I don’t often get to post photos of what I’m currently shooting because much of it has to stay under wraps until the clients have used them in the magazines or adverts. This weekend though I have my photojournalism hat on in my home town of Whistler, BC. The bobsled and skeleton world cup is here for the first round of the winter season at the Whistler Sliding Center that hosted the event for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Here is a photo from lasts nights 2-man bobsled event. Canada 1 bob piloted by Lyndon Rush grabbed joint second place in the event and I liked this shot of them pushing off from the start on their final run. Shooting in a snowstorm under artificial lighting in the dark is about as tough as it gets for sports shots so it really pays to have an f2.8 lens in this scenario. In my case I was using the Canon 300mm f2.8 L IS Even at f2.8 I was still at iso 4000 but the 1dMKIV handles that with no problem at all. Shooting in manual exposure is the way to go as the lighting does not change and I also used just the central AF point as that is also faster in the dark. A shutter speed of 1/320 was great for getting things mostly sharp but a little blur on their fee to show the speed they are running.
1/320 f2.8 iso 4000 ; Canon 1dMKIV Canon 300mm f2.8 L IS
I have a new limited edition print available so I thought I would post up some shots of one already printed up and framed. This is a photo of Austin Ross skiing across a fallen tree in Whistler, BC.
This example is printed at 24″ x 16″ on archival photo rag and then sprayed with an archival spray on top to keep it looking perfect for a very very long time! The printing is done by a company who I consider to be the best professional printers in Vancouver. I can ship anywhere and shipping is charged at cost. If you have a specific image of mine that you would like to have framed then this can also be arranged. Christmas is on it’s way and a nice framed print is always a great gift ! Click through for more pricing information and print options.
Before the 2010 Olympics kicked off in my home town of Whistler, BC, I was commissioned by the local arts council to produce a slideshow of some of my skiing images. The slideshow was played on TVs and giant screens around the Olympics during the breaks between events. Check it out below and click through to Vimeo if you want to watch it in HD.
Tomorrow the Apple iPad will finally launch internationally,including in my home country of Canada. I have written previously about what an iPad can do for photographers and now everyone outside of the US can find out for themselves. To mark the occasion I have decided to offer up a FREE wallpaper for your brand new iPad. Wallpapers for the iPad need to be 1024px X 1024px. This is somewhat unusual, and only a portion of this picture will be able to be seen at one time, depending on whether you have the iPad in vertical or horizontal mode.
The wallpaper I’m offering here is a photo of the Peak 2 Peak gondola at the ski resort of Whistler Blackcombb in my home town of Whistler, BC in Canada. I’m offering it here for personal use only as a wallpaper for your iPad.
If you are interested in creating your own iPad wallpapers I have also created a photoshop template that will help you visualize exactly which parts of your photo will be visible when the iPad is in a particular orientation. You can DOWNLOAD THE IPAD WALLPAPER TEMPLATE by clicking the link. It is a .psd file which you can open and overlay as a separate layer on top of you image in photoshop. Make sure you lower the opacity a little bit on the template layer to reveal your photo underneath. Then you can move your image around until you have it in just the right spot so it will look good in both orientations ! The areas covered by the red squares will never be seen, in either orientation. The center square will always be seen, and the yellow strips will be seen depending on whether you have it horizontal or vertical.
A couple of days ago we took some time off sledding here in Whistler with the PBP crew to shoot a jib setup that I had found before the season started. The setup was a double bomb drop, one drop followed immediately by another one into some trees. I thought i’d take a bit of time to go over my thought processes when i’m shooting something like this. Unfortunately I can’t show you the final shot from the shoot but you’ll see it soon enough….
One of the first things you want to remember with this stuff is to try and make the setup look good. Take the time to make things look nice for the cameras. In this case it was being filmed too so it needed to look neat and tidy but even if i’m just shooting stills , its a good idea to keep it clean and tidy. Put square edges on your jumps and landings and try not to put unnecessary footprints in the background. These things wont always end up in your shot but if you do the work beforehand, once you have started shooting you won’t have to stop halfway and fix something up just because you have changed angles.
