A B.C.-based film crew is getting international attention after travelling to the Arctic earlier this year to capture a "once in a lifetime" photograph.
It all began several years ago, when Squamish-based photographer Reuben Krabbe had a dream of taking a photo of a skier in action during a solar eclipse.
“Other people love to go running every day, I love to take photos,” he tells CTV News.
Krabbe approached the ski company Salomon with his idea – and to his surprise they agreed to fund the project.
“My immediate response was ‘are you really, really sure that we should [do this], because there’s like a 20 per cent chance that we’ll even see the sun on that day,’” he recalls. “And they said ‘yeah, that makes it even better!’”
That’s how the 11 person team ended up in Svalbard, Norway last March – one of the northernmost settlements in the world – camping in tents for two weeks while chasing the elusive shot. The full eclipse was only visible in two places in the world this year, Svalbard and the Faroe Islands.
“If you draw a line from Norway to the North Pole, [Svalbard] is halfway up there,” says Krabbe. “There’s polar bears all over the place, you can’t leave your house without a gun…It’s the most extreme you can get.”
There were other challenges as well. To get the photo he wanted the angle needed to be perfect. The team’s professional big mountain skiers also needed to be prepared and skiing in a “photogenic” fashion.
The biggest difficulty, however, was timing. The entire solar eclipse would only last for 2.5 hours, with the moment Krabbe dreamed of capturing – the time the sun was entirely covered up by the moon – lasting only 2.5 minutes.
“If I’m two metres right the photo doesn’t work, if I’m two metres left the photo doesn’t work,” Krabbe says. “The entire project came down to that one moment.”
The day of the eclipse was minus 20 C and “bitterly cold”, recalls Krabbe – but miraculously, everything went according to plan.
Footage from the film chronicling the experience, Eclipse, captures Krabbe’s reaction immediately after the shoot.
“That was better than I thought it could have been, I hope I didn't f*** that up,” he yells, hugging his teammates.
Then the terror set in. It wasn’t until he had checked all the images and backed it up on three different hard drives in his tent that Krabbe says he could truly celebrate.
“You’re seeing the actual image that you’ve thought about for years in split second moments, and watching that happen was just the most unbelievable experience,” he says. “Just being there without a camera would have been one of the most beautiful moments of your life.”
His amazing images are highly acclaimed, and Eclipse won Best Snow Film at Banff Mountain Film Festival last week. The full 30-minute film can be watched online for free.
Krabbe says he was “terrified” people wouldn’t like the project, so the fact that it's been well received makes an already amazing experience even better.
“It’s a weird thing watching a piece of yourself go this far this quick,” he says, smiling. “This may well be one of the most viewed photographs I’ll ever have and release in my life. So just watching this all unfold is just a treat.”
With files from CTV Vancouver’s Scott Hurst
