Trotters and Pacers at Mohawk /  by Karen Whylie

I was a horse crazy child, and adult. It was such a pleasure to get up close and personal with the Standardbred racehorses at Woodbine Mohawk Racetrack. I created a composite portrait of a vet who researches sudden cardiac death in sport horses.

A pacer flying past. When horses trot, their legs move diagonally, but when they pace, the legs on the same side of their bodies move together.

Dr Amanda Avison, PhD graduate student in Clinical Studies at the University of Guelph

Playing with motion blur. I laughed when I saw this shot on the screen of my camera but I have come to love it, a bold crop!

A favorite shoot: Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) for Shift Magazine /  by Karen Whylie

When someone asks me what my favourite photo assignment was, I always go to this one in my head. The culture magazine, Shift, asked me to drive up to Sudbury to see what was there in this advanced physics lab called SNO that was then trying to detect the presence of these sub-atomic particles called Neutrinos. They later won the Nobel prize and after finishing their research, closed the lab.
A new research facility has opened on that site now called SNOLAB.

I entered the lab as everyone does, through an elevator beside a trailer in a wintery parking lot on a big rock. The elevator was pitch black and full of miners and engineers. I am claustrophobic. I was freaking out inside but I held it together. We all wore headlamps and down we went, 3 kilometres down. The steel cables act like elastics when they are that long so we would bounce up and down until finally settling on the tunnel that would take us to the lab.

Check out the article and photos for a description of our journey…