Trips archive at Erik Seo Photography Blog

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Home, Spring park shoots are over!

27May09

7246 miles (4584 miles on the road), 47 days, and 7 terrain park shoots, and 43,225 dead bugs on my car later my season is finally over and I’m finally home back in Salt Lake City, Utah. This year’s Spring terrain park shoot season was shorter than last year, but the amount of travel between shoots really wore on me this Spring. It was nuts actually, and home never looked so good. My own bed, my own space, not working on my slow laptop, and having my golf clubs, being able to sneak out for some golf in the work day, everything, all the comforts of home…finally! However, it was all completely worth it. I got a lot of great action shots with a lot of the usual people but also some new faces. I got to spend some time with some good friends I don’t get to see a lot, visit new places, see family, oh and to find out that 4th gear in my Civic tops out at 130mph!

Also in this trip I did a lot of fun portraits, spent some time working more on capturing the lifestyle side of things and shot a lot with a Holga which was pretty fun. Shooting film, the mystery of wondering how things are going to turn out, especially with the thought of a very inprecise piece of camera equipment, adding in the mystery of how cross processing is going to turn out made for some fun stuff. I just sent it all out to Panda photo lab in Seattle, WA and I’m really excited to see how it turned out. I’m really anxious to see how it all plays out with the good ol film. It’s been at least 5 years since I shot any film.

Once I hit the road back home, I was all in, from Bend, OR to Hood River, OR to take a few portraits, then finally home to Salt Lake City, UT. Did it all straight through, starting at 10am in Bend, then arriving home in Salt Lake City, UT at 3am. I probably should have stayed the night in Boise but I was determined to sleep in my own bed ASAP, so 17 hours later I was there, at home, in my own bed and was worth every second on the road.

I’ll have a bit more later with some random photos from the spring in a few days.

Filed under Trips and Winter Sports Photography. |1 Comment

Spring Park Shoots, round 5 – Day 28

07May09

After 4 days off spent editing my season in Seattle, WA it’s time to finish up my season at Mt. Bachelor in Bend, Oregon. Unfortunately with a few days off, that means I’ve unpacked, meaning I have to re-pack all that gear into my tiny Honda Civic coupe. I’ve gone from not bringing enough gear on trips, to bringing EVERYTHING, to realzing I’ve brought too much. Maybe next year I will get this right!

Another thing I’ve learned along the way is that duct tape fixes everything. Of course, I already knew this but I didn’t think it would work in this case. A the Poor Boyz Productions shoot at Mt. Hood Ski Bowl, OR Ian Coble loaned me his Elinchrom Ranger to use for a few days after he had left the shoot to head back home to Seattle. For the last jump of the shoot, I needed another narrow beam reflector to really pump out the light in order to light up some trees in the background of the shot. I only had the wide and that just wasn’t cutting it. I did still have the 50 degree sports reflectors for my Alien Bees and a bit of tape went a long way to save my ass and work things out. I’d usually MacGyver this one up and make a reflector out of aluminium foil however the AB reflector and a few strips of tape were a hell of a lot easier.

Anyhoo, I’ll have a bit more from the road as I try to keep burnout from setting in. 2 and a half more weeks and my Winter will be over and I can relax for summer!

Filed under Trips and Winter Sports Photography. |3 Comments

Spring madness – Round 3

24Apr09

Round 3 of the spring park shoots is on. I just finished up with the Poor Boyz Production shoot at Mt Hood Ski Bowl in Government Camp, OR. Jossi Wells and Charles Gagnier rolled I’m late but was stoked to get out and shoot with them as it isn’t very often that I get to have them in front of the camera. We only had one more day on the big channel gap jump before heading over to Pete’s creation, what I like to refer to as the Chinerse death trap. This was the most difficult snow feature I’ve ever had to light up. I had planned to either go simple or rediculous. I opted for rediculous, and pulled out every piece of lighting equipment I had, including a borrowed Elimchrom Ranger from Ian Coble, who had left a few days earlier. Unfortunately my D3 went kaput and the shot I did get, was unusable due to camera malfunction. Fortunately I did just pick up a D300 as a backup so I have something until the D3 is repaired

After one night on that, it was finally time to move on to round 4 of 6 of the spring park shoots at Stevens Pass, WA for a shoot with Rage Films. I’m stoked for the Stevens Pass shoot as they have always been super good to work with and is always a fun shoot.

Photos to come soon

Filed under Trips and Winter Sports Photography. |1 Comment

The Spring Madness begins!

19Apr09

Nine days into my spring terrain park shoot season I’m finally updating my blog. I started my spring shoot season out at home at The Canyons Resort in Park City, Utah which is where I used to work in marketing before I moved on to photography as my full-time job. It was super sick to have big park features finally at my old stomping grounds, especially since my bros Andy Marston and John Hall (ex terrain park crew there) were the cat drivers that built most of the features.

John Symms tapping a log swing at The Canyons Resort in Park Cit Rage Films had piggy-backed this shoot after the Snowboarder Magazine Super Sessions and we had 3 days on the features that were there. It was definately a collection of pretty unique terrain park features, however we had didn’t luck out like the Snowboarder Magazine crew and had a bit of bad weather so we pretty well focused on 2 features, the log swing and the hip jump with the pine tree growing out of the deck! The crew was comprised of Kyler Cooley, Dylan Natale, Ian Cosco, Giray Dadali, John Symms, Tim Russell, Craig Coker, Angeli Vanlaanen and Macrae Williams.

Once the Rage shoot was finished with I got to head out the next day for an epic 16 hour drive to Seattle to go see my brother who was on leave for a bit from his tour in Iraq. The drive was pretty rough, was pretty tired and had to drive through 50 miles of black ice in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. I thank the Oregon Department of Transportation for doing nothing as usual to keep their roads in order as a simple layer of sand would have made the drive much faster.