Next up, pick an angle or two. Normally I find there is one angle that jumps out at me as “The one”. I’ll fire off a couple of test shots shutter priority set to 1/320 (max sync speed on my canon 1DMKIIN) so I can get an idea for the angle and also what the exposure is going to be. Then I’ll stick the camera in Manual at 1/320 and guestimate f-stop for the ambient exposure i’m going to need to underexpose by a stop or two in order to stop ghosting. The exact amount or underexposure really depends on how much ambient is hitting the feature , in this case the rock was actually pretty well shaded so i hardly needed to underexpose the sky by much at all and the rock was almost totally dark. We were also shooting at the end of the day so the sky had a nice deep color to it.
Now I know what my exposure setting is going to be it’s time to get out some lighting kit. I shot this with 4x Nikon sb80DXs and one Elinchrom Ranger RX. The SB80s were on dual brackets with each pair fired by one pocketwizard. Note though that just because they are on the same bracket doesnt mean they have to be aimed at the same subject… In the final scenario here, all 4 SB80s were aimed at different points by swiveling their heads around. The next two photos show some of the differences that light placement can make. The first setup had the ranger behind me, 2 SB80s on the left firing up at where the rider would be and then 2 more SB80s on the right firing up at the rider. This looked pretty crap though, not enough contrast in that rock and just pretty dull looking. The ranger was pointing far too close to the same direction as the camera was so there were very little shadows cast on the rock and the moss. FAIL.
For the second setup I moved the Ranger over to the right (you can see the flare from it in the second shot below. That created some nice contrast in the snow on the rock now and a great reflection in the wet rock on the bottom right (compare the two!). I then aimed one of the SB80s on the left at the rock as there was no longer any light on that side of the rock. The second SB80 from that bracket was zoomed to 105mm and pointed at the spot in the air where i wanted the rider to be. The second pair of SB80s was positioned behind me. One was zoomed to 70mm and aimed at the skier (not 105mm like the other one as this one was closer to the rider) and the second was left wide at 17mm filling in the front of the rock slightly. The third shot below shows the view from above down to the landing and gives you some idea of the distances involved. The Ranger is much further back as it is way more powerful. For the fastest flash duration on a Ranger you have to have it at full power so it needs to be set back quite a long way in order to get the same exposure as the SB80s
Now we’re getting somewhere. I got one of the riders to stand on top so I can get a feel for the shot and make some fine adjustments to the lighting. Have them throw a snowball so you can see the trajectory and then you are good to go! All of the flashes I was using have a fast flash duration at full power, fast enough that I can confidently leave them at full power for most things as in this case. Then all you have to do to adjust your exposure is alter the distances that the flashes are from the subject or use the zoom function on the flash head if it has one. Doing this quickly is just a matter of practice, I don’t use a light meter for any of it. After a while you’ll be able to get your exposures and distances pretty dead on very quickly.
Time to drop! Video courtesy of Jeff Thomas/Poorboyz Productions.
Once I have the strobes where I want them for the shoot I tend not to move them until I have the shot I want fromt that angle. What you will normally find though is that there are some good lifestyle oppertunities as the riders go about doing there thing. The exposure for my shot was going to be f10, 1/320 at iso 200. That would properly expose the rock and the rider for the action shot but by following the riders round with a longer lens and simply adjusting the aperture as they got further away from the strobes, you can usually grab a couple of lifestyles if you are quick. These 2 shots of Dane Tudor and Charley Ager were shot entirely by using the lighting setup fot the action shot. Nothing was planned, I simply reacted to where they were and quickly adjusted the exposure.
UPDATE: September 20th 2009.
So when i wrote this post, I couldn’t show you any of the action shots from the shoot. I needed to wait and find out if any of them were going to get used for commercial uses or in magazines. As it happens, the best shot from this shoot was picked up by Salomon to use as an international advert for one of their new skis, the Suspect, and you might also see it crop up as a poster for one of their top skiers, Dane Tudor.
