This summer I was contacted by the FIA’s magazine about shooting a feature on a land speed record attempt out at the Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah.  For those of you snow people that don’t know what the FIA is, it’s basically FIS but for auto racing.  I’m a car geek.  I’ve been one for a while, but I have yet to pursue any real opportunities photographing auto racing as I wanted to keep that fun part of life, just that.  Fun and not work.  This opportunity seemed quite mellow and maybe a good slide into that side a bit so I gave it a go.

 I was pumped to get out on the salt again, when I went out last year for Speed Week, it was a really cool experience but this time around I was shooting a feature, giving me a bit of direction this time around.  Another thing that was pretty fun was to be out there at sunset and sunrise, with access to these crazy machines.  I had never seen cars like this in person, and had no idea what 457mph looked like.   It was a trip for sure to see cars going that fast and trying to keep up with my eyes, let alone my camera!

After sending in the photos I got a response telling me that the planned 4 page feature was being bumped to a 6 pager since they liked the photos, and I was stoked to hear that!  I then got the next email with the link to the magazine online and found that it had been now bumped to 12 pages.  I even managed to get a photo of my own truck in the story on accident.  I left a photo I took of my truck at sunset on the salt in the edit.  Turns out they wanted it and my little truck is now in an internati0nal publication.  Pretty cool huh?

Check out the story here at the FIA’s website.

Roz Grouenwood at the 2011 Snowbasin Winter Dew Tour Superpipe Toyota Championships

Mike Hornbeck at Breckenridge, Colorado with Level 1 Productions

Anna Segal on the final jump at the 2011 Snowbasin Winter Dew Tour Slopestyle Toyota Championships

Justin Dorey at Alpine Meadows, California with Level 1 Productions

Kaya Turski at Alpine Meadows, California with Level 1 Productions

Alex Bellamare crashing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada with Level 1 Productions

Alex Bellamare at Sun Valley Resort, Idaho with Level 1 Productions

Alex Bellamare at Sun Valley Resort, Idaho with Level 1 Productions

About the last thing I’d ever expected was to have a urban skiing photo in National Geographic.  Well, that day has come and it’s a pretty cool one.  It’s not in the magazine, it’s just their “Extreme Photo of The Week”  but hey, I don’t care it’s just cool.  This shot of Nick Martini at Powder Mountain during a Poor Boyz Productions shoot last season was recently in the January issue of Powder Magazine but National Geographic Adventure picked it up for their website.

Check it out when you get a chance here:  http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/extreme-photo-of-the-week/#/powder-mountain-resort_44791_600x450.jpg

This just came in over the interweb.  Stoked about this one, especially since the shot is a few years old.  Just goes to prove that pow skiing is timeless, whereas a jib shot wouldn’t be current enough after a season has gone by.  This shot is of Hannah Whitney taken in Grizzly Gulch at Alta, Utah.  This evening was at the height of a storm that dumped 5 feet in 5 days.  The snow was so deep and light that I had to ask Hannah to barely ski in with any speed because when she came in at a normal speed so it wouldn’t look like burrowing through snow!

 
Clayton Vila dropping off a closeout rail in Spokane, WA – w/Poor Boyz Productions – Freeskier 14.4 p051

 
Bobby Brown doubling up with a double corked 1080 on the final jump in the Winter Dew Tour Toyota Championships Slopestyle course at Snowbasin, UT – Freeskier 14.1 p095

 
The bus ride back to town, and the voting process during the Red Bull Cold Rush in Silverton, CO – Freeskier 14.1 p116

Things are a bit busy right now and I haven’t had the time I hoped to have to spend on the blog.  I’ll have a few things in the next few weeks but for now here’s a few recently published photos in Powder Magazine this season so far including the UK feature “Carry That Weight”.  Hope you dig it.

]]> http://www.erikseo.com/blog/2011/09/freeskier-magazine-issues-14-1-14-2/feed/ 1 http://www.erikseo.com/blog/2011/08/down-c-down-handrail-wallischs-great-white-buffalo-scott-sports-ad/ http://www.erikseo.com/blog/2011/08/down-c-down-handrail-wallischs-great-white-buffalo-scott-sports-ad/#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:03:52 +0000 Erik Seo http://www.erikseo.com/blog/?p=2255  

WTF is Tom’s great white buffalo?  Wallisch has been wanting to get this handrail since he first started going to the University of Utah in 2007.  It wasn’t brought up to my attention until 2009 and we’ve been trying to get it done ever since.  Looking at this thing, (which I will claim right now is the sickest urban handrail ever done on skis) I knew I had to be there, but there was a catch.  I’m technically not allowed on the U of U campus.  Part of shooting urban is getting kicked out, but sometimes ticketed.  The University of Utah is pretty well known for being a great spot for urban ski / snowboard shooting and so do the campus police.  The last time I shot at the U of U was in 2006, where I got a $600 ticket and told not to come back.  So that’s my back story on myself and the U of U, I didn’t want to go and risk a larger ticket and be thrown in the back of a police car, but come on look at this thing, I had to.

