Brandon Broderick has placed second in the Epic Landscapes category.
Broderick is one of only two BC photographers who made the list.
Canadian Geographic staff combed through 6400 entries to pick their top three images in four categories, for a total of 12 “outstanding” images.
In addition to Epic Landscape, categories include City Life; Weather, Season and Sky and Wildlife in Action.
As well, one photographer is named Photographer of the Year. This year, that winner was Alan Poelman of Atikokan, Ontario, who captured a lynx looking at the camera through a gap in the forest.
Broderick’s shot is an aerial photo of the Nass River at low tide.
An Ontario native, Broderick moved to Terrace just over a decade ago, where he developed his chops as a wildlife and nature photographer. He was out hired to take pictures of the eulachon run on the Skeena River, and picked up a drone to shoot the chaos of the seagulls and sea lions feeding. “As soon as I was out there, I was like, ‘There’s no way I can fly this thing around all these animals.’ I would risk hitting a bird with it and potentially killing the bird and losing the drone,” he says. “But the idea for the shot was in my head. Driving from Terrace to Prince Rupert along the Skeena, you have low tide—basically what you see in that photo. When the tide goes out, there’s these cool sandbars and for ten years I had wanted to take that photo. Just before I moved to Tumbler Ridge—like, a month before—I was on the Nass river which is the next major waterway north. It was low tide, and I was able to take a shot I was wanting to take for a decade and then it ended up doing well in the contest, which was pretty crazy.”
He says a lot of people are confused by the image, which is almost abstract in its emphasis on shapes and lines. “It’s one of my personal favorites, yet it was one of the ones that performed the worst on social media. So having it place second makes you believe in yourself more and trust yourself and not put all your faith in likes and followers and all that social media stuff. It’s kind of abstract. You don’t really know what you’re looking at when you first see it and I’ve had many people ask me ‘what is it?’ And there’s not really anything for scale. I really wanted to include a bit of color in the corner and that’s why I entered that picture and not the one that’s just of the sandbars, but in that picture, you can see an eagle and it’s just a speck, because the photo is taken from about 100 meters up with a wide angle lens. I really liked that. I like that it makes people stop and think.”
Broderick says he has entered contests before and never done well, so he wasn’t really all that keen on entering another one, but his partner, Claire encouraged him to enter. “When they came back and said it was a finalist, that was a win for me. I didn’t expect it to do any better. And I didn’t know or care if there were 10 finalists or 500 finalists. It was just cool to be a Canadian Geographic finalist.
But he almost wasn’t. The couple was on their way to Vancouver when he got the email saying he was a finalist. The email also asked for a high-res photo and a bunch of info before the end of the day. “If that email came in, like three hours later, I wouldn’t have been able to give the high res file and I would have been disqualified. So it really worked out,” say Broderick.
While he won for his landscape, Broderick is best known for his wildlife photography. He says he’s still getting a sense of the rhythm of the area, and figuring out where the animals are. “You can’t really plan on what you’re going to be shooting with wildlife, unless you’re going to a zoo or a game farm, and that is definitely not my style. All my wildlife is wild. I don’t use calls or bait. It’s just me finding the animal. A lot of those lynx shots are taken in the 30 seconds it takes me to stop the vehicle, to get out of the vehicle and get a shot. I sometimes follow them for a bit, as long as it allows me to. I don’t want to stress them out. But I’ve had lynx that have curled up and fallen asleep just a few feet from me. I could literally hear them purring. Sometimes I’m with them for hours. It’s varied. I just love being outside and capturing these things and being able to share that with people that aren’t as fortunate as I am to see these things.”
Part of the process of taking the second best landscape photo in the country is taking a lot of photos that aren’t. “When I go out, I’m primarily looking for wildlife,” says Broderick. “I look at the images I’m taking as if it were on someone’s wall. I take them for myself basically and hope that other people also like them. Many of my landscape shots have come from when I’m just in a lull of not finding any wildlife to photograph. And if I get back with one picture that I love, it’s a really good day. You always take new stuff you’re happy with and other stuff you kind of look back on and cringe.”
And, while Tumbler is now home, Broderick plans on using this as a springboard into the Rocky Mountains in general. “This is a great home base to explore the Northern Rockies. You can be at Muncho Lake in eight hours in the wildlife there is incredible. Banff and Jasper really aren’t that far, either.”
While he’s only been here a short time, he’s already starting to build his collection of Tumbler Ridge photographs. “I have a couple lynx shots that have turned out pretty cool. I like them because they were such a challenge to get. And there’s one with tree shadows on the lake that I took this weekend. I’m really happy with that. And yeah, what else? Some of the waterfalls, Nesbitt’s Knee falls. I really liked some of the shots I did there.”
But for now, it’s a matter of discovering where to find wildlife, and the rhythms of the seasons, which are unlike what he experienced in Terrace. “I’m struggling with the wildlife here, because everything here is so heavily hunted. In Terrace, I’d find a coyote and it would walk up to me out of curiosity. Here? I could see a coyote 100 meters away and as soon as I stopped my vehicle, it’s gone. They’re so used to be being shot at. That being said, there’s a lot of different animals here: elk, caribou, sheep. There’s so much ground to cover. And it’s a challenge to find back roads that are plowed, yet aren’t crazy busy. I’ll drive down any road, and there’s tracks everywhere. There’s no shortage of wildlife here, that’s for sure. It’s just I need to figure out the best ways to actually find it and photograph it.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
