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Photography by Jakub Sisak
A Q&A with Jakub Sisak …
How did you get into photography?
Both my parents were avid amateur photographers, so I grew up in a household where the process of capturing and developing photos was just a normal part of my childhood. As a child into adolescence, drawing was my main early creative outlet. As a teenager, I attended art school, and with that came formal training in the artistic process and theory about perspective, scale, composition, etc. Some of that early exposure to the photographic process may have somehow ingrained itself in my DNA perhaps? Though I experimented with film, I didn’t really start seriously dabbling with photography until I first got my hands on a digital camera about 20 years ago. I quickly realized that digital cameras were so easy and fun to use. I then borrowed a DSLR from a friend at work for a few days and that was that, I was hooked.
What draws you into winter photo making ... rather than just waiting until warmer weather.
I moved to Canada (more specifically Northwestern Ontario) from the Czech Republic in 1993. Even after so many years, this landscape always feels new and exciting, mysterious and even dangerous. It’s wild and quiet, open and so vast that I am still awed by it. Winters are very long and cold here and at first, I just wanted to capture that; to show the chill and the stillness of winter and how the sea fog rises from the Lake in the sunrise, and though it looks like fire, you can feel the ice and cold just by looking at the image. Eventually I found something else out there … I came to enjoy the quietness in the cold, the sounds of ice at night and the unique light reflections and colours of winter.
Is there anything that most folks don't realize about winter? What advice would you give them to more savor the season?
It opens new ways to explore the outdoors. Soon after I began to capture a lot of winter photos, I also realized that not only good, warm and appropriate clothing made for the extreme cold was imperative, but also crampons (for walking on the ice) and snowshoes are a necessity and made winter hiking much more enjoyable. I don’t own any boats, ATVs and such toys and mostly get to remote places on my own two feet. Once I began to venture out in the deep of the winter, I quickly realized that on the ice, I can hike miles on the Lake and get to places and vistas I normally can’t in the summer. This opened up a whole new perspective to familiar landscapes.
Which of your photos generated the most interest on social media and were you surprised?
Back in November 2014, I took a short hike to High Falls to see if the falls were freezing over. It was a gloomy misty morning and the landscape had this monochromatic look and I just didn’t have the feeling that I would get a good image that day. However, when the view of the falls opened up before me it felt like a gift; there was a landscape like from a fairytale. I decided to do a long exposure with a neutral density filter and the shot was very challenging because the lens and the camera were accumulating a lot of mist from the falls and I had to constantly wipe the front element between shots and most of the images had water drops in them but one. I was excited about the shot and was excited to share it. Within a few hours after I uploaded it to Facebook, it became the most popular photo I even posted. I’ve taken a similar image at the same location several times since and it just never felt the same as the first capture. Sometimes the unexpected happens when you least expect it. You can link to the image.