Sheer - Some Background to the Shot

Looking across at the sheer chunk of rock which makes up Gimili peak. In Norse mythology Gimlé or Gimili is described as the most beautiful place in Asgard, the realm of the gods.

The scale here is hard to comprehend. If you zoom into the high resolution image you can just make out our small party of adventurers resting on the ridgeline. They are totally engulfed by the sheer scale of the landscape (see zoom in the video).

I had never seen Gimili shot from this perspective and felt I could do it justice. Both a physically difficult and complex shot to get due to extreme terrain (access shots below) and the fact that Gimili literally towers above you even after climbing high onto the spine.

It was technically challenging to shoot due to the vastness of the peak. To capture the entire massif, the image was formed using 36 images stitched into a single panorama then cropped and downscaled to ~77MP. High image numbers allowed maximum overlap reducing distortion.

The high quality of the rock at Gimili is amazing for scrambling and climbing, particularly compared to the crumbling sedimentary strata of the Rockies. On the way down we passed some Mountain Goats who call Gimili home.

Gimili is part of the Valhalla Gneiss Complex. The complex consists of lower grade metamorphic sediments interspersed with massive high grade granitic and granodiorite intrusions such as Gimili. It sits at 2774m (9100 ft) in the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia, Canada.

Hopefully this gives you a feel for the complexity and logistics that goes into an image like this. Sheer is up on my Super Real series on SuperRare and was sold to the legend Dansung for 2.69 ETH https://superrare.com/intrepidphotos

Gimili is part of the Valhalla complex and sits at 2774m (9100 ft) in the Selkirk Mountains of Valhalla Provincial Park. British Columbia, Canada.

If you would like to learn a little bit more about my background in photography you can read the interview @photofeed did with me here.

Robert Downie
Love Life, Love Photography

_{All images in this post were taken by and remain the Copyright of Robert Downie - http://www.robertdowniephotography.com}