Lodge video, photography and virtual tours in the Kootenays and Columbia Valley

Purcell Mountain Lodge is only reachable by helicopter, an "island in the sky" above the treeline. It attracts serious skiers and hikers who are comparing it against every other backcountry lodge in the world, so the imagery had to show the terrain, the isolation and the calibre of the lodge itself. Drone footage put the lodge alone above the clouds; the tour and stills showed what it is like to arrive and stay.

Mistaya Lodge sits in a glacier-ringed valley on the Rockies side of Golden, also helicopter-only. Shooting it meant working on the valley's schedule: sunset, back out at 2 am for the Milky Way, and up again for sunrise. The owner's review says as much.

Alongside the lodges I have worked with Tourism Golden and Travel Columbia Valley, the organisations responsible for selling the region as a whole. That work sits on the other side of the same problem: a valley with world-class scenery needs imagery that shows what visitors actually do there, in every season, and it needs to be consistent enough to use across campaigns, member listings and press.

For an individual property, that means your imagery can be built to sit comfortably beside the regional campaign material rather than looking like it came from a different decade.

A Kootenays lodge sells summer hiking and winter ski touring to different guests, and each needs its own imagery. I plan the library as two visits where the budget allows, timed to the lodge's own helicopter rotations so the flights are shared with guests rather than chartered for the shoot. The virtual tour is captured once; the film and stills get a winter and a summer edit.

Drone flights here are planned around the terrain, the lodge's operating permits and Transport Canada rules, with no flying inside Yoho, Kootenay or Glacier National Parks.