At 26 years of
age Storm Carroll has been a full time professional photographer for the last
five years. He got his first film camera in Grade nine and at St. Patrick’s he
studied darkroom photography where students used good ol’ film and chemicals to
print. He took courses in broadcasting at Confederation College. Friends
dropped some knowledge on him and he switched to digital photography and got the
computer programs needed to create great images.
Of big
photographic influence was National Geographic magazine. Amongst all the great
photographers Storm admires he’s a big fan of Cole Barash, a young photographer
famous for his magazine covers of snowboarding stunts.
Storm got his
career going by taking shots of his buddies fly-fishing, canoeing and camping.
Those pictures got noticed and he discovered a market for great nature shots. Ontario
magazines and government agencies have been updating their image banks with digital
and HD photography.
And later his
career was bolstered twhen he did a half hour video documentary called, North
Shore Diaries, about three gentleman fisherman, Ian, Paul, and Brennan,
fly-fishing gurus from the North Shore. Storm joined them for an entire fishing
season between the border of Pigeon River and Wawa, with a base in the Terrace
Bay area.
This video helped
rocket Storm further into the outdoor magazine business. He works for CG Emery
International who own Streamside, a fly-fishing company, and the hunting supply
company, Backwoods. Their magazines use Storm’s photography in their
advertising.
Two weeks ago
Storm returned from Iqaluit and Nunavut where he worked with James Smedley, a
writer for Ontario Out of Doors magazine. They were working on a story about
fly-fishing and tourism. “The fishing was unreal,” says Storm.
Storm adds, “You
don’t have to travel very far here to see pristine country. I think the North
Shore is one of the most beautiful places going. People just need to get out
and explore. There’s a good sum of people that do, but there could be more.”
Storm adds, “A lot of people look at my pictures and say ‘where’s that?’ They
think it’s British Columbia, but the shots are all from here.”
The art
show at Calicos is Storm’s Ode to the North Shore, where many shots were taken
while he was filming North Shore Diaries.
Storm likes that
his photography might inspire greater respect for nature. He’s not a fan of any
mine or the Tar Sands, “But I drive a car… so I can’t complain a lot about
that.” He’s worried that mining operations, present and future won’t abide by
better environmental regulations.
He likes
photographing fish, especially trout. “There’s nothing like a beautiful fly-fishing
rod lying next to a rainbow trout.” Yet Storm has a good time taking wedding
photos. He does up to twelve weddings a year. He finds these shoots challenging.
“Every photo shoot is different and you have to learn to react to people and assess
the situation. It’s completely diverse, compared to a fish. People talk back.
But I do love it.”
Storm talked with
awe about his favourite shot of sturgeon spawning. He saw about a hundred of
them one day at Rainy River near Fort Frances where many were nine feet long.
“Not too many people have seen that before,” he says. “Normally they stay at
the bottom of the lake. They can get really old, a hundred to a
hundred-and-fifty years. They come out of Lake of the Woods for spawning. The
rivers constantly pump nutrients and oxygen into the lake. This is when you can
see them, and then they head back to the bottom.”
In Portage Creek, while part of a
cooperative wrangler program with John George, Storm caught a rainbow trout
that weighed 16 pounds and was the biggest steelhead the cooperative had seen
in that river system in 25 years. In this catch-and-release program, George
collected the data, tagged and clipped the fish.
The show at
Calicos was originally going to be filled with pictures of fish, but Storm’s
girlfriend, Trish, advised him to add more variety. If you can’t make it to
Calicos, Storm is posting images on a blog on his website at www.stormcarroll.com.
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