Weather it be lack of snow, lack of timing, patrolling rent-a-cops, or conflicting travel schedules this thing had not come together for the 2 years before.   In the late winter of 2010 we got a super late snowfall in the city, AJ (4bi9 Media), Tom and myself were all in town at the same time and there was snow, I was amped and ready to get out there.  Yah, there’s a dumpster in the landing coming out of the rail.  It snows again, yup, same dumpster.  It didn’t have wheels.  Then it was spring, game over.

Turn the clock forward to the day before Thanksgiving this past fall.  I’m in Tahoe and I get a call, there’s snow in SLC and the dumpster is gone, and turkey day (Thanksgiving Day) is prime time to go after it with a good chance we won’t see any campus police.  Perfect.  I’m doing a shoot with Will Wesson and Ian Compton with Level 1 Productions 8 hours away.  Well, we were close to the end of the trip and I had to get this done when the opportunity presented itself.  Fine, started to figure out what is left to do in Tahoe/Reno and when to split up and head back.  Another call.  Another feature on my 5 year old to-shoot list.  Oh, it’s going down at sunrise, Thanksgiving day.  Awesome.  That means I have to leave now and drive through the night.  OK then.

Myself, Freedle (Level 1 Productions filmer), Will Wesson and Ian Compton break up our gear between the two trucks so Freedle can fit those three in his truck and I hit the road.  A long overnight drive back home to Salt Lake City, Utah.  Needless to say I was pretty tired and had to pull over a few times and sleep.  I was pretty determined to make it back by sunrise.  Ten hours later I finally roll into Salt Lake City just in time to take a 30 minute nap, then get my shit together and meet up with the 4Bi9 crew at a parking lot step down to tranny I’ve been wanting to shoot on for 5 years.  We finished up around 11am and I went home and eventually crashed.  I crashed hard enough that I slept through every Thanksgiving dinner party I could have gone to…oops.

At 10pm we head out to the down c down, finally.  After a lot of setup of the drop in ramp, snow, lights and my lights, I finally get to my plan.  I setup my camera remotely on a tripod fired by a Pocket Wizard Multimax transceiver along with another Multimax mounted to the hot shoe firing my strobes.  I did this for one reason alone, so I could appear to be just watching in my truck, in street clothes in the case we get busted, hoping that if we get caught, they don’t arrest me for trespassing since I was just sitting around, in street clothes watching in a truck.  After a while and about 4 angles later Tom still hasn’t gotten the rail yet and is getting beat up a bit and the inevitable happens, the campus police shows up.  Great, well I guess it’s time to test my plan right?  Then the most unexpected thing happens, the cop just drives away.  He saw everything going down and just didn’t care.  Good thing he was the only campus police officer on duty and we weren’t really doing anything that really mattered, at least that’s a good explanation right?  After a bunch more tries, it just wasn’t happening.  We gave up and went home.  It was the first time in the 5 years I’ve worked with Tom that he didn’t get a feature quit.  It’s still not done!

Fast forward again to February, after a few chances with snowfall in SLC came through everyone’s schedules finally lined up again with the weather and we went back for round two.  The crew set the drop in a bit straighter (previously was about a 45 degree angle into the handrail) and it made all the difference.  It was less than 15 tries and it was done, finally!  We weren’t even there long enough to worry about getting busted.  Three years and I got my shots, AJ got his shots, Tom got the rail and everyone was high fiving and there was a huge wave of relief that came by me.  I came away from the U of U unscathed.  All said in done I ended up with an advertisement that I’m happier with than any other I’ve shot and yet for my oldest client.  Much like most of my last winter season things just finally came together right.

Check out the ad at the newsstand in the 2011 Freeskier Magazine Buyer’s Guide.

As long as I’ve been working with Level 1 Productions it’s one of the covers that have eluded me through the years.  We have been working together since near the start of my career so finally getting it now is something I’m pretty excited about.  My shot of Alex Bellemarre in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada is sharing the cover of the After Dark DVD with  photographer Chris O’Connell’s shot of Tanner Rainville at Great Canadian Heli in Golden, BC, Canada.

This type of feature has been on my to do list for at least 5 years now.  The urban death gap has eluded me now for quite some time but this past season with a really fast winch that Level 1 purchased we were able to do it.  I had the shots on Alex’s first try, but standing up a 50 foot rodeo 5 to flat was no easy task.  Fortunately a few tries after Alex said he didn’t think it was possible, the kid powered through and stomped one of the more ridiculous things I’ve ever shot.

One of the added benefits of shooting with Byron Wells is since he’s from New Zealand and their ski magazines come out in June I get to see my photos in print a lot earlier than waiting 6 months for the photos to run in the ski magazines up in the Northern Hemisphere.  This year is no different except Byron’s a bit more prominent in the magazine this time!  Apparently the cover has some pretty good detail treatment with a bunch of foil print on the text so I’m pretty excited to see it in person.  This is a shot from 2010 in Park City in this little backcountry urban zone as I like to call it that crews have been milking for the past few seasons.  The old mining buildings in this zone make for some pretty unique shooting opportunities.  This shot has was actually a horizontal shot and was cropped quite a bit to fit the vertical cover.  Just about every time I’ve shot urban with Byron, it’s something he hasn’t tried before, but we always end up getting shots.  He’s one hard working kid that wants to get shots.  Glad Byron finally has a cover shot down there.  Check out the original below.