CH: Any other wild or crazy stories of things that have happened when you’re out taking photos
or shooting videos?
GS: Well, just lots of wild animals like -- what? -- sea lions, seals, otters, eagles, a whole bunch of
interesting stuff like that.
CH: I want to ask you some technical questions about photography. What makes a shot a great
shot? What must a photo have in it to make it stand out?
GS: What you have to have is you have to have good composition and you have to try and use the
rule of thirds. And what that does basically is you’re trying to put your subject on a certain part of
the screen and there’s four different spots you can do. You divide your screen into nine equal
squares, or rectangles it is, and then what you do is, right where the corners meet you want the
subject to be in that area. And another really important thing is lighting. There’s something called
the magic hour. It’s either when the sun comes up, from when it comes over the horizon, to an
hour later. And then an hour before it goes down over the horizon in that hour, right till then.
That’s the best lighting.
CH: I’ve heard about the magic hour, at dusk and dawn. That’s when cinematographers like to
shoot.
GS: Yeah, you’ve got the most rich colors then.
CH: What is the single hardest thing about getting a good shot?
GS: Sometimes you have to put yourself in interesting positions, like laying on your belly,
sometimes standing in a stream. There’s a lot of different situations where a lot of people would --
they’d kinda turn around and go the other way because it’s too dangerous. Or it’s just
uncomfortable because you’re sitting there, there’s bugs all around you biting you, you’re laying in
the grass, there’s bugs crawling up your pant legs and stuff like that. It’s not comfortable
sometimes.
CH: I guess too, if you’re in a public situation with other people around you might feel you look
a little bit out of place taking photos sometimes.
GS: Well, what you have to do is you have to not worry about that, right. People know I shoot
videos and pictures around town so I’ve never had anybody say anything to me at all about me
taking pictures because -- I don’t take pictures of stuff I’m not supposed to.
CH: They all know you as Gary the photography guy.
GS: Yeah. Well, most people do, I’m not going to say all.
CH: What’s your philosophy about touching up photos to intensify or alter how they look? Do
you ever digitally enhance your photos before putting them on the web, like in Photoshop or some
other software program?
GS: I don’t use Photoshop. I do have -- okay, I shoot RAW pictures, right, which is a format. I
shoot in a kind of a flat format as well so the colors aren’t really vivid because what that does is it
actually makes it so that in the software that you have you can actually bring the colors to where
they’re supposed to be kind of, right. So I don’t actually enhance them, what I do is I just bring
them to exactly where I remember them to be, right.
CH: So you’re going for an accurate representation of what you saw as opposed to exaggerating
it?
GS: If I shot in JPEG I would try and shoot as real to life as possible.
CH: You’ve got a pretty big following on the web with your photos and videos, right?
GS: It’s mostly the videos. The photos, I just post them on Facebook and people like them I
guess, which is all right.
CH: And you were telling me your YouTube videos generate income for you.
GS: Yeah, they do.
CH: Moving away from photography, one thing I’ve noticed in Powell River is that a lot of
people I’ve met here end up dying. Have you noticed people dying as well?
GS: I know a few people that have died, but not as much as you I don’t think. A friend of mine
actually, a guy I played hockey with, he just died of brain cancer just -- what? -- in the last month.
Who knows what happened there, right? He was sixty, right about sixty. But he actually lived south
of town close to Palm Beach Road, real close to there.
CH: But you haven’t noticed death waves or anything like that?
GS: No, no. Usually where I notice something like that is people who lived alongside the pole line
[electricity lines] where they used to spray foliant reducers, the things that would kill off the plants
so they didn’t have to go in there with manual labor to clean up the trees, people along the sides of
those areas ended up getting cancer and dying.
CH: Have you heard of chemtrails?
GS: Yes.
CH: Do you see the chemtrails they’re spraying in the sky over Powell River?
GS: Well, I see nice white lines behind them [the aircraft]. Yeah. Who knows what that is? Is it
exhaust? Is it -- what is it, right?
CH: Do you have any theories about what it might be?
GS: Exhaust? I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’d have to get up there with a balloon and put it
right through the middle of it, right.
CH: What do you love about Powell River?
GS: If you know a lot of people, which of course, I was born and raised here, I’ve been doing
business in Powell River for twenty years, over twenty years probably, so all the people are nice,
they’re friendly, the scenery’s great, it’s outdoorsy, there’s a lot of physical activity you can do,
you know.
CH: What do you detest about Powell River?
GS: I detest the ferry situation we have here. We should actually have a road coming into Powell
River so we’ve got the option to leave when we want, right. They’ve got us by the balls. They do.