The lack of updates over the last few weeks might lead you to believe that I have been off adventuring round the world chasing snow storms….not quite.
It’s been a strange winter here in British Columbia. The snow didn’t really come in November and December leaving the mountains still looking like mountain bike resorts. A lot of my plans went down the plughole and I was left twiddling my thumbs for a few weeks. Then on December 26th Vancouver received nearly 60cm of snow (though nearby Whistler got only a couple of inches). With more snow than Vancouver had ever seen I quickly organized a trip down there to meet up with the Poorboyz crew and we hit some rails for a few days with Mike Henitiuk, Matt Margetts and Leigh Powis. When a city that normally doesnt get any snow, receives nearly 2 feet, the place comes to a standstill. Jeff Thomas met me at his house in North Vancouver by coming down his road on his snowmobile…..
As soon as that trip was done I headed back to Whistler for the Deep Winter photo challenge that I wrote about last week. After the Deep Winter I headed back down to Vancouver for a shoot at Grouse Mountain which saw the beginning of another strage weather pattern. As we arrived at Grouse it looked like the day was going to be foggy and overcast but a quick trip up the gondola quickly showed that the temperatures were inverted and the top of the mountain was bathed in a beautiful orange glow as the sun rose above the cloud layer. This inverted weather pattern stayed around for the next 10 days though bringing unseasonally high temperatures to the alpine regions while the valleys hovered around 0. Up in whistler the temperature in the alpine shot up to a high of 10 degrees and stayed there for the week. The already thin snowpack was melting away…….
Booter shooting in whistler from Dan Carr on Vimeo. With no real powder to ski anywhere I spent the week building backcountry jumps with the PBP crew. We discovered that the snow on some West facing aspects was still soft enough to land on once you punched through a thin crust so we built a collections of step downs, hips and gap jumps with Anthony Boronowski, Charley Ager, Brandon Kelly, Dane Tudor and Riley Leboe as they work on the new Poorboyz movie to be called………. well I cant tell you that yet but wait until the SIA trade show in Las Vegas next week and all will be revealed. For now though the inversion has dispersed and the slush has turned to Ice but at least that finally gave me some time to do an update!
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of receiving an invite to take part in this winter’s DEEP WINTER photo challenge, presented by Arcteryx in my home town of Whistler in British Columbia.
Myself and three other professional snow photographers will battle the elements and storms of the West coast for three days in January to put together a slide show of images to display to a crowd of 2000 people at the Chateau in Whistler.
For the last couple of years, this competition has been blessed with deep powder and stormy days. With a bit of luck we will have the same this year and it should lead to some great shots!
This shot is on the back cover of the December Issue of Freeskier. It was shot in April on Blackcomb mountain in Whistler, BC during a shoot with Matchstick Productions. To read the full story about the shoot you can read my article on Newschoolers.com here and as always, click the photo to view it larger. The conditions for this shoot had been tough all week. Unseasonably cold weather left the jump too hard to hit for a few days and it came right down to the last possible day before the MSP crew had to leave town. Even then we only had a tiny window to shoot in.
The shot was taken with a Canon 1DMKIIN and a 70-200 2.8. Exposure setting was f7.1 at 1/1250 and iso 160 with a focal lenght of 160mm
I sold a photo to Whistler Blackcomb recently for them to use in an advert for the new Peak to Peak gondola. If you haven’t heard of the gondola project check it out here. The gondola spans the valley between Whistler and Blackcomb mountain and will be officially opened this winter. The clever part is in the design though, it’s only held up by four lift towers on its 2.8 mile length leaving a 1.88 mile length in the middle completely unsupported!
This is the shot of Marshal Talbot that was used. It was shot on Whistler mountain this past winter with a Canon 1dMKIIN and a 70-200 2.8 at 1/320 and f9.0. Lighting came from an Elinchrom Ranger at full power hidden behind the tree on the right almost point straight up at Marshal and the base of his skis. The Ranger was on top of an 8ft lightstand and fired with pocketwizards
1/320 f2.8 iso 4000 ; Canon 1dMKIV Canon 300mm f2.8 L IS