So, 12 hours after arriving in Seattle, I packed the car back up and hit the road to Mt. Hood Ski Bowl in Goverment Camp, Oregon to hit stop number 2 in my Spring park shoot season with Poor Boyz Productions. The PBP crew was comprised of Matt Walker, Alexi Godbout, Nick Martini, Kaya Turski, Andrew Hathaway, Ben Moxham the Brit – Leigh Powis, along with Fimers Pete Alport, Jeff Thomas, Ross (sorry I can’t remember your last name), T-Rob (the intern) along with photographer Matt Stouble and myself.

The weather had still not left on day one of the shoot as we shot our first rail feature with a total of 10 minutes of sun breaks so the first day went down in the clouds. Day 2 brought us the sun that was supposed to go away, however we lucked out and at the end of the day after 2 different jib features the clouds had still not rolled in. We dodged a bullet for day 2. Day 3 brough us good old Pacific Northwest drizzle, rain and fog and a well needed off day for myself. I got to finally catch up on some editing and had a break from the long days. Day 4 was supposed to be the first jump day, however a mechanical problem with the snow cat pushed back the jump building an extra day and most of the day was spent chilling on the lodge deck relaxing and taking a few lifestyle shots here and there. I’m looking forward to tomorrow as it’s the first day on the jump and its coming together real well. It’s big, with a big landing, the skiers are stoked. Here’s to day 5 and the next 4 days of sun forecasted!

Filed under Trips and Winter Sports Photography. |3 Comments

Farellones, Chile

21Sep08

My Chilean trip continues as we have left Portillo down to Santiago for a day before heading back up to Farellones, home of the 3 Valleys of La Parva, El Colorado and Valle Nevado ski resorts. We were supposed to be heading to Las Lenas, however they decided to back out on the lift tickets they had promised us two and a half months ago so we had to go to plan B. Heh, we had no plan B! Soooo we ended up calling Mark Lassiter again over at www.southamericaski.com to organize a last minute plan B. We ended up with the 3 valleys with a slough of plans including being in Chile on Sept 18th, the Chilean independence day for some partying with the locals.

We arrived on a foggy and rainy morning that cleared out just in time for sunset. Farellones has some amazing sunsets, any day you can see the sun. The smog in Santiago is pretty gnarly but having a positive byproduct of making sick sunsets, just about every day up in the mountains. Farellones is a pretty small town at the base of El Colorado resort and below La Parva and Valle Nevado resorts. We’ve had quite the contrast of places we have been in Chile from the luxury of Portillo to more of a true South American experience in Farellones. We have been staying at a hostel called Refugio Aleman which has some really amazing views back towards Santiago and right into the sick daily sunsets through the smog of Santiago.

We will have a few more days here in Farellones with Anna’s friend Benny from Mammoth since Refugio Aleman is only a ski hostel and is closing for the season today! We have a sunset jump session planned as well as a few more jibs so the shooting should be pretty fun. After that we will be at La Parva for a day then the last day hopefully doing another road lap day on the Santa Teressa slope between El Colorado and Valle Nevado for fun without the camera on my back, then going straight to the airport and outbound back to Utah. Here’s a few photos of Farellones

Filed under Trips. |4 Comments

The road to Portillo, Chile

13Sep08

So Anna and I have arrived in Portillo, Chile along with our new friend Chris Taine from NZ. For the most part Chilean drivers are kinda crazy. On our ride up our bus driver didn’t think 120kph was fast enough for a bus so he kept passing cars left and right. When we got to the mountain road on the way to Portillo, he felt that he (and everyone else) didn’t need to wait for trucks and passed very slowly on blind corners. Kinda sketchy eh? Now add in the fact that most vehicles on the highway were semi’s and yah, that was kinda sketchy. Apparently people in Argentina are more agro than drivers in NYC or Boston. Ha, looks like it should be an interesting ride…I think we will be picking seats in the middle of the bus!

After having a pretty uneventful bus ride up we ran across a road block of a overturned semi with it’s trailer torn in half. Yah, what do you think hapened there huh? Anyhoo after driving up 32 switchbacks we arrived at the Portillo Lodge, a beautiful yellow and blue lodge in a steep valley. The peaks here are big, steep, and very scenic. I’m stoked to get out and ski and shoot…..when the spring ice softens up!

Filed under Trips. |3 Comments

Santiago, Chile

10Sep08

So I just arrived in the first foreign country outside of North America in 3 years. I’ve been waiting to go for the past 2 months and I’m super stoked to be out here. I’m shooting a story for Australian and New Zealand Skiing magazine for next Winter’s editorial schedule with Aussie skier Anna Segal. Santiago was a lot of fun. After staying in a hotel pretty well in downtown we cruised around the city on the subway and by foot. Santiago is a pretty cool city of about 7 million people with a lot of bums and street performers that expect money for taking their photos! From bums runing around with a horn and drum to a group of cheerleaders that would perform at the stop lights, they all expect money regardless of if they jumped in front of your camera or not!

The tour operator, Mark Lassiter of www.southamericaski.com hooked us up with one of his friends Vince and his friend Chris Taine where we met up for some dinner and drinks after cruising around town. As it turns out Chris was heading to Portillo and is going to stay with us and ski for a few days too.

More later with a bit of skiing. We have 7 days in Portillo, Chile coming up, then to Mendoza, Argentina, then off Las Lenas, another day in Santiago before I head home to Salt Lake City, Utah.

$Anna\'s new best friend the evil balloon clown guy. Homey really wanted some cash for this.$