And that’s wrong. There’s no way that that should happen. The price of gas here now is -- you go
over to Vancouver Island you’re paying twenty cents less a litre than Powell River. You go to
Vancouver, it’s probably pretty close to the same and they’ve actually got a transit tax on their gas
down in Vancouver and they’re still paying less than we are, right. So it doesn’t make any sense.
Transport costs are not that high, they bring a whole bunch up at one time.
CH: In your mind, what kind of political change needs to happen in the world right now?
GS: I would have to say that the government has to listen to people. They don’t seem to be
listening to people at all. The government in Ottawa as well as the government in Victoria. They just
do what they want to do and we just have to suck it up. And that’s wrong.
CH: Do you vote? If so, which parties do you endorse federally and provincially and why do you
like them?
GS: I do vote. But I’m not going to say which ones I vote for. I’ll tell you what: I don’t vote for
the Liberal party in BC and I don’t vote for the Conservative party in Ottawa, that’s all.
CH: A lot of people I’ve met in Powell River have had run-ins with the RCMP, including myself.
Have you had any problems with them? What’s your opinion of them?
GS: I’ve actually had very little interaction with them and I’ve had no problems with them at all.
Years ago I actually donated to one of their Christmas parties or something like that and I ended up
being buddy-buddy with a couple of the cops, right. They’re not here anymore, they got transferred
to different locations or went to different locations. I actually never had any issues with them at all.
Lucky me.
CH: What do you foresee happening to mankind in the future? Do you see a collapse or an
apocalypse, an end to society happening? Or do you see society carrying on like it always has?
GS: We can’t really carry on how we always have. Things have to change a little bit because the
average person now, the middle class, it’s not middle class anymore, right. The income they have is
all going to living, surviving, right. There’s not a whole bunch extra left anymore. Like before, in
the ’70s when I was growing up here in town, people worked in the mill, they had lots of money to
spend on boats, on whatever they wanted. And now it just doesn’t happen anymore, right.
CH: If people want to check out your photography and videos online where should they look?
GS: They can go to my Facebook page or they can go to my YouTube channel which is
niceprguy2. And if they want to use my videos for something all they do is send me an e-mail to
[email protected]. And I don’t have any issues with doing that. I’ve actually sold a few
videos too.
CH: What kind of videos have you sold?
GS: One for the BC Bike Race. What I did is I set up a time-lapse. They had all the bikes on
racks there just before the race, right. So what I did is I thought, Okay, well if I set up a time-lapse
on there, these guys are gonna be running around like scurrying little ants getting their bikes and
going to the start line. It turned out really good and somebody bought it off me. And I had another
guy -- Sunshine Coast Music Festival. He didn’t have any video of him and his buddy, they were
up there playing classical guitar and they wanted it filmed, so two hundred dollars for doing that
which is kinda nice. Bonus!
My thanks to Gary Slootweg for doing this excellent interview. If you’d like to contact Gary
regarding carpet cleaning and heating services he can be reached at 604-414-8062. Here’s a
link to the website: PR Carpet Cleaning and Heating Services.
CH: You once told me an incredible story about how your son Jessie was badly injured on a
hiking expedition you went on. Can you recount what happened?
GS: What happened is, we hiked up to Emma Lake, this is the day before the accident happened,
and then we camped at Emma Lake cabin and then the next morning we got up and then we hiked
up onto Snowy Peak. So we had to go up through the Emerald Valley and then up onto Snowy
Peak. And then we had lunch up on top there and then we were making our way back down toward
the cabin and my son had a bit of a misstep, he was going down a little bit of a face, it wasn’t
anything really steep but there was, like, a razor blade, well not razor blade, but a serrated knife-
blade rock edge and he raked his leg across that and he actually sliced his leg in a few places and cut
through an artery and we had blood pumping out like one of those horror flicks. It was great, yeah.
CH: Unbelievable.
GS: So I flipped him upside-down, got his leg elevated, there was ice and snow up there. This is in
-- what? -- September. Yeah, September long weekend. And I got ice and snow on it, but we’re at
five thousand five hundred feet up so there’s still ice and snow in patches. And we packed it with
ice and snow and we had to get the helicopter to fly him off of there. We had SPOT GPS which
was very helpful.
CH: So you called emergency services?
GS: What there is is there’s a GPS device that’s got a button on it and if you push that button it
actually sends a signal to, I think the place is Texas, and then also to all of your contacts on your
SPOT GPS list. So it’ll send e-mails and texts to people so people know that something bad is
going on.
