The last two issues of SBC Skier Magazine from Canada have hit the newsstands and I have a few more photos I’m pretty stoked on that made it into the magazine as well as three shots in their first ever Photo Issue as well.
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.
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.
Last season was quite the interesting one. It was one not full of a lot of shots due to the low snowpack and just terrible weather in general, however the few good shots I did get last season, I was super pumped on. This was one of them. This feature was the entire reason I went on this trip to Montana to shoot urban with Poor Boyz Productions and Alexis Godbout, Matt Walker, Charles Gagnier and LJ Strenio in tow. Everyone else was doing a lot of spin and tap tricks on this feature but Alexis had something else in mind here. I was running around in circles, changing the lighting setups between everyone else, then Alexis doing his handplant to right 180, completely opposite from the norm.
Like my caption on the ad says, I brought everything I had to this feature. (1) Elinchrom Ranger RX AS Speed w/A head, (1) Alien Bee 1600, (1) Alien Bee 800, (1) Alien Bee 400, (5) Nikon SB 80DX Speedlights and a pile of Pocket Wizard Plus 2′s and Multimax’s. It was a ton of backlighting with a lot of tricky single speedlight placement throughout that took a lot of trial and error to get it dialed. Fortunately for me, there was a lot of trial and error going on with the skiers to get the trick they wanted, giving me a lot of time to get my lighting dialed as well.
This ad kind of summarizes my season from the start in November 2009 to the finish in July of 2010. It was a long season for me as I did extend it a little with the shoot at the Sammy Carlson Invitational in July at Windell’s Camp at Timberline, Oregon.
The highlight of this ad for me is the shot of Dane Tudor during the Sammy Carlson Invitational, right side, middle photo. It was my first experience with the Pocket Wizard FlexTT5′s for Nikon and things worked out well, very well, better than I had expected. I had just gotten the beta versions of the FlexTT5′s for Nikon and hadn’t had much time to really play with them so I was a bit worried to try them out but I gave them a go. The weather dealt us a full house that evening with the low clouds streaming in the valley from the west leaving an epic view with the low cloud layer and the sunset light. To top it off my first day testing the Pocket Wizard FlexTT5′s for Nikon turned out great. I had manual hypersync to two Elinchrom Ranger RX AS Speed strobes at 1/1000 sec. with partial coverage (all I wanted to light was the top half of the frame where the skier would be) at over 600 feet.
I’m really happy with how the Scott ad campaign came out this season and that I got to be a part of it last season. I’m looking forward to doing it again this season.
This is the final ad in the Tom Wallisch Scott Sports advertising campaign in the November issue of Freeskier Magazine. The Olympus quad kink in Salt Lake City, Utah is a rail I’ve been to three times since I’ve been shooting skiing, all pretty well failed attempts for me for various reasons and I’ve avoided shooting this rail in the past due to that. Of course with Tom, it became a different story as the disaster on made it very much worthwhile. The weather also came together for us on this one as well since my favorite thing to do is shooting strobed photos while it’s snowing. It just fills the frame so much better and gives a feel of winter to the scene.
The previous attempts failed mostly because of speed and my ignorance at the time to how much speed is required for such a mellow, long rail. With the 4Bi9 crew though, we had a ton of people to help, and that included some people to drive a car for a tow-in so we had all the speed in the world here.
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