuff
I tell people that one of my critical tools for shooting large jobs that take a lot of organization is Microsoft Excel. Nobody ever believes me about that, so I screenshot my spreadsheet from the shoot. When I’m done with a shoot, I mark it shot and filed (or sent to the newspaper) and then fill it with yellow to make it easy to spot. Pemberton was pretty small, but the Readers Choice spreadsheet for Squamish had almost two hundred lines.
I removed the contact information before I made the screenshot, as a lot of the numbers aren’t public. I’m a huge collector of phone numbers. Back in the pre-internet days, I used to keep a three ring binder filled with alphabetically listed business cards that I collected from everyone I met, along with a phone book and copy of the Yellow Pages in the back seat of my car. Since I got my first iPhone, I store every phone contact I get, and in the last 15 years or so, it’s grown into the tens of thousands of numbers. I get calls from Vancouver and Toronto media asking about someone locally, and usually I can tell them, ‘no problem, I have their number’. Never fails to impress.
I shot all the photos on my new Nikon Z9, which I’m still getting the hang of, I’ve been on a small camera kick using two Z6 cameras for last few years, I’m liking the Z9, it never misses, but it’s also really a pig to carry around. I used to carry two D4 cameras and they didn’t seem so heavy, I must be getting old.
The outside photos were with the 24-120mm (so much for small cameras). The insides were shot with the 14-30mm, with a Godox AD-200 in a soft box for lighting.