I've always loved Hive because I feel I can be honest here. I have a lot of friends and family that follow me on mainstream social media and when that is the case I tend to hold back a bit in telling how I really feel. Also, being a professional wedding photographer I do feel some pressure to keep up a certain image or perception for our business. So I don't often post "how I'm really feeling."
It's not the same here. Even though I know anyone here can find any of my other social media, and anyone on my other social media could potentially find my Hive blog, I still feel more free to be honest here. I love that about this place.
Anyhow, to the point. About eight or nine months after I stopped posting four years ago, we were back in Canada, living in my parent's basement in a room I built for us. It's not the worst thing in the world, I know a lot of people who had it way worse than us, but the whole pandemic thing hit us pretty hard. Especially not being able to work, combined with being forced to leave Spain, and then ending up in my parent's house, in the tiniest small town in Canada, in the -40c winter, it was pretty depressing.
To try and cope with that, and not having anything to do anyhow, I decided to start photographing a self portrait concept I've been thinking about for quite some time.
The idea of the project is a classic "Company Man" who is so entrenched in his work and his devotion to the company that he would literally go barefoot to the ends of the earth for them.
So my character, "The Manager", is the subject of the photos. I put on a white short sleeve button up shirt, skinny black tie, black pants, and a briefcase that used to be my grandfather's, and started walking into the woods to the creek behind my parent's house (with camera and lighting gear in tow).
I had a vision of this character "The Manager" fully dressed, briefcase in hand, walking across the stream.
Did I mention it was the middle of winter, with four feet of snow on the ground?
Oh, and I was barefoot.
That to me is one of the most important aspects of this character: He's ALWAYS barefoot in the photos.
For whatever reason that part is very important to me.
So anyhow I get my lights and camera set up, take a few test shots, work up the nerve and I go for it.
I strip off my jacket, boots, socks, grab the briefcase, hit the self timer on the camera and start walking towards the water.
It wasn't nearly as cold as I was expecting, which was good because I didn't get what I was looking for first time, so I reset the timer and did it again.
The second time was much worse as I had to stomp through the knee deep snow with already wet bare feet, and then back again. So after this one I decided I should probably pack up and head for home.
It was exhilarating and fun, but my wife and parents were pretty irritated at me doing something they viewed as dangerous and irresponsible, just to get a photo. They weren't wrong, it's pretty dangerous and stupid to go walking through a small river in the woods with no one around in the freezing cold and surrounded by snow, like if I fell and got swept down stream I would definitely be in some trouble, but to be honest at that time I really didn't care. Maybe I kind of wanted that to happen even, but it didn't, so I'm fine. Plus as you can probably tell, the creek is really shallow, IMO the worst that could happen is maybe I slip and hit my head, which thinking about it now maybe could lead to me freezing to death, but you know, that didn't happen, so whatevs.
Anyhow, that was the start of my little project, which has a few gems in it if I do say so myself. At various times through this project I walked through the creek in winter, along a frozen road in the middle of the night, up a hill through waist deep snow in the mountains, even across a frozen lake, plus some other interesting places in different cities.
I'll post all of the photos I've done with this project eventually, but for now here is the original, and the second one, which I think is maybe my favourite of the entire project. I hope you like it, and thanks for reading all this :)
