When this year’s Banff Mountain Photography Competition winners were just about to be announced and festivals coordinator for Mountain Culture & Environment, Christine Thél, was busy sending out congratulations to the seven award winners (from four different countries) and nine photographers (from five different countries) who received special mentions. But that’s easy work compared to the avalanche of images received that had to be uploaded to The Banff Centre’s  FTP site, saved to an external hard drive, entered into a database, and then finally perused by a select jury.

Christine has been working with the Banff Mountain Photography Competition for the past four years and 2009 marked a special development for the program. Previously, photographers have submitted hard copies of images for the jury, but in the past several years Christine noticed a decline in entries and concluded “we needed to go digital”.

Was she ever right! In 2009, the number of images doubled from the previous year to over 4,200, with more than 600 photographers competing from 41 countries. Of the total submissions, 95 per cent were submitted digitally. With assistance from The Centre’s Information Technology Department,  Christine set up a special page on The Banff Centre’s FTP site to receive the images and she then downloaded them to an external hard drive for viewing later with the jury.

Not only is the online system more effective in generating and storing more image submissions, Christine also believes the images were of better quality. “Several of the semi-professional and professional artists that hadn’t submitted recently returned to us because of the digital uploading system,” says Christine. And as if that’s not enough, there’s an important “green” component to the whole competition now. There was less waste because very few images had to be printed and we reduced emissions since no postage or return postage of the entries was needed.

This year’s jury consisted of three Canadian members, Alec Pytlowany and Andrew Querner (both photographers and past award winners), and Kristy Davison, the photo editor for Highline Magazine. The jury selected Nathalie Daoust’s artistic and ephemeral image of a young woman in a misty mountain landscape as the grand prize winner; a bit of a departure from the traditional mountain sports or landscape image that we’ve seen in the past. But festivals director Shannon O’Donoghue is happy with their selection as it aligns perfectly with the inspiring creativity mandate of The Banff Centre.

All the winning images are now displayed online and will be in the Sally Borden Building by late October. The images will be featured as part of the Film Festival intermission video, and will also travel to various locations throughout Canada and the United States to be enjoyed by those who aren’t able to make it to Banff.

Credit: The winning photo for the 2009 Banff Mountain Photography Competition. A stunning image by photographer Nathalie Daoust.

Karin Stubenvoll

In fall 2008, Mountain Culture and Environment welcomed the return of Karin Stubenvoll to the World Tour team. Karin had worked briefly in the Mountain Culture office in 2006 as a World Tour Program Coordinator for the Banff Mountain Film Festival. However, her history with Mountain Culture and the Banff Mountain Film Festival is much deeper and broader than it might appear.

Stubenvoll’s first connection to the World Tour began in France in the late 1990s when she worked as the European tour coordinator with one of the World Tour film projection partners in Europe at the time, Chris McGeough. Apart from assisting with the local presentation of the Banff films in Chamonix, Stubenvoll organized the logistics for all the film screenings in Europe from an office there. The screenings, although smaller in number when compared with the European tour today, had a broad reach from the Ice Hotel in Kiruna, Sweden in the north, to Livigno, Italy in the south, and all the way to Budapest, Hungary in the east.

Back in those days, the films were in NTSC Beta-cam format which caused complications in Europe where projection equipment worked in another format. As a result, all the films were projected on North American equipment that had to be brought and set up at each individual venue. Stubenvoll remembers a particularly frantic screening in Denmark which happened two days after the Film Festival in Banff where tapes were duplicated overnight by Banff Centre producer Woody MacPhail, then flown to Copenhagen with Chris McGeough, where she met him with the projection equipment van ready for a show that night.

Since her return to Mountain Culture in Banff in 2008, Stubenvoll has been working on the World Tour as usual but has been extensively involved with the expansion of the film screenings in Germany. The German tour has grown exponentially from two shows in the late 1990’s to more than 30 Banff Mountain Film Festival and Radical Reels screenings in Germany and Switzerland this year, with more in the works for 2010 and 2011. Part of this success is likely due to Stubenvoll’s long history with Mountain Culture at The Banff Centre and her fluency in three languages, including her native tongue German.

World tour manager Jim Baker says “We’re thrilled to have (her) working with us again. Her in-depth knowledge and world-wide connections are taking the international tour to a new level.”