It was my friends first time in Squamish this weekend, so we went by all the classics. I was going to just let my friend climb Viper, but was persuaded to try some new beta for the start. It works surprisingly well!
I have video of my friend using the new beta as well.
I tried to take some photos of fireworks over the weekend and I realized it was hard! Not to mention the bad location outside of gasworks with a telephone pole in my way, but it was hard just getting ready to shoot with the lens. It was fun and I took some ok shots, but I really want to get some better ones next year. I feel like I was shooting stars except I got more than one chance. Makes me respect astro-photographers who shoot events that occur less than once per year.
I decided to ride the BikeForMS ride this summer with coworkers at Accenture and Avanade. I am in the fundraising and training phase still as I have two months until the actual ride. The fundraising experience has been humbling to say the least. While I did not expect my friends to not donate, their donations and willingness to trade services/goods for donations has been overwhelming. I have already increased my goal twice and hope to do it a third time. The reason I keep raising my goal is that throughout this experience I keep meeting people who have or know someone with MS. I knew it was prevalent in the NW, but I did not realize to what degree. Being able to touch these people’s lives means a lot to me and it is a good motivator to continue. For most of the people with MS they can’t even ride a bike, so doing so myself and raising some money at the same time is the least I can do.
If you would like to donate and support me in the BikeForMS ride this summer please visit my participant page and click the donate button.
Jamie Chong mentioned it in his blog recently, but there is a new guide book for Squamish out now. Version 2 of Marc Bourdon’s guide. It now has color pictures, a top 100 list and a color system denoting the difficulty range of problems. All in all it is a much more polished guide book and almost to the standards of the Bishop/Hueco guides, but it still lacks page numbers on the maps and the top 100 list. The grades were also taken out of the index. I am not sure why this was done. It’s still a great guide though.
This weekend my brother and I went up and found a great new V2 called slingshot. We also went up to Wendy’s World to find some new problems. The area could use a little more traffic and I am hoping that with the new guidebook this will happen.
And I got back on Viper
Jon v Viper from Jon Keto on Vimeo.
I am not a professional photographer by any means, nor would I consider myself an amateur. I am just a person who likes to take varied photos. Whether it is the zoo, bouldering, cars, my desk or people I am always learning and discovering new things about taking photos (the resulting photo and the process itself). I picked up post processing only just recently and I am happy with the results I have come up with, but I definitely recognize I need to improve and that I shouldn’t use it as a crutch. With that said I don’t crop the photos I take. I am not sure if this is related to a small case of OCD and liking uniformity with my digital possesions, but I just don’t do it. I don’t look down on people who don’t, as I don’t look down on people who don’t post process.
This evening I was chatting with a friend who I take pictures with every so often. This person mentioned a ‘photography snob’ who never cropped their photos and always wanted to frame the photo just right or they would not take the photo. I can understand this and it seems reasonable. Then this snob recommended using lightroom. Wait a minute, this seems odd to me. Maybe I am the only one who thinks so, but this seems a wee bit hypocritical. Philoshipically, it seems hard to rationlize being adverse to cropping, but not post processing.
My only response was to tell them to wait for the next time this snob was trying to perfectly frame their photo to ask about lighting and if it wasn’t perfect they should wait until the light was perfect before taking the photo.
In the end every photographer has their own techniques and ‘moral compass’, but to miss out on a photo opportunity because you did’t want to drop seems like it would you to not capture a lot of candid moments, but hey, maybe this snob only wants to shoot portrait photography. Even when I asked my brother about this contradiction he asked me in reply “isn’t half the fun of photography seeing what you can do with it on the computer?”. The moral of the story is, photography means something different to everyone and find what makes you happy and do it.
If you really want to argue either way here are some articles I thought were good starters.
After many years in Seattle I finally made it to the Solstice Parade. My favorite group in the parade was the Ice Queens based on their elaborate costumes. To see the rest of my photos go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonketo/sets/72157624193438609/.
Just recently I watched CORE (a climbing DVD, a documentary in the lightest sense). During the documentary I heard the familiar and easily noticeable voice that spoke of climbing grips, not holds. It was Ricky Oliver. You can hear a very short sound byte at 1:38 in the CORE trailer linked to above. We called him Ricky Bobby, but he reminded me of Dale Gribble. He is a really fun guy and a great guide. I wanted to see if I could find the clip online, but I still have not found it. I did, however, find an article in the New York times talking about bouldering Hueco Tanks that quoted him. His quote or contribution to the article is not groundbreaking, but I think the article does a good job explaining to non-climbers what Hueco Tanks is like for someone who is not super passionate about climbing.
So, for everyone who doesn’t climb and doesn’t understand what Hueco Tanks means to climbers, whether they are from the old school generation that had unrestricted access, the new generation who has grown up with the Hueco Tanks restrictions or somewhere in between, check out the article. It is a good short read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/sports/othersports/14boulder.html
I know I went to Squamish last weekend, but I was able to post a video of me climbing WAS. It’s a neat problem and I really liked the movement of getting my right hand up to the rail. Even though the problem is tall, the landing is flat. Just don’t get your foot stuck in the hueco.
I pulled the trigger and upgraded my vimeo account so I could finally just upload all of my Hueco videos. Here is one of my favorites from the trip. Melon Patch! And we ran a send train on it.
Jon Eric Vu v Melon Patch from Jon Keto on Vimeo